ORLANDO: an anthology of queer past, present, and future

RLANDO

an anthology of queer past, present, and future

“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

ORLANDO is a single-issue print zine that explores queer futurity and our many radical acts of self-transformation. To be read with a morning coffee. To be read with your partner by your side. To be read alone. To be read with your childhood self in mind. To be read in the doctor’s office. To be read in line for the bar. To be read under the covers, as the sun makes her exit. To be read while assembling a great outfit for the grocery store. To be read when you need it most. To be read when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda. To be read, even afterwards.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Massive thanks to ENGL 490 at UNC Chapel Hill for sparking the birth of ORLANDO and supporting her many incarnations. Thanks to Ross White for great advice and postcards. Thanks to the editorial staff for wonderful creative insight. Thanks to friends at Back Page Creative Writing for sharing, listening, and fostering a beautiful space. Finally, thank you to queer poets of past, present, and future who write so that we may all keep going.

Naomi Ovrutsky, editor-in-chief

@naomi_ovr

@backpageunc

Barbie Jeep Vehicular Manslaughter

Savannah Meyer

My Father’s Photographs of Loons from the Boundary Waters

Tate Lewis-Carroll

preacher’s daughter

Ash Chen

FEAST

Eli V. Rahm

To Juan José

R. Joseph Rodríguez

Deep July

Aoife Smith

Iced Coffee at the Diner

Alexandra Burack

SAVANNAH MEYER

Barbie Jeep ManslaughterVehicular

I was a baby in a living room once

My life used to be pink and gemstones

And huge eyes and talking horses and Anatomically incorrect turtles and girls

Who are all legs and chalk nubs and Crushing on mermaids with purple hair

When did I stop being in love with the World and all of my babysitters when Did I become a two-faced toddler

Thumbsucking fucker forgetting how

To swallow my life was as sweet as pepto Hippo milk pesto poop and past due

My life was goldfish and cream cheese

Cucumber sandwiches my life was Crustless and crestfallen strawberry milk

Bubble baths and a giraffe on my birthday

I’m an 8 year old with a heart monitor at Chuck E. Cheese and they can’t figure out Why I’m on the floor again they can’t figure Out when I went bad when I turned rotten

TATE LEWIS-CARROLL

My Father’s Photographs of Loons from the Boundary Waters

And I’m there again, awakening with six other troubled boys, a week into this month of rehabilitation, before a pot of boiling water. The counselor passes out coffee beans and flat stones, saying, Grind. The grounds will put hair on your chests. And though we are boys, buzzing around a campfire, asking for refills, spitting the grit stuck from between our teeth, we have finally become the men of our childhood’s disdain, slouching beside our troubles. And then the long call of a loon along the shoreline, followed by a distant answer. Cries of joy or warning— it passes the time to wonder which.

ASH CHEN

the preacher’s daughter

— after Richard Siken

our song is playing again. the one that’s saltines and honey, that lives like a sonnet inside girls like us that aren’t nice and beg a balm in place of touch. the girl that leaves blood stains on your old communion dress in sweet confession. tell Him of the thousand days turned lifeless night. summer, you snuck your ma’s whiskey and your body out to the woods and blessed tennessee-sweet kisses that i can’t help thinking can’t be for me. i belong to you. losing everyone.

ELI V. RAHM

FEAST

Levi laughs when I say I wanna eat her out on her period. Slick as a fish, she jumps away but I pull her ankle towards me and she disintegrates into water, returns as flesh and seaweed.

Levi demands bigger tits so I cut mine off and present them to her on a plate. She calls me Agatha for weeks but takes them anyway—plasters them to her scaly chest.

Levi’s throwing up mouthful after mouthful of salmon and I almost say I told you so—you should have never eaten all those Alaskan bears.

Levi holds all of purgatory in her belly. That is, she’s named the baby Purgatory, and I press my ear to the edge of this swollen universe.

Levi says she doesn’t believe in any god except herself even as they’re carving out her insides. Skinning her for the swallow.

Levi falls asleep on the table and I, slow, carry her to bed. Replace what’s missing with a slab of pig’s meat.

Levi doesn’t thank me. This is a ritual we’ve practiced before.

Levi sometimes isn’t a she at all because how can an ocean be gendered, like gods or girls. There is nothing but the taste of salt on tongues. There is nothing but salt here.

R. JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ

To Juan José

Uncle, come out. Hide and seek’s over and done with.

Father, your brother, he’s gone now.

Let us go then, you and I, soon to the carnival and bar to be who we are among us.

Shall I pick you up by 9? Honk the horn? Will the men with whom you live mind my coming by?

Ready or not, here I come.

Car idling. Hear it now?

Well, hurry up already, will you? Time to vest up.

I knew; you knew. All those years!

R. JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ

Extra watch and care you gave me growing up. Sentry you were like in Antigone. Except no one hurled words, harmed nor hurt me with you nearby.

O, there is time for you to be you with no watch or watchman nearby. Be you, uncle, without any apology nor care. Will you?

Freemen we are even as courts and judgers deliberate all cloaked in robes, some wigged.

Free will reigns. Take the reins this time.

Shall we sew the next flag beside kin, since game’s over now?

AOIFE SMITH

Deep July

Not so long after dark, in Marvin’s backyard, laughter is chorused for unremembered reasons while hands—rough with summer —manipulate the metal hello of a lime green lighter. Butane is friendly and four dykes sit with nothing between them and familiar grass. Embers glisten, fascinate. Sweltering veins shift without perceivable pause, the soft sizzle of their song makes way towards night’s deep indulgence. I want to put one on the center of my tongue. Another in the very back of my mouth, between my molars, where I can make it dust. Proclamations address no one particular, are said for the sake of sound’s ability to burnish closen ess. Alongside cicadas evening sputters, aware of its eventual need to make way for dawn. Marvin rests their head in Ruth’s lap. And the curling warmth is smothered. Eaten only by earth—ground consumes what remains, with patience.

Today, so far from this patch of ryegrass, I do not know how it feels.

ALEXANDRA BURACK

Iced Coffee at the Diner

I’d left the exacto knife and the pills on the bathroom counter. If this is the morning I give up, I figured why not a diner coffee first. Out of habit I’d brought a book of poems by someone more gifted, smart, thinner, and male than I’d ever be. It comforted me that the poems were sweeping in their aesthetic vision and bold experiences I could feel, even in the collapsed mine of my heart. I patted the cover. Good book, I thought, that you are here and I will not be. It is right to step back, let gift instead of effort claim the lineage. I started to thumb my paper daybook, jumping ahead to a month that would survive me, and noticed a famous poet I admired would read. Then I pictured the spent lilacs no one would replace at my grandmother’s lichen-frilled grave. So much poetry, so much language can never translate. My iced coffee came in a retro-green fluted glass on a saucer lined with a doily, and a silverplate long-handled spoon. I vowed the last iced coffee; be brave and belt it down black to myself as I bent for the first sip. “Dégueulasse,”I spat, hoping no nearby table understood the French word for “disgusting.” Who can drink this dark bitterness straight? I poured in cream from the dented plastic container whose paper top tore moistly down the middle instead of smoothly off. There’s barely a full teaspoon in these, I raged silently. I emptied five more and stirred until the liquid appeared as soft linen the shade of our kitchen curtains when daddy was still alive. No coffee for me back then since I was only seven. But I’m sure I would have loved the surf of light that swirled into the murky cocoa-black while unmoored buoys of ice cubes fought to still on the surface. When the check came, a sun shower startled the outdoor eaters, who scrambled inside. I left double my usual tip and noticed, on the walk home in the ceasing rain, how plush the drops can feel on parched skin, and decided to stay.

MERCEDES HAWKS

Baby At My Breast, Tell Me What You Know!

Bathe me with honey and milk; to only hush me with two plump fingers on my bulging tongue. I forgot the prayer. A swarm of bees drilling stingers into my ripped skin— I am the carcass of the lion, before the wedding. Eat me, please. Unravel me from this shell, and my legs will fold at the seams. I hummed to fill the forest; a cicada nest on my teeth. Wide-eyed and lips gaping. I am lustful and vain. Call me a woman, but I will come out in a child’s hands as maggots, where I am beautiful and mysterious. I am truly disgusting.

Most of all, I beg you to split my scalp. Peel my skin back, install this faith. Help me remember this prayer. In the world I spiral like a million tiny insects, Each thin wing sprouting from my naked back. And still with flesh and blood on my teeth, I only exist as a mother.

LEO OSBORN

ON TRANS JOY IN THE FACE OF DEATH

Fiercely will I clutch it between my teeth, blood and feather and broken bone.

I’m talking-you-fucking-fuck-with-mekiller-dog-wild-animal-don’t.

I’m saying this isn’t fucking over, don’t you dare walk away.

I have fought too hard for this. I’ve stayed in the tomb too long.

I’m pushing back the stone,motherfucker.

I’m waking up my heart.

You can’t take my resurrection any more than you can cleave the Love from God,

Not with your laws and your bans or your fists and my blood

I did not build this cocoon just for you to rip off these tender wings, a child who still hasn’t learned how to touch something holy without tearing it apart.

So I am angry and I am fearful, but most of all I am full of light: Here is my joy. I spit it at you. Here is my hope.With it I will burn you down.

LEO OSBORN

I’ll find it in the glitter and the dancing and the lights, In the table at which I eat with all these righteous friends of mine.

I’ll hold it for the queen I see on the platform,subway

Or the professor who looks like maybe I could one day, if we survive this.

I’ll stab it into my thigh every Monday night and watch my blood stain your clothes, write it into every poem and taste it on my tongue:

I-am-a-motherfucking-monster-and-I-am-so-goddamn-full-of-love!

I’m not Gabriel, baby. I never claimed to be gentle.

This light is the knife that will carve your heart from your chest.

And the angel said be not afraid, but he hadn’t wrestled with me yet.

Contributor Biographies

Alexandra Burack, author of On the Verge, is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and editor. Her work appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and Ink & Marrow. A Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, she serves as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ).

Ash Chen is a first generation Asian-American student at UNC Chapel Hill, where she majors in English with a minor in Science, Medicine, & Literature. When she is not managing campus responsibilities, she enjoys reading and writing queer literature/poetry, playing the electric bass, and sustaining injuries in mosh pits.

Mercedes Hawks is an aspiring poet from Mount Airy, North Carolina. She attends Lees McRae College, in Banner Elk, North Carolina. She loves to read and write, both of which she has done ever since she was little. She hopes one day to be a published author of a poetry collection and see her name on bookshelves in the future.

Tate Lewis-Carroll (They/Them) is the author of What’s Left (Finishing Line ’23), Blind to the Prairie (Forthcoming from Bottlecap), and is the editor of the 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar. Their work appears in Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poets, Modern Haiku, and Hotel Amerika. Follow them on Instagram @TateLewisCarroll.

Savannah Meyer is a queer poet living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. She is a senior Creative Writing major at SUNY Purchase. Their work can be found in Gandy Dancer Lit Mag.

Leo Osborn is a queer writer, actor, and artist currently based in New York. Influenced by the works of Mary Oliver, Richard Siken, and Hafez among others, his poetry seeks to capture the inherent divinity of queerness, and the little piece of God in each of us.

Eli V. Rahm (They/Them) is a queer poet from Virginia. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Passages North, Bellingham Review, beestung, Barren, The Academy of American Poets, Portland Review, among others. You can find them tweeting about horror films and strange animals @dinodysphoria

R. Joseph Rodríguez is the author of This Is Our Summons Now: Poems and several research articles and critical essays. He is a reader of banned and challenged books and poems. Currently, Joseph teaches at local schools and universities in Austin, Texas. Follow him on social media @escribescribe.

Aoife Smith (They/Them) is a queer and trans poet and fiber artist living in Brooklyn. They are an MFA candidate at Columbia University and a reader for The Columbia Journal. Aoife’s work has appeared online and in print with Muzzle Magazine, Puca Magazine, Death Rattle/Oroboro Lit, and others.

editor-in-chief

Naomi Ovrutsky cover design

Vyshu Sabbi head of design

Georgia Chapman editorial team

Maddie Behnke

Graham Hill

Catherine Pabalate

James Walker contributors

Alexandra Burack

Ash Chen

Mercedes Hawks

Tate Lewis-Carroll

Savannah Meyer

Leo Osborn

Eli V. Rahm

R. Joseph Rodríguez

Aoife Smith