Issuu

“in

bloom” by Uma Chatterjee

Dear Reader,

Birthday parties are peculiar things. Unlike New Year and various cultural holidays that collectively celebrate the passing of time, birthdays hinge on individual anchor points as milestones.

If the occasion is your own birthday and the anchor is yours, you may feel a sense of completeness; the acknowledgement of the world and your place within it has come full circle as another chapter opens. If you are a guest at the party and it is not your birthday, that anchor of time does not belong to you. Nevertheless, the sense of passing time and acknowledging milestones is still present. I have found, through attending my fair share of birthday parties, that this sensation can catch us off guard and force us to examine ourselves in incomplete orbits.

With Volume IV being our first anniversary issue, our editorial team wanted to explore what guests at our own literary birthday party would delve into. This volume exhibits writers and artists in their most reflective states, each finding an insular moment at the party to consider past, present, and future for themselves. These pieces show intense identities birthed by pop culture, thwarted attempts to connect with nature, and plenty of political anxiety. Particularly with the UK General Election behind us and the US Presidential Election looming, authors express concern over public health, the environment, reproductive care, and LGBTQ+ rights.

What is so amazing about each of these works on top of their courage and earnestness is their ability to function in dual motion. They simultaneously look both inward and outward while trying to avoid the vertigo that comes with making sense of it all. It is my hope that, in conversation with each other as guests at our party, readers and writers of Volume IV can find grounding amidst confusion, loneliness, and fear. Perhaps we may find permission within ourselves to revel in our vulnerability.

Thank you once again to the fabulous Pornstar Martini Editorial Team, which has continuously provided a formidable and fun community. Congratulations on one year of outrageous queer literature!

Each section promises wonderful reads for whatever mood and group of guests you wish to spend your time with. So without further ado: welcome to our birthday party and grab a drink.

With Literary Love, Harriet Taylor Editor In Chief

Pornstar Martini Birthday Bash

Volume #004 Fall 2024 Item PGS ----------------------Jello-Shot------------------------

Soup is Brat. Soup Ate. Soup is Bussin. Soup is not Ohio.T.O. Guy 10-13

Pixel PornHarriet Taylor 14-17 -------------------Shitty-Boxed-Wine--------------------

Uncrossed roads, unspoken wordsSelma O. 20-21

Sequence & Wool - 22-23 Annie Diamond

bad romance, 2009 & bad romance, 2020Obi Taswell 24-25

Dear LexaproAlden Iannelli 26-27

3 ounces Grape Jello

3 ounces Berry Blue Jello

3 ounces Lime Jello

3 ounces Pineapple Jello

3 ounces Orange Jello

3 ounces Strawberry Jello

9 cups water divided

3 cups vodka divided Whipped cream

Rainbow sprinkles

∞ Patience

Effects: giggles, chattiness, loss of verbal filter

drink 1: unicorn jello shot

Words by T.O. Guy

This summer is a bitch. Or an a-hole. Or whatever pejorative you prefer. The draw and allure of warm weather days, of a hot girl summer spent poolside, beachside or lakeside around glistening deck-shoed friends has, to be frank, not aged well. This sustained summer feels more like a friend-quaintance that you initially thought had bestie potential but instead is a hanger-on who just drains you to the point of needing to find ways to get a migraine or catch COVID just to get some alone time.

What I need is fall. I’ve needed it for several weeks now.

I need to be refreshed by a reality that is more than damp clothes and whirring air conditioners; more than sweat-salted skin and sandy pockets; and something more than salad-after-fucking-salad.

I suppose this mini-rant is an outlet for the genuine uneasy awareness that I’ve been feeling, the weight of the disparate shittiness that permeates so many of the ways we’re treating each other these last few…years? Decades? Time has no meaning anymore.

It feels like our better angels are perpetually shouted down by our worse selves, our basest desires, our adolescent fits. I can’t pinpoint the moment or event that turned the worm, but I do feel that a once-familiar general sense of clunky, if accessible, cooperation has been replaced—entirely in some corners—by an adversarial pseudo-jingoism bereft of humanity, responsibility, or even, you know, normalcy. I don’t know why so many people are so comfortable being so shitty to other people—but for sure, this heat isn’t helping.

When I was a kid, my mother only made soup for dinner when she and my dad had been fighting. When she was in a foul mood, she’d take a shower, start a load of laundry, and

make soup. Any sight of a wet-haired mom trudging down the hall, laundry basket in tow, sent me and my siblings to seek cover and prepare to sip Campbells. Soup Pavloved me like this until well past college. Eventually, my maturity got the better of me and instead of being triggered by the associative potage trauma, I was unexpectedly comforted by the harmony and “greater than the sum of its parts” quality of a warm bowl on a cold day. I began to wonder why the simple, humble elegance of something so universally celebrated had been eclipsed by a darker familial tradition of a different kind: namely my family’s generational emotional imbalance. But I digress…

It’s easy to eye-roll and take a “too cool for school” attitude when it comes to espousing the magical-adjacent qualities of soup. But be honest: no one has ever wanted a chicken breast in a bowl of water. That’s gross. That’s just bland wet meat. On the other hand, that chicken along with a little rice, a little seasoning, a basic mirepoix, and a little patience, can quickly show a bad cold the door, or help a hard day land a bit softer than it began. At its best, soup can be a direct line of access to nostalgic memories of trips abroad, grandparents, scents of gatherings, and even (in spite of my own experience) a sense of home and safety.

These long hot days of frustration have had me considering a different part of the beauty of soup: those aforementioned qualities that transform bland wet meat into something special. The culinary alchemy that is achieved through the mixing and combining flavors and textures in a broth that highlights and elevates each ingredient while also becoming a separate creation unto itself. This reminds me of times when those better angels aren’t shouted down and instead move us to find strength and value in the mirepoix of multiculturalism, the battuto of debate, the sofrito of growth. Whether of humble roots or the apotheosis of molecular gastronomy, a great soup is not a salad of chunky food just lying next to each other, nor is it a white-hot crucible melting pot that strips any recognizability away and turns out a homogenized liquiform—that’s called a sauce.

Soup, when done right, is a peaceful, nourishing, nurturing reminder that we are all at our best when we find ways to contribute to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, when we find beauty and balance in our different strengths, and that none of us are in this alone.

Now, if only this weather would cool the fuck down.

harriet_taylor pixel porn by

Angst, fluff, strap-ons, smut, teen au, pleasure, secrecy, pov, catholic guilt, fantasy

POV: Have you ever read smut at a family function?

Language: English Words: 916 Chapters: 1/1

Comments: 12 Kudos: 15 Hits: 69

Summary:

The hours after Christmas Dinner, 2015.

On the screen you’re gripping with white-knuckles, your favorite characters are about to fuck.

You’re wearing that certain look between a suppressed smirk and a drunken stupor, eyes slightly watered, wavering from side to side as you read. A sweat breaks on your upper lip; a flush spreads across your chest.

From your crumpled corner of the sofa, you tear your gaze upward, searching with beady eyes for the tell-tale signs of omniscient nosiness. It’s best you avoid eye contact at all costs with everyone, especially your mother.

It’s getting late. Dad’s asleep in his chair. Your aunt is glued to the TV special.

You keep your cover and take a moment to uninvite God. You’re getting good at this.

You give yourself the all-clear.

To a little queer teenager like yourself, this kind of secrecy is a form of performance art. It’s the sacred possession of something that isn’t transparent, like when all your relatives look at you and believe they know exactly what you’re experiencing because of your youth—condescending smiles accompanied by I remember and back in my day. They think you’re just another quiet screenteen. You think they’re stupid.

They don’t know that AO3 is the new MTV. They don’t know that on school nights, you slip under the cloak of private browsing, perhaps slide on a VPN in case the government is watching. They don’t know that you’ve bookmarked a collection of smutty fanfiction better curated than the goddamn Met.

This list is an amuse-bouche of fantasy, a portal to a world of things that have never happened to you but feel so real. It’s a world in which writers aren’t scared to make girls kiss, where scissoring is easy and doesn’t involve hip cramp, where fear of airport security doesn’t stop characters from bringing strap-ons on vacation. Orgasms are not a finite, men-only resource. Here, sex is spectacular and kink is written by virgins in catholic school.

In this nursery for baby gays, you prepare for the real world—isn’t fanfic really just fifth-dimension foreplay? You study intimacy, its movements, its rituals. You learn the anatomy of a moan and the many written ways one can express pleasure. You notice the word “sex” and the shape of its letters—the winding path, the open-ended embrace, a story in three acts concluded by a sharp and definite crossing of independent parts.

You learn more here than in the classroom—it’s not like Pythagoras can solve your chronic anxiety about asking girls out. Fanfic is where you grasp the psychology of romance and ask yourself a million questions. How do you flirt? How do you plan a first date? How do your favorite characters deal with getting outed? For people like you, AO3 offers a chance to play without getting hurt. It’s a safe space to try things on and figure out what works. How does this feel? If you’re in the closet, you might as well make it a walk-in.

In fact, you’ve found an entire community in the same virtual fitting room. People here try on different genders, sexualities, and relationships. This public space is a global gift economy—fans eagerly await chapter updates dedicated to online friends or lovers. Credit is given in the form of kudos and comments. Writers produce out of sheer creative will. The reward for everyone is joy. All of this is a warming reminder that in this terrarium, this Woodstock that feels like the great leveler of the internet, you’re not alone.

It’s hard not to feel a damning sense of shame about the way you lap up explicit words, replay the moments that make your stomach flip, getting drunk on the thrill and soaking up the excess. You want the smut burnt into your eyes until it doesn’t hit the same because you’ve read it so many times, like an overread word that’s lost its meaning. Sometimes you convince yourself that your reading habits are a form of perverted voyeurism. Other times you remember that in the real word, there’s no sex theory test. In a curriculum that consists of abstinence and condoms on bananas, fanfiction has to be better than unsolicited dick pics from icky boys at other schools and an addiction to unethically made video porn.

The truth is, everyone needs something to cling to, to imitate and adapt. Each person, you realize, needs a trope—an enemies-to-lovers or a forced-proximity—something that helps us compartmentalize the romantic moments we think about while falling asleep at night. These are the moments we share in group chats, photo albums, or tags on AO3. There are myriad ways of creating rose-colored narratives. Fanfiction is just your corner of whimsy. You hope more than anything that if being here is a sin, you can be forgiven.

From your crumpled corner of the sofa, you finish your fic.

Your breaths become slower and more even. Your relatives are filing out one by one, crumbs of Christmas cake seeded on the floor and the air fragrant with custard.

Your Dad’s cousin turns to you and tells you how great it is that you read so much. You offer a cool smile and accept the compliment. Tonight, you will keep the secret. Tomorrow, you will emerge, face the daylight, and bookmark something new.

1 trip to the grocery store

1 judgemental side-eye from the cashier

Effects: flirtation, affection, descent into crushing nostalgia

drink 2: shitty boxed wine

okenwords

Words by Selma O.

Oh darling, I’m sitting here sifting through last night’s memories and I realize: I really fucked it up, didn’t I?

For a poet, I am truly terrible at reading between the lines so instead, let me bottle my best words for you in mine:

You walked into my life on a random Tuesday night. I was wrapped in midnight roses and restlessness and you— you were draped in the Barcelona afternoon sky your lips the shade of a dragonfruit your eyes a sparkling lake and long hair, no bra really is my type so

Would you dance with me, darling?

Would you lay your arms around my neck if I wrapped mine around your waist?

Would you kiss me if I pushed you up against that bedazzled bathroom wall?

I want to slowly unwrap the sky you stole trace your jawline taste your laughter bite your lip kiss my way down to the skin above your boots eat you out—but I missed my chance, didn’t I?

Perhaps time and space will cross our paths again or perhaps we were always meant to pass each other by, the way day meets night in a moment of twilight.

Words by Annie Diamond

Becoming a Bat Mitzvah, I chanted from Terumah, the portion of Exodus when God delivers to Moses edicts on building the tabernacle. I was 12, smug,

with straightened hair and rhinestoned shoes, then the most expensive thing I had ever worn. It was 2006, I was thin and did not know it,

had not learned the outsized hurt of an old favorite dress hanging wrong. Got through the aughts without an eating disorder, when gorgeous size-10

girls were called fat on national television. Terumah translated as offering: portion filled with gold (zahav), and silver, spices, anointing oil. Terumah orders decoration, detail, candlesticks like almond blossoms. I learned to self adorn even before Terumah, and long before I knew I was beautiful. Learned adornment

as the opposite of natural looks, fists raised against prettiness. Kaleidoscopic hair colors, Doc Martens from Craigslist with a discontinued nineties floral pattern, thrift store dresses. Terumah gave me words for the sacredness of ornament, the holiness of a self chosen. Mom and I handmade invitations

together on light gold card stock to which we glued pale purple plastic gems. I look at photos now and find her, me, astonishing: colossal

toothful smile, pre-braces, flat chest, Semitic nose too big for the face, I thought then; lip stain, not gloss, milk-pale shoulders electric beneath velvet dress straps.

I had hoped the black dress and matte lip would make me seem serious, because I felt serious. I felt serious even about the rhinestoned shoes, about the choice to

wear flats and not heels: wanted to look considered, mature. Almost two decades later I wear a sequined dress to get married at home, barefoot with little black

in the closet, red lipstick, pink and orange earrings. I move the engagement ring to the right hand, hate the thought of quieting that particular sparkle, of

forever expatriating it to a box. Months later at a vintage store, I find a spangled Escada blazer with a handwritten tag that makes me snicker, sequence and wool blazer. Sequence mistaken for sequins. Husband suggests whoever wrote it speaks a first language other than English, and then I feel like an asshole. I keep the tag, leave it on the dresser to remind me. Cadence of the phrase I like regardless, sequins and wool, sequence and wool.

Words by Obi Taswell

bad romance, 2009

after lady gaga

bad romance crashed into our lives like flight 1549 into a flock of geese above the hudson. forgive me if i’m being blunt, or clouding your head with loose feathers and goose flesh. it’s like that, to be twelve and stranger to your own heart. one day your best friend hands you a slip of paper. the folds remind you of a paper crane, and when you unfold it the flutters in your heart remind you of a real one. but you cannot be gay, so you must be stuffed with feathers, which is to say a bird is stuck in your thoracic cavity. which is to say when you hear your best friend singing i want your everything as long as it’s free you already know it’s caught in the cage of your ribs. what is the word for pluck the feathers from my chest and kiss me please when you are too young still, and your lips are closed as you’re humming along.

bad romance, 2020 after

lady gaga

i never thought about kissing him. not that summer after seventh grade when joe biden was vice president and everywhere was whispers of swine flu and i searched every grocery store shampoo aisle for that scent like water rolling over smooth boulders so my hair could match his. not that year in college between joe the “vice” and joe the “president,” and he dated A, & then R, & then not me. and not that night years later, dancing to bad romance while covid raged outside. he held the moon light on his jawline and my hips, which were a river, in his hands. all my thoughts were of kissing him and i felt light as a feather. forgive me if i’m being too cliché; my chest is bare and a bird just soared out.

Dear Lexapro

Words by Alden Iannelli

To the bottle of 25mg Lexapro in the drawer of my bedside table,

I have been quite unfair—locked you away only a drawer above my lube and free flavored condoms. Dust gathers on your label after everything we have been through.

My therapist and I agreed that the only way for me to let go of how much guilt sits in my chest is to explore our past relationship. We also decided that pills are fucking expensive, so throwing you away or flushing you—however righteous it might feel—would be a bit needless. What if we need each other again? Occasionally, on a bad day, I debate popping one of you like Dayquil. I never have, though. I just smoke weed instead.

Let’s start off strong. You killed my appetite (you, the constant intake of nicotine, and the Accutane if we’re being fair), and track practice always ended in light-headed gasps and car rides home with white knuckles. You killed my appetite for food and my appetite for words.

Our relationship started in high school, when I still loved to write. Epic heroes and Shirley Jackson-inspired hauntings. Bitter, mocking poetry. My hunger for stories slipped away while the constant bombardment of thoughts of my loved ones dying subsided. Was it worth it?

What I will always resent you for, though, was your ability to take things away. You let me chase pleasure and didn’t even bother to dangle it a couple of feet away. Orgasms. Horniness. Couch-humping-faucet-riding urges. The urge to touch and be touched. The feeling of relief at the end. You took it all away as some cruel, sick joke.

Between the words and the sex and the realization that my anxiety was quite generational, I decided I had had enough. Sure, I’d forget you for a night or two, but I always came back. This time was different.

My therapist parents tried to warn me to ween off, but I have always been a bit stubborn. I cast you away and never said goodbye. Does it make you feel better to know that I suffered? Two weeks of darkness that haunted a family trip to the lake. So dark that for a bit, I believed my then-boyfriend when he said that the Devil was trying to tempt me back into his grasp. I believed him so hard that when my brother’s visiting college friends asked if they could pray over me, I let them. I read and reread the Book of Job and momentarily the Bible made sense to me.

I did things I regretted when I lost you.

But a year later, I started to wonder if I ever needed you in the first place. You taught me a lot and protected me from myself while we were together. I will let you rest inside of my bedside table, and occasionally, when I reach into the drawer below to grab the lube, I will think of you and remember the good and the bad. So thank you, my bottle of Lexapro, for everything. I hope I will never need you again.

Shot by Holly B. McCauley

1 Costco membership card, borrowed/ stolen from adult relative

1 Loss of will to live

Effects: Wanting to fight the most insufferable bitch at the party

drink 3: costco liquor

ourbloodscaresthem

WordsbyTaraFerreira

I am strolling in a breath of a cotton dress down a pathway that accompanies me through bushes and primal undergrowth. It is just beginning to change from summer hot to autumn cool, and my skin inhales its own air. The trees that hang over me guide my way, and a feeling of femme pleasure grows as I realize my place within the wilderness. I gaze skyward until it becomes dark and I must look down towards the earth to find my next step.

I stumble when, out of the nighttime space before me, a body appears. It stands firm. Some distance behind him is another figure, and behind him, another. It is a parade of forms and shadows through the forest that blocks my passage ahead, the one I need to take.

The closest one speaks, “It looks like you might be in possession of a uterus there.” He is right in front of me and replicated all the way home.

“Oh, um,” I pull my shoulders back, refusing the impulse to make myself smaller, to take up less space so as to have avoided this disturbance. To show no curve to my belly. I stand as tall and straight as I can while he takes an eyeball tour of my body without asking. “It’s empty.”

“Well, we heard that a girl around here was seeing how to get those baby killin’ pills. Alone.” He marches forward in progression of his cause. “I think we have

some questions to ask you.” I just want to get home, and I try to step backwards, but his hand already holds tight around my wrist.

“Um, no, not me.” I try to reach for my womb in my bag. If I could just show him she’s empty, she’s only mine, but he jerks my arm up and away. The pressure he applies grows as I labor to free my body from his control.

“It’s the law. I got the right.”

I keep my lips tight out of fear that my words could be used against me. He forces me back, has already driven me out from under the forest cover and towards the accusing streetlights and cars. This is where he wants me. I trip and my dress rips from his pulling, and my bag upturns.

My uterus falls out and onto the road, splatting fleshy and flat, half on and slipping off the sidewalk. “What the fuck?!” the impediment cries, eyes all over me but never down to my wet lady part. He weakens, and I am able to take my arm back.

I scrape my womb off the pavement and hold her up close to my chest. “There’s nothing fucking in there!” Red paints the asphalt, and I put her back in the zippered pocket of my bag before she picks up too much gravel.

“That’s where the baby is?!” He shakes his head, “I thought it was … but I thought ...” His words trail off like his beliefs don’t have the weight to hold them up. I refuse to familiarize the body before me with the parts of my own. I say nothing.

After a moment of standstill, he straightens and remains firm in his decided position. “I’d take better care of my…whatever they call that,” and nods his head in the direction of my bag.

I reach in and pull her back out. Our blood oozes all down my arms and over my torn dress. I extend my hands out to the person before me. He chooses to exist in ignorance of our cycle, and so he falters before the fluid that means death to him but life to me. He backs away. Once the next figure sees the bleeding he too moves out of my path forward. And the one after. On, and on, I proceed through the forest, dripping blood.

Shot by Page Murray

Shot by Page Murray

Words by Stephen Kim

He played a game of I spy through the social worker’s basement office window.

Something that starts with S: spiderweb cracks spanning the parking lot asphalt. Now T: two major potholes trapping remnants of Wednesday’s rainfall and a submerged It Gets Better banner broiling in the August heat.

Waiting, he doubted what he packed was enough: Fifty dollars tucked away in last year’s birthday card, a week’s worth of underwear, a box of maple protein bars the texture of cardboard, the handmade stuffed rabbit he no longer admitted to having. No passport. No driver’s license. What teenage boy even knows his social security number?

He wished it had gone differently. A triumphant rebuke of their bigotry as he paraded out the front door, buoyed by savings from a job he would have found at sixteen.

Instead, he skulked out the back, face hidden under a baseball cap, after the ding of a text message: “We know. Be gone before we get back.”

“no traffic” by Shane

Corn

“untitled” by Shane Corn

when she showers

Words by Sarah Rubinstein

When she showers, she coats herself in a pink soapy syrup. It has little flecks of gold in it and smells like bubblegum. Her skin stings and itches, surely causing an allergic reaction.

She doesn’t care.

She practices her ballet routine in the shower. She paints figure-eights on the tile with soapy toes. There’s a song she sings along with it. She doesn’t remember the name, but she knows it’s the third track on the CD that she got for Hanukkah.

When she showers, she opts for a slightly more sophisticated—but still heavily perfumed—body wash. Warm Vanilla Sugar. She rubs it all over her body before stopping to hover over her stomach. She looks down and grips the fat in her hands.

Eliza’s pool party is next weekend and she’s terrified. She’s avoiding eye contact with the pink and purple swimsuit hanging up in her closet.

Her body doesn’t look anything like her favorite character on that Disney Channel show. —

When she showers, she has a curated karaoke playlist on her iPod Touch to listen to. Songs by boy bands with dyed hair and tattoos that her mom doesn’t know about. She and Macey are trying to get free tickets from the local radio’s contest. She almost forgets to actually wash herself these days, she’s so caught up in the music.

A trail of blood runs down her leg, sloshing around on the suds-covered tile. She groans loudly and reaches over the shower door to grab her, unfortunately, white towel.

When she showers, she starts her routine with her pink razor. Tonight her parents are out of town and Brandon is coming over. They might go all the way.

So, she aggressively tries to shave everything down there. She spreads out a thick coat of floral scented shaving cream that will give her an infection the next day. And then she gets to work, craning her head down, jabbing at her hair every which way, going against the grain.

Paige recommended she watch some porn to prepare for the night. She noticed all the girls were like hairless cats. That must be what Brandon is expecting.

She makes several cuts in the process. She decides that when the bleeding stops, she’ll cover the cuts with concealer.

—

When she showers, she tries to be in and out as quickly as possible. The community bathrooms in her dorm are disgusting. There’s always a girl next to her blasting her favorite music while loudly gossiping with her friend outside the stall. Sometimes, people have sex in there.

She tries to wash off the sweat from the only bar seedy enough to let her and her friends sneak in. Andrea left with the bartender again. She becomes increasingly jealous, knowing that Andrea is probably using his nice apartment shower at this moment.

The six shots of Pink Whitney are starting to get to her. She ends up puking all over her finally clean, naked body.

The girls in the nearby stalls shriek in disgust as the neon pink puke washes over to their shower shoe-clad feet.

—

When she showers, she can’t help but be annoyed at the disgusting set up. Kyle’s stray pubes are scattered across the walls. The product shelf is filled with various fancy beard products she’s bought him that he’s never touched. She found out just last week that the guy had been using lotion, thinking it was body wash.

She applies a hair mask that an influencer recommended on TikTok. It’s supposed to keep your hair shiny.

Kyle hasn’t gotten a haircut in six months and is now sporting a greasy mullet.

—

When she showers, she feels light-headed from the hot steam. She’s only eaten ten carrot sticks today. If she sticks to this, maybe she can fit into the active wear she sees all the women in her pilates class wearing.

Overcome with dizziness, she slips and falls on the tile and breaks her leg. She tells her coworkers she injured herself while going on a hike with her boyfriend.

—

When she showers, her cat Frankie likes to wait behind the shower curtain for her. Her therapist says they may be a little codependent.

She takes a deep breath and lets herself piss into the drain. After all, this is her own loft, and she can do whatever she wants.

Then, she proceeds with her skin care routine which is supposed to stop aging according to the products’ labels. She doesn’t want to take after her mom’s wrinkles.

When she showers, she actually decides to draw herself a bath this time. Xavier is in the nursery with the baby, which gives her about fifteen minutes to herself.

She lights some candles and opens a bottle of rosé. Once the water is warmed up and the bubbles start foaming to the surface, she steps in with the bottle in hand. She doesn’t need a glass.

About forty-five minutes later, Xavier finds her asleep in a blanket of bubbles with the half empty bottle resting in between her boobs. —

Her and Xavier have twins.

She starts taking showers once a week if she can manage.

When her daughter showers, she tries to focus on the sound of the downpour on her skin and not her parents fighting in the bedroom next door.

Eventually the yells subside and she hears the sound of the lock on their door. She watches the water wash over her body before stopping to glare at her stomach.

She looks down and grips the fat in her hands.

Sydney’s pool party is next weekend and she’s terrified. She has been avoiding eye contact with the blue one-piece hanging up in her closet.

REMEMBERED/DISMEMBERED:

Lisa Frankenstein,COVID, and Grief

WORDS BY ISABEL KETTLER

Four years after the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like the societal consensus is that it is best to ignore one of the deadliest, most devastating diseases we have ever known, in spite of the fact that it continues to rage across the world. “Getting back to normal” was a phrase in constant usage almost as soon as countries began to take measures to mitigate the spread of COVID. Then and now, it seems as though returning to the illusion of “normalcy” takes precedence over the millions of people killed by COVID-19, the people who were disabled by the disease or whose disabilities somehow serve to justify their deaths, and the bereaved loved ones of the lost, whose grief is minimized as the COVID-19 pandemic is written off as merely an unfortunate period of history. To “go back to normal” was to cheapen these deaths and allow the disease to spread unchecked as it disabled and killed people again and again. So ubiquitous was this phrase at the height of COVID outbreaks and lockdowns that I was primed to forever associate it with that period of history. This made it all the more startling when I heard it in a teen romantic comedy-horror movie very loosely based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

That film? 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein. The feature directorial debut of Zelda Williams from a screenplay by Diablo Cody (of Juno and Jennifer’s Body fame), Lisa Frankenstein is the story of Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), a teenager in 1989 struggling to adjust to a new town and stepfamily in the wake of her mother’s grisly, unsolved murder. Her life is further upended when she meets, befriends, and eventually falls in love with the recently revived corpse of a dead Victorian man (“The Creature,” played by Cole Sprouse). The movie follows Lisa and the Creature as they bond and attempt to replace the Creature’s missing body parts, even turning to murder to supply these parts. In spite of the grisly premise, Lisa Frankenstein is an extremely sweet and earnest examination of grief, a theme made obvious by one scene in particular. While Lisa and the Creature are bonding, she opens up about her mother’s death: “After my mom died everyone was in such a hurry to go back to normal, and they kept acting like I had a problem because I couldn’t stop missing her,” (emphasis my own). Though my own associations with the phrase “go back to normal” made its inclusion in a movie that takes place in 1989 seem almost anachronistic, according to Diablo Cody’s liner notes on the movie’s soundtrack, the evocation was intended: “I wrote the screenplay for Lisa Frankenstein during an extraordinarily dark time, the spring of 2020… I watched helplessly as we lost thousands, then millions of beloved ones to a plague.” Written in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lisa Frankenstein is perhaps the first worthwhile movie to address the pandemic, albeit obliquely, and in spite of its problems it stands as a slightly silly, but never insincere meditation on life, death, and unprocessed grief.

In practice, Lisa Frankenstein is almost like a funhouse mirror reflection of the book that inspired it. Much like Lisa, the death of Victor Frankenstein’s mother casts a shadow over his life, and his grief is minimized and dismissed by his family throughout the novel. But while his grief eventually manifests in the desire to conquer and control death, Lisa’s grief manifests in caring for the Creature. Though she is not directly responsible for his animation, after her initial fear wears off, she provides the Creature with a shower, clothes, and her friendship. The offbeat, extremely sweet interactions between Newton and Sprouse are some of the movie’s highlights, and Sprouse, who has no spoken dialogue in the movie, is a delight to watch as he tries to convey to Lisa the depth of his love for her. Rather than the Creature murdering “the lovely and the helpless” members of the Frankenstein family to get revenge on the creator who rejected him, as he does in the book, Lisa and the Creature’s victims are themselves guilty of wrongdoing: both Lisa’s stepmother who threatened to commit her to a mental hospital and a classmate who attempted to assault her while she was drugged at a party become sources for the creature’s new body parts. Lisa and the Creature participate in the (re)building of the Creature together, and as they piece him together and revitalize the dead flesh by shocking him in a faulty tanning bed (it makes sense in the movie, I swear), he loses more and more of his deathly pallor and becomes closer and closer to human. Conversely, the Creature provides Lisa with a true friend and confidant, listening to her and helping to boost her confidence, and he is the first person who does not dismiss or ignore her grief at the loss of her mother.

Perhaps Lisa Frankenstein’s greatest genius is reframing elements of Frankenstein in feminine terms. In the original novel, Victor Frankenstein’s scientific experiments are framed as solitary, masculine endeavors, placing the ambitions of an individual over the well-being of a community. Indeed, Frankenstein’s experiments virtually usurp the roles of mothers in the creation of a family, reducing what is a collaborative experience to the efforts of one individual. This is, of course, a simplified and unfortunately biologically essentialist read of the novel, but time and word count requirements prevent me from

teasing out the gender issues at play in Frankenstein in greater detail. In Lisa Frankenstein, Lisa is not a scientist, but a seamstress, and she and the Creature collaborate to bring him back to life. The selfish and misguided attempt to conquer death present in the original novel becomes a collaborative method of giving life to Lisa and the Creature. Of course, murder is still murder and Lisa eventually must resort to suicide by tanning bed in order to escape the police, but her and the Creature’s love enables her to face death with acceptance instead of fear. You cannot conquer or ignore death, but, as her farewell note to the Creature says, “Death is temporary. I’ll love you forever.”

In spite of its good qualities, Lisa Frankenstein remains criminally underseen. It failed to make money at the box office and critics were, at best, lukewarm on the movie. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call it a perfect film, but it is absolutely one worth seeing. It’s a colorful explosion of teen girl experience that understands that we can’t just go back to normal after our worlds are shattered, but we can stitch each other up and try to build something better.

1/2 blunt

1 group of stoners

3 suppressed coughs

Effects: pondering the universe, bodily dissociation, anxiety

substance 4: a half smoked blunt

a half smoked blunt

Ode to a dead cat

Words

The bits of your skull are like snow on the road your blood a deep lake—the sun is setting.

You are not here but in a cabin, admiring the white specks as they drop to the earth.

You flick your tail, fire-warmed in the window.

The one you love reaches down and picks you up in their arms.

You are safe.

Safety never came easily

Safety came from holes under houses the umbrella of a parked car the strangers who threw food instead of kicking

Now, safety has come in the shape of a tire that cracked you open and spilled you on the cement.

Your muscles finally slack. No need to tense

You can rest now

Just look out the window at the fallen snow

As I admire how your skull sparkles in the road

by Maya Gardner

The Deer

Words by Maya Gardner

The deer laid open on the table

I knew it was dead

Because I had watched you kill it

It didn’t run when you pulled the trigger

Instead, it froze Its head turned towards you

Stuck in the instant it went from Two eyes to three And fell to the forest floor

This is the moment that played in the black gloss of its eyes

When I told you it was afraid

“It isn’t scared; it’s dead”

Is there a difference?

On a dark mountain drive

A deer froze in the middle of the road

Making no effort to move as the car passed through it

My head turned as it dragged itself to the shoulder

and the taillights faded into its eyes

I asked you why they always freeze

When there is time to run

“They aren’t that smart”

I saw that frozen look again today

In the bathroom mirror

In my eyes

The reflection of the gun

The reflection of the headlights

I wonder

If I’ll get out of the road

Or if I’ll crawl to the side

And bleed out on the shoulder

“I’m a mess but ok” by Shane Corn

“it came to me at night” by Uma Chatterjee

“green utopia” by Uma Chatterjee

i’d never been before to the all you can drink masterpiece so magic, this whole little world opened up to a rare story of me wanting wanting this Thing and getting It constantly head between knees losing It completely beat up and loved on and worth getting back like god’s grace you’ll notice It in Its absence; nostalgia-oriented junk-stoned fashion and a place to take it off took It with me down a gash in the road let a local lead me far from home

my angel of mercy tried to kill It but couldn’t even though i barely touch It, It always comes with me i’m obviously not going back to get It

keep It by my bedside just for the drama i get stuck on things sometimes, i’m impulsive i’m pretending, to the shame and chagrin of anyone who matters, i’m pretending to taste more like strawberry than a strawberry; this, out of anything is what matters sweet and sad putting a false god where it doesn’t belong so opulence finally took something and there It is sitting in the country kitchen

gas leak

Words by BEE LB

water me in soft blues

Words by Nikita Ladd

if you take me out to the rocks, let me slip and crack my skull it’s better and bloodier that way pull me back from nowhere, the place my mind is churning, and remind me of the tide pool of the shock of orange lichen on taut stretches of shoreline rock of the shag of seaweed gone rampant in the shallows there’s a tendency we have as people to sync our breathing to whatever person we are lying next to or embracing, and here i think i’ve matched the steady sound of waves the in and out a pleasant tether an easy way of being