FRUITSLICE Issue 8: Repair

Fruitslice is a celebration of…

• All the unfinished crafts in our homes.

• Always repairing, and thus trusting the process rather than the product.

• Broken things that we grow around rather than fix

• The art of kintsugi

• Conflict resolution

• Non-linear healing journeys and repair that is forever a part of the journey

• Vulnerability and emotional honesty

Fruitslice is a backlash against…

• The idea that those in power will be the solution to every problem

• Repair as it pertains to perfectionism.

• Nihilism

This issue is dedicated to Repair.

To the aches, pains, and bruises we’ve endured. The hurt we’ve kept close to our hearts.

To the long nights and longer days. The hurdles and setbacks we’ve encountered.

To each of us deciding, despite the difficulty, to carry on healing anyway.

To those who share their love with us, and love the parts we deem broken, even when we believe we don’t deserve it.

To the people and places and systems that tried to break our spirits, only to make us stronger in the end.

To all those who have reached out, taken us by the hand, and said: You don’t have to do this alone anymore.

To healing and a journey rife with twisting roads, left-hand turns, and dead ends. To the maps we’ve drawn and the paths we’ve taken, determined to see ourselves through.

To anyone who has ever thought they would never find their way to relief but kept looking for it anyway.

To every scraped knee and paper cut. Every wound we received along the way to finding ourselves.

To those who keep going and hoping and loving and falling down and getting back up again.

This issue is for you.

Content Warning: This issue explores the haphazard and imperfect work of repair. As the contributors within navigate the often turbulent landscape of healing, they face head-on difficult topics, experiences, histories, and legacies. While these issues are approached mindfully and with care, readers should be aware that these pages contain sensitive subject matter including, but not limited to, the following: mental health (including conditions such as anxiety and depression), self-harm, scars, death, suicide, grief, panic attacks, heartbreak, eating disorders, rape, domestic abuse, child neglect, fraught family dynamics, trauma (including religious trauma), violence, gore, death of animals, blood, substance abuse, alcoholism, recovery and relapse, needles and needles piercing skin, surgery and surgical implements, sex, sexuality, masturbation, nudity, conformity, coming out and coming of age, shame, conformity, erasure, censorship, totalitarian regimes, fascism, war, institutional power, the justice system, homophobic and transphobic slurs and legislation, and profanity, among others. These themes are all interwoven with the ways we traverse the terrain of repair. We hope you, readers, manage your discomfort as it arises and take steps to care for yourself.

Art by Lo Lundeen

Copyright © [2025] Fruitslice Inc. All rights reserved.

Everything in this issue belongs to its original creators—the writers, the artists, the dreamers, etc. Fruitslice holds first publication rights, and the right to archive and distribute the work in its originally published form. Every effort was made to contact and properly credit copyright holders. Please get in touch with us regarding corrections or omissions. Reproducing or reprinting all or any part of this issue without prior consent (except in the case of brief quotations used in critical reviews and academic work) will be considered utterly disrespectful, generally uncool, and legally questionable—but we aren’t cops.

Repair Team

Founding Editor-in-Chief Senior Editors

Chloe Oloren

Azul Castro

Casper Orr

Elijah Buth

Kayla Thompson

Starly Lou Riggs

Poetry Editors

Non-fiction Editors

ashley hunt

Azul Castro

Danny LaVigne

Kayla Thompson

KD Hack

Navreet Gill

Rowan Crosthwaite

Starly Lou Riggs

Timothy Arliss O'brien

Adam Mac

Andi Rand

Azul Castro

Casper Orr

Danny LaVigne

Elijah Buth

Ellie Allan

Micah Brown

Rhyker Dye

Rowan Crosthwaite

Starly Lou Riggs

Team Fruitslice

Fruitslice Executive Council

Board of Directors

Founding Editor-in-Chief

Art Directors

Senior Designer

Senior Project Manager

Project Management Team

Submission Management Lead

Submission Management Team

Director of Development

Grant Coordinators

Website Design & Technical Support

Internal Community Director

Caroline Gharis

Casper Orr

Chloe Oloren

Elijah Buth

Jason Wayne Wong

Kayla Thompson

Meg Streich

Melanie Zhgenti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

Rhyker Dye

Starly Lou Riggs

Ann McCann

Chloe Oloren

Jason Wayne Wong

Chloe Oloren

Melanie Zhgenti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

McKenna Gray

Danny LaVigne

bellze tandoc

Holly Renshaw

Leilany Sosa

bellze tandoc

David Cruz

Layla Razek

Madison Dooley

ashley hunt

Elisha Sawyer

Kahlea Williams

Olivia Bannerman

Rhyker Dye

Terminal Velocity

Words by Chandler Gates

Art by Maria Iacob

A bird hit the window, smacking the glass with a thwunk so loud, my head snapped around at the sound of its velocity abruptly ending. A tiny, shivering body lay misshapen on the ground, the size of a crumpled-up napkin tossed from a window. It must have been flying at full speed, zipping through the air, not noticing the sun glinting off the clear surface, lost in the reflection of the day’s rippled blue clouds and blurred trees.

I rose from the bench I’d been lying on, waiting for the camp’s lunch bell to ring, and stooped down to look closer at the bird. They looked like some kind of sparrow— not that I knew birds. Their feathers still twitched lightly, and the movements of their speckled brown chest, puffing in and out, were nearly imperceptible. I squinted to examine them, looking for injury, but I didn’t know what to look for. Their taloned feet were drawn up tight against their small frame, as if someone had wound them up to put away. Perhaps their neck was broken. I reached to scoop the bird up, but then paused. A fear of disease whispered in the back of my mind, stalling my hands. Remorsefully, I stood up and stepped into the lounge building, walking past the stage where the pianos and guitar sat, ready for the final night of the Deep Singing program, and the long wooden dining tables of the mess hall, until I reached the kitchen.

Nearly two weeks had passed since I boarded the ferry to Orcas Island. In

exchange for a bed, meals, and access to the camp’s art programs, I worked three hours each day weeding the garden, cooking meals, and cleaning cabins. It was quiet then, the kitchen resting in the lull between breakfast and lunch rushes. Only the head gardener was there, steeping her nettle and chamomile tea on the stove. She flashed a toothy grin, and I nodded a hello back as I walked briskly past her to the storage shelves at the far end of the room. I rooted around until I found the tub of towels and stuffed one into a large plastic dish bin, then rushed back outside.

I plucked the bird up with the towel and eased them into the palm of my hand. I lowered the towel with the bird lying hammocked at the center into the dish tub and carried it to the wooded area beside the building, placing it in a quiet spot out of the path of the walking trails that crisscrossed the campgrounds. I hunkered down over the bird, their shallow breathing anchoring me as I swayed on the balls of my feet, thighs burning from crouching so low.

My eyes momentarily traced the pathways, disappearing into tall pine trees, and I envisioned dotted lines connecting across the island and submerging in the water until they reached the next island. I imagined tying the entire Pacific Northwest archipelago together with string, but as tight as I tied, my finger couldn’t hold the knot in place, and the string unraveled, loosened with a breath.

The bird stopped breathing.

The sudden silence threw me off balance and I fell forward. Shamefully, my eyes blurred with tears, and I hoped no one would pass by and see me acting so childishly. The bird’s lingering pain radiated into my bones, and my ribcage clenched until my stomach started to flip, threatening to reject the oatmeal I’d eaten that morning. Hot tears slipped down my cheek, and I wiped them away with a deprecating laugh.

Two hours before, in the church of books, illuminated by the light of the trees, I listened to a woman share the story of her husband’s death with the writing circle.

“The sun was going down, and only the kitchen light was on, so the rest of the house pooled darkness around me like I was on this little island. I wasn’t even hungry, but it was our usual time for dinner. My body simply moved through the motions— punching in numbers on the microwave to reheat a plate of leftover pasta. As I watched the plate spin in the humming microwave— for two minutes and thirty seconds—I fantasized that he was still coming home, that any second his car would pull into the driveway and he’d walk in, flipping all the lights on in his wake, like a bioluminescent wave surging through the house, breaking up the dark. I sat at the kitchen table, the plate of leftover pasta before me. I took a bite, rolling it around in my mouth. I tasted nothing.”

As she spoke, I pictured grief incarnate, its amorphous form crawling into her lap and nestling deep into her chest. But instead of pushing it away, she cupped its cheek tenderly as though comforting a lost child. I wanted to say something to soothe her, but the words didn’t come, or they did, but I swallowed them because saying them felt like too much to someone I’d only known for such a short time. I wished I could grip her shoulders and leech the sadness from her bones with my fingertips.

Looking back down at the lifeless bird dwarfed by the black bin, I was reminded of all the dead cats I’d ever scraped off the road. Once, I’d even bought flowers and returned to scatter them over a small ginger kitten, as if I knew that cat intrinsically. Each time without effort, I replayed the scene of every cat’s death as if I were there, as if I knew how their necks came to be twisted, as I felt my own neck tighten, their slight bodies crushed under unwavering tires, my own chest caved in. But I couldn’t put the woman in the palm of my hand to carry her somewhere safe or cover her with grocery store flowers, left as a token on the side of the road. I felt my chewed-up heart roll tastelessly in my mouth—impossible to swallow.

Earlier in the week, the camp caretaker took all the volunteers on a walk around the camp to show us “something special.” He led us to a large tree stump a ways up the big hill that sloped down into camp, nestled among some of the original cabins built back in the 1930s. From there, you could see the garden that brushed up against the edge of the meadow where the apple orchard was planted beside the lounge building, and at the center of the meadow lay the pavilion hut where the Deep Singers sang to those not yet departed and those not yet born. Later that day, they would sing, from deep in their throats, humming, crying, stomping, holding one another as they swayed. He pointed to the stump and asked us to look closely, to see what was different about it. We all studied the tree, unsure what to look for. He smiled at our silence and ran a hand across the gnarled bark that covered the stump’s surface like a scab before revealing the answer.

“This is where the tree was healed after it fell. Because you see, this tree isn’t dead. Once a tree is cut down, it’s not able to provide for itself anymore. The only way for this callus to form is for the trees around it to share nutrients through the root system so the cambium can repair itself. The other trees have to actively keep it alive. You might think that’s normal, that this is typical behavior for trees. But it’s not, it’s really rare, and never in my life or anywhere else in this world have I seen other trees act like this so often. This stump isn’t even the only one; there are others like it all over camp. The trees here choose to heal each other, even though it might be seen as a waste of resources. They heal each other time and time again.”

A scratching noise emitted from the tub. In disbelief, I watched as the bird tumbled to their side, wings splaying out at odd angles to brace the small body upright. Their chest heaved in a gust of air, no bigger than a thimble amount, and they tucked the wings in tighter to sit in a resting position on their stomach. I held my breath, careful not to startle them, and continued to hold it steady until time flowed slow as honey dripped through an hourglass. The bird’s black eyes fixated on me, and with a sudden flap of their wings, they darted up into the trees above my head. I turned to see them alight from branch to branch, and my gaze followed them until they slipped out and up, away into the rest of the day.

That night, I dreamed of the trees. The swaying pines humming, the original Deep Singers, their ancient voices swelled from the roots below, down in the dark earth, and their branches stretched across the island, locking arms to keep the harm at bay, lapping at the water’s edge.

Words by Gwendolyn Hill

The Game

Abattleground of sixty-four checkered squares spreads before me. My fingers itch to touch the wooden pieces, to feel their ridges and their soft weight. But I sit still—we’re playing touch-move. Arms crossed, I lean forward, trying to make my eyes roam over the whole board so my father doesn’t see me looking at only one spot.

I squint. “Give me a moment.”

That’s the hardest part of chess: knowing your opponent is tracking your every move, on and off the chessboard. I do it too, of course. With less experienced players, I can tell when they get excited thinking they’ve got me made, only to get knocked down two moves later. They stare at me aghast, and I hold back a smile, knowing that two moves ago their face betrayed everything. Is this how my father feels when he wins?

When I lose to my father, I feel like I’m admitting to being less-than. He apologizes: “I’m sorry Wendy, I just really like to win.”

Chess is dependent on self-mastery: mastery of emotions and intellect. As much as heat rises to my face whenever my father wipes the board with me, he’s never cruel, so I respect it. I wouldn’t want him to go easy on me, since then it wouldn’t be my victory. I wouldn’t truly be proving my worth. But, as his child, it wouldn’t have killed him to let me win without me knowing. this once.

My father’s love is quiet in actions. He completes the endless household tasks: keeping the leaves from piling up in the driveway, keeping the water running, keeping the heat on. He does not ask for or expect recognition. It’s the right thing to do, I hear him say in my head. It’s my job. I don’t know if he sees these menial tasks as acts of love—I used to think he saw them as cause and effect, action and consequence. He was grateful when my sister and I raked the never-ending piles of leaves surrounding his house without asking this past winter, surprised that I started speaking his language.

Quiet love is not a bad thing. But in our arguments, that love is not always clear. When we as children bicker with our parents, we remember the bad, and we require so much more love and happiness to even begin to offset the dark days.

on worth. Just raked I six and

When my father and I argue, it’s not much of a fight. I cry when I’m angry, and he’s a stone-waller who thinks crying invalidates my arguments. He would never hurt me, but he’s over six feet tall and I barely reach his chest. And he’s scary when he’s mad; whenever he raises his voice or his tone changes, my tears come down in sheets. You’re overreacting. You’re being a drama queen.

But to me, the real argument isn’t about whatever little thing we’re discussing. I’m fighting for the right to express my emotions, to have them validated, so our game becomes an allegory of morality. If I lose, it means his unemotional approach proves right. If I win, I prove him wrong.

But why?

My father will never admit that he is unsure with grace; he’ll make a decision and stick with it to a fault. I’d always ask. He’d swell. Why? Because I said so. I couldn’t accept that. He’d stand there woodenly. Life isn’t fair.

But that’s not fair! and will

I am realizing there is no “winning” this game with my father— not truly. So I’m trying to stray from binaries like winning and losing, because that isn’t getting me anywhere. Up until two years ago, I have instinctively followed my fear of rejection. I’ve been obsessing over the future and planning every move in hopes of receiving the exact response I want, the exact kind of love. I feel a sense of control that brings relief—until that illusion is shattered. It will continue to shatter until my father and I realize we are supposed to be on the same team.

It is only within the past year that I’ve started saying I love you to him after our phone calls—something he never initiates, but always returns. Even after we argue…no, especially after we argue, I say I love you. Partially because I do, but also because I want to hear him say it back. To remind us both that in the end, we are father and daughter.

My father is a man who has morals he staunchly stands behind, unshakable in his principles. When I was younger and he shut me down, I thought he meant to reduce me to a single dimension, that he didn’t respect my emotions, and therefore did not respect me. But my father, the engineer, the lawyer…the calculating man he is…I’ve realized he doesn’t always think things through. Maybe he means what he says, but does he mean to make me cry? No. I cognitively know that he loves me, but it’s hard to feel it. With each dismissal, I retreat within myself. With each dismissal, my carefully crafted defense shatters, and pieces crash from our board.

Last June, I saw my father in-person again for the first time in two years at my college Lavender Graduation. Instead of familiar checkerboard squares, he was greeted with stripes and Pride flags in every corner, with my name and biography plastered on the screen for

Two days later, we were headed back to the car after a two hour long walk when he You know, I was really hurt that you didn’t tell me. Confused, I turned Wait, tell you what? He met my eyes. That you’re Queer. It seemed like everyone else knew but me, and I had to find out at your graduation. I wish you had told me. My tears dripped down softly and my throat swelled shut. I hugged him. I’m sorry. Honestly, I had forgotten that he didn’t know.

In therapy, I put into words something I’d instinctively known before, but never voiced; I always have to come up with a fully-formed plan of attack before discussing anything with my dad. Mentally preparing for dismissal, my plan must have no loopholes. Like in chess, I try to predict the future, to think 10 steps ahead. But even then, my father always surprises me. As much as I predict and prepare, he always makes his

We have a rule in my dad’s house for games; whoever wins has to clean up, almost like penitence. My father and I still play our game, but instead, we reset the board together. The pieces still have scratches from where we dropped them, the felt on the bottom is wearing down, and the wood is losing its luster. The pieces remember. But each time we play, the game is a little different, and we start to see each other with fresh eyes. an award. suddenly spoke. to look at him. me, him. always plan in much predict makes own moves. to his character.” But father you hard them, never never expected regurgitates true.

My father always wants me to learn plenty of life lessons under his care, since “experience builds character.” But I couldn’t care less about “character”—what I want is a father I am not afraid of. A father that says I love you without prompting. And it is so hard to communicate my needs over and over to someone I feel should know them, but I have never stopped trying.

My father, who doesn’t narrate his own thoughts. My father, who never lets his children win games. As a child, I never expected to have to spell out what I needed from him; it feels false now when I feed him the words and he regurgitates them. I love you. Your experience is valid. Your emotions are valid. But he means what he says. He wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t

Fault Lines

Words by Keegan Smith-Nichols

Photos by Sienna Joya Haag

When I buckle myself into my mom’s car, I can’t see out the front window. It’s covered in an inch of fresh snow, and, even if it wasn’t, the massive Nevada Road and Recreation Atlas propped open against my knees blocks my view. With my finger, I trace today’s route highlighted across three pages: east on Interstate 80 out of Reno until we get to Fernley, where we’ll take the roundabout’s third exit and continue east to Highway 50. Forty miles after that, just on the other side of Fallon, we’ll arrive at Grimes Point, a field of volcanic boulders covered in petroglyphs.

It’s the first day of winter break, and it makes perfect sense that my mom and I are driving together on the Loneliest Road in America. We’re not the only people out here, but close to it. I take a video of the road ahead with my phone, joking that I’ll stop filming once another car passes, but it’s only after we arrive and park at the trailhead that a truck breaks the silence and rumbles along the road. The cloud of dust kicked up by its tires lingers in the air long after the truck disappears.

That my mom and I have had our miscommunications, misunderstandings, and disagreements is hardly noteworthy. I try not to dwell on the particulars of arguments we’ve had because I don’t yet know the difference between situating the present in context and keeping score. When my mom enrolled me at a boarding school halfway through my junior year of high school, it felt like being pushed away from my family. She was making sacrifices to offer me an opportunity. When I stopped responding to the name my parents gave me, my mom felt like she’d lost my dad all over again. I was trying to live. I misunderstood her concerns about my transition as disapproval and her questions as judgement. I never told her much about my life and complained that she didn’t understand me. I made no effort to understand her.

For a lifetime of reasons, we make perfect companions on America’s Loneliest Road. We’re both stubborn and obsessive, meticulous to a fault. We each have our own way of doing things, and, in time, I’ve learned to love this about us. My mom has become my favorite person to hike with because her eyes are sharp and she’s always asking questions: Why is this here? Where did it come from? What would happen if it disappeared? It’s embarrassing how long it took me to learn that my mom is a person too, someone with her own life and memories and purpose. Growing up, she used to tell me and my brother bedtime stories about rattlesnakes she’d nearly stepped on and mountains she’d climbed. She told us about the bears that stole a pound of fudge from her and what the sunrise looks like from the top of Mount Fuji. As a kid, I thought all the stories my mom would tell had already happened to her. As an adult, I’m happily wrong. My mom is still writing stories, and now I’m part of them.

Neither of us has been to Grimes Point before. From the trailhead, we wind our way through a boulder field and up a ridge scattered with quartz and rabbitbrush. Rocks are unreliable narrators; they tell a story about the past, but the record is usually incomplete and contains neither a beginning nor an end. Twelve million years ago, a volcano erupted here, and my mom and I are searching for the evidence: colorful chunks of rock that rockhounds these days call “Nevada wonderstone.” It’s not particularly rare or valuable, but with its swirls of red and orange and purple, Nevada wonderstone is satisfying to find and beautiful to see. My mom and I aren’t having much luck finding any. AllTrails tells us we’ve gone off-route as we scour the ground on our hands and knees.

We scramble down the ridge toward the desiccated floor of Lake Lahontan. Ten thousand years ago, all of this except for the top of the ridge was underwater. Looking across the basin, only the ghost of the shoreline remains, weathered into the hillside. The terrace drops steadily until the hills meet the basin floor, and now it’s a dry, lonely expanse of salt and sagebrush. The rocks crunch under our boots. Only some have been tumbled smooth by long-evaporated waves; others retain their jagged edges. My mom suggests we should come back later with a bucket. Not far down the road, the internet’s rockhounds say there are exciting things to find: more wonderstone, jasper, agates, maybe even garnets.

The trail hugs the base of the hills and leads to a series of caves, where my mom takes a photo of me lying flat on my back trying to capture the rock formations on the cave’s ceiling. The picture immediately becomes one of my favorite photos of myself. My smile is huge, I’m covered in dust, and I feel like my mom has captured everything I like about myself. She’s seeing me how I do. I finally took the time to show her who I am, and she listened.

I have something to say to my mom. I’ve been searching for the right words for years. They’re something like: I’m sorry, or maybe: I forgive you, but probably just: I love you. For so long our language has been silence, something I’ve always assumed to be indicative of a lack of sentiment, held back and left unexpressed. But the longer I sit in this desert, a place blazingly alive if you only stop to listen, the more I think that this silence, so sure of itself, already contains it all.

Two magpies swoop low over the brush and chatter, their feathers iridescent in the fading daylight. Now that the sun has set, the temperature is falling quickly. It’s the shortest day of the year. Here in this wild, ancient silence under a purple desert sky, this is the closest to my mom I’ve ever felt. I hope she can feel it too. I don’t know that I’ll ever find those words, but I won’t stop looking for them. We’re having too much fun.

The Thawing

Words by Amy Cook

It was sit-in-the-sprinklers hot in New Jersey. I was sixteen; too old for sleepaway camp, although both of my siblings were shipped off there when school ended. The summer of 1996 broke with possibility, smudged slightly by reading lists. I covered fluorescent Post-its with sickly-scented pens. Six Flags Great Adventure, improv club in Red Bank, Jenkinson’s Boardwalk, movies, mall, TGI Fridays.

AOL chat rooms, I added. I found the pace of them exhilarating. The anonymity.

I was newly unmoored and hiding from myself. Jenna was gone. Gone meaning no more best-friend-foreverness, which ended the day our teacher outed her, tipping into motion a month-long avalanche of chaos and bird-pecking. Parents, administrators, therapists—everyone had their turn at her, until there was so little left. I could have come out, too; tried to keep us afloat, but I sought silence. Jenna was the only other Queer person I knew, and she’d been my lifeboat for two years. She was sent somewhere to straighten out, and if that wasn’t my doing, it remained my fault.

That summer, the walls of my bedroom were papered with images of actors; the men of All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital, pages ripped out of Soap Opera Digest and scotch-taped above my bed, and when I ran out of wall, the ceiling. These were not the teenage heartthrobs, or even twentysomethings playing teenage heartthrobs. These were adults, with graying beards and bad backs. I didn’t exclude women; pictures of Helen Hunt and Princess Diana hung there, too. But I shouted my heterosexuality. Helen and Diana were secondary.

That summer, we could hardly pay the utilities bill, and I wasn’t permitted to touch the AC. There was no cooling down. I was wearing a pair of blue pajama shorts and a Gap Kids tank top when the melt set in and my parents asked me to come out of my shady room. Torture.

They sat on the couch, separated by a few feet and the rest of our lives. My father was leaving the taped-up card house he had been constructing for thirtynine years, bolstering the sticky sides with a wife and three children. He had always been gay, he explained, as my mother stared into the suburban distance, past my long unused clubhouse and over the fence. He had been, he said, living in the closet.

And it was a miracle that I even existed.

Words and Photos by Maxwell Brad Peterson

I photograph the daily lives of my friends and family— rooted in rural places like Idaho, Missouri, and Nicaragua. These images explore the places where life unfolds quietly: rooms cluttered with tools and memories. Spaces that serve as workshops, nurseries, and sanctuaries draw me to the moments that aren’t part of a bigger story—the small acts of care and makingdo that shape survival and belonging. My work invites attention to these overlooked details, celebrating lives built with strength, resilience, and lasting meaning.

Eric, Enock, and I worked together for three years at a sushi bar near the beach. During a busy shift at the bar, the lights illuminating the bottles went out. I stepped out of their way as they clambered up the bar to fix it and I took this shot as the lights switched on. I was struck by how their shapes almost combine into a mythical unit. Their blurred faces give them an archetypal feeling, like the face of a statue, which I felt reflects the anonymity most service workers exist in as they facilitate much of our lives. Against the black and yellow, their skin glows shades of red, like an iron in the fire, symbolizing their power and utility.

Eric and Enock

rain dancer, Mexico City

I watched this volador (flyer) climb up a 20-meter pole before he and three other dancers descended by rappeling. Their amplitude increased, asking with their bodies and their collective courage for Tláloc to give them rain.

The tranquility in this dancer’s face shocked me when I looked back at the images of him and his group. The heavily beaded faja doubled over, the vibrant colors of his regalia, with the wind flowing all around him as he whirled like magic through the air appeared to me well-executed enough to make even a god stay the hand of drought.

The Comfort of Thunder

Words by David Milley

AArt by Mausoliere

t eleven, he was young for eighth grade, but there he was: clever, but not wise.

The littlest kid in his classes, he was only beginning to feel the kinds of things stirring in him that the boys around him had been feeling for two years already.

There was a boy in his English class, Craig, who was fourteen, taller and stronger than the other boys, with curly light brown hair and a beard just starting to grow. He smiled at the boy, who thought that meant he was a friend. Craig already had a buddy, Alan—thickset and bespectacled—but the boy didn’t care. The boy followed them like a puppy, from English class to lunch, and back upstairs, where they went to separate math classes. He dreamed of Craig’s smile, of his arm encircling his shoulder. Of being pulled in close, face to face.

Craig smiled indulgently, appreciating the attention, until he tired of the boy following him. Maybe Alan told Craig it looked queer, or maybe Craig caught onto it himself. Craig began hitting the boy. When the boy walked up to him at the end of class, Craig punched his upper arm. When they passed in the hallway between other classes, Craig pushed him into the wall.

The boy tried to avoid Craig, but now Craig was following the boy, to torment him with sly punches and slaps when he could catch him, when nobody was looking. Nowhere was safe—not class, not the hallways, not the lunchroom, not the gym or the phys ed field. Craig would appear from nowhere to deliver a slap or a pinch or a punch.

After a week of this, the boy told the teacher. Mrs. Kling promised to talk to Craig and, next day, the boy was moved to the front row. Now, Craig’s punches in the hallway came hard and fast, and he didn’t bother to hide them. On a class trip to the library, Craig punched the boy so hard in the stomach that he cried out and doubled over. Mrs. Kling pretended not to hear. The boy staggered out of line and went to the guidance counselor’s office. Mrs. Gallagher promised it would stop.

Next day, Mrs. Kling set the class to reading, and beckoned the boy out into the hallway with Craig and Alan and another boy, Lee, who everybody already said was queer.

“You should have kept this between you and Craig,” she started, “but you went to Mrs. Gallagher. Alan and Lee are here to witness that I’m being fair. You won’t be able to go behind my back again.”

DAVID MILLEY

Craig and Alan smirked. Lee looked scared.

She said more: “Craig will stay away from you, you can be sure of that! I don’t want him anywhere near you!” As she spoke, she worked herself into a fury. “If you’re going to be that way, you will always be beaten and you will deserve it.”

“People like you are miserable. They’re lonely and afraid all their lives. They can never keep a job. They always die young, miserable and alone.” She paused. “You could save time and do it now.”

THE COMFORT OF THUNDER

Lightning flashed inside the storm. In the glare, I saw that Mrs. Kling was lying to me, the way my Sunday School teacher lied about the virtuous heathens when I was six, the way my third grade teacher lied about the racist taunts about the college where my parents taught. This time, the lie wasn’t about god, or the work my parents did, or even all those tests I’d taken that landed me here too young. This time, the lie was about me, the center of who I was, and who I was to become.

She wasn’t lying about my feelings for Craig, my feelings before he began to hurt me. She was laying them all out into the open, bare, where the other boys would learn the lesson she was teaching. She was painting all the feelings that had warmed my awakening heart as something criminal and diseased. I was a thief whose hands should be cut off for his touch, a leper to be left on a desert island, a heathen doomed to hell.

But the more venom she spit, the more I heard what she didn’t mean to say—that there were other people like me. A lot of people like me. And she was terrified of us. She was so terrified that she did her best to destroy me, a child.

I opened my eyes and stared. If Mrs. Kling said there would be no joy in my life, I knew I was certain to find it, even if it was nowhere to be seen that day. She saw me looking, caught her breath and stood a moment, glaring at the four wide-eyed boys before her. She waved us back into class, following a few moments later.

After that, Craig did stay away from me: so did Alan and Lee. Other kids did not. I was hit —a lot—the rest of eighth grade, and called “queer” and “homo” nearly everywhere I went. Mrs. Kling continued to give me top grades, but she never looked at me again.

I spent ninth grade avoiding the other kids. To get out of phys ed and the mockery of the locker room, I joined the crossing guards, certifying my status as an outcast. I used that free hour to do homework in the library. Outside of my lessons, I tried not to catch the attention of my teachers. I disappeared.

From that day on, I’ve guarded who I am. I’m slow to join the party, and I almost never make the first move to make a friend. Mrs. Kling lied about everything else, but she showed me that hatred was real. It was overwhelming in the 1960s; it still overwhelms children today.

Growing up, fearing the consequences kept me from the embrace of my Queer tribe. I spent my teen years hiding my feelings from my parents, knowing that they would try to fix me, and I didn’t want that. I took another test and escaped to college early, but the rumor followed me there. I struggled; my professors did not want to teach me. I burned through my youth, reached grad school at seventeen, and finally found room to breathe. All those years, I’d used my prodigy status as a shield from hatred; it saved me. I finished grad school and moved north to Philadelphia to find work, far from Florida.

I found love, too. If the 1960s were a frightening time for Queer people like me, the ‘70s were intoxicating. I was lucky to come to adulthood when I did. Finding love was easy then, and frequent.

One delirious night, I looked to the seat next to me at the bar to see the most incredible man perched there. Bearded, strong, tough-looking, he wore a stern face. His eyes sparked with laughter. “Warren,” he said, “like the place where they keep rabbits.” That cold night, I took him home, riding the subway through a city which was suddenly empty, except for us. We spent all that night (and the next day and night) together.

For nearly fifty years, we’ve never been alone. Warren stands by me and I stand by him. I’ve written my way through an exciting career. Warren made a garden of our yard and a garden of our lives. Every day, I wake beside my love.

We’re growing old now. We face the ills that everyone faces, if they have the luck to live long enough. We lived our lives together without waiting for the world to approve. My life waited for me on the other side of that terrible day.

Art by Chandra Iftekhar

Photo by Sienna Joya Haag

Ghosts in the Archive: Cold

War Paranoia, The Lavender Scare, and the Queer Futures We’re Still Building

Words by Timothy Arliss OBrien

In the dim corridors of American history, fear has often walked hand-in-hand with state power. It comes dressed in the aggressive language of patriotism and the impending fear of anyone who doesn’t conform. During the Cold War, the u.s. government launched a campaign of suspicion and surveillance aimed not only at rooting out alleged communists, but also at eliminating LGBTQ+ individuals from positions of influence. Beneath the highly televised anti-communist Senate hearings lay the quieter, more insidious persecution of Queer Americans, a campaign now known as the Lavender Scare.

This state-sponsored panic took place alongside the Red Scare in the late 1940s and intensified throughout the 1950s, casting LGBTQ+ federal employees as dangerous, morally suspect, and inherently untrustworthy. Historians such as David K. Johnson have meticulously documented how thousands of people lost their jobs, not because of criminal activity or disloyalty, but because of whispered rumors, vague accusations, or the “wrong” acquaintances.1

In Leslie Feinberg’s 2005 essay, 1950: Lavender Scare, Feinberg outlines2 how Queerness became conflated with treason in the minds of legislators and bureaucrats. The logic was circular and insidious: LGBTQ+ individuals were seen as vulnerable to blackmail and therefore posed a security threat. But it is imperative to remember that blackmail itself was only possible because the government had criminalized LGBTQ+ identities to begin with. In this way, the government manufactured the very conditions it claimed to fear, weaponizing shame and secrecy against Queer people to justify their exclusion.

This was not a momentary lapse in judgment, nor an unfortunate side effect of a broader anti-communist agenda. It was a targeted, ideologically-driven purge. Executive Order 10450, signed by President Eisenhower in 1953, banned “sexual perverts” from working in the federal government. This vague phrasing granted sweeping authority to remove anyone suspected of homosexuality from civil service. Between 1947 and 1957, over 5,000 federal employees were investigated, interrogated, and dismissed because they

1David K. Johnson,”The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government”, 2004 2Leslie Feinberg, “1950: ’Lavender Scare’!,” February 17, 2005, https://www.workers.org/2005/us/lgbtseries_0224/ index.html.

GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE

were (or were suspected to be) Gay. The scars of that purge are not only personal, they are institutional. They persist in the historical silences, the blank spaces in personnel records, and the intergenerational trauma passed down among LGBTQ+ communities who learned to hide, lie, and fear authority.

Fast forwarding to today, a chilling resonance emerges. While the Cold War has long since ended, its structures of paranoia and social control remain embedded in the American psyche. The specter of state-sanctioned homophobia has not vanished; it has simply shapeshifted. In recent years, we have seen an alarming rise in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. In 2023 and 2024 alone, hundreds of bills were introduced in state legislatures across the U.S., many of which specifically target Transgender individuals, especially youth. The American Civil Liberties Union has done the important work of mapping these attacks on our rights.3 These laws restrict access to gender-affirming care, criminalize drag performances, ban inclusive books from school libraries, and punish educators for acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people. They echo the old tactics of the Lavender Scare, dressed in new language: instead of “security risk,” the justification is now “child protection”; instead of “moral turpitude,” they shout “parental rights.”

Historians have argued that the state’s regulation of intimacy, identity, and embodiment is never neutral. It serves particular visions of the nation—visions rooted in whiteness, heteronormativity, and patriarchal authority. Max Osborn’s article from May of 2025, “Groomers, gays, and gender ideology: Why the anti-LGBTQIA+ legislative backlash is a moral panic and why criminologists should care”4 describes how certain bodies are rendered legible and others deviant, how the public sphere is built on fantasies of control. Today’s moral panics—over Trans youth in sports, over Queer books in libraries, over drag queens reading to children—are simply the latest iterations of a much older architecture of exclusion.

The current wave of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation exists within a broader historical framework of social control, and these moral panics are not isolated or novel. Rather, they manifest a longstanding strategy of policing the boundaries of normativity and using law and policy to enforce cultural fantasies of purity, safety, and tradition. Osborn emphasizes how certain bodies are made “legible” within public discourse, to be understood as natural, acceptable, or safe, while others are cast as dangerous and disposable. In this light, the public sphere is revealed not as a neutral space for democratic participation, but as one structured by fear, myth, and the continuous exclusion of those who challenge the status quo.

Amidst the unprecedented cruelty, we are witnessing the growth of an unprecedented Queer archive. Unlike the Lavender Scare era, when silence was often the only strategy for survival, today’s Queer communities document, resist, and imagine with fervor. Digital platforms allow for rapid response and mobilization; grassroots organizations build mutual aid networks that fill the gaps left by hostile governments, and young Queer people are rewriting the script of what visibility can mean.

In the past, files were quietly destroyed and names were scrubbed from personnel lists. Now, Queer artists, activists, and historians are reconstructing the past and preserving the present. Projects like the Digital Transgender Archive5 , the Queer Zine Archive Project6 , and LGBTQ Religious Archives Network7 actively resist erasure. They transform trauma into testimony, turning the act of remembrance into a form of rebellion. In doing so, these archivists expose the systems that once deemed Queer lives unworthy of record. They

3“Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2024.” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu. org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024.

4Osborn, Max. “Groomers, Gays, and Gender Ideology: Why the Anti-LGBTQIA+ Legislative Backlash Is a Moral Panic and Why Criminologists Should Care.” Punishment & Society, May 2025, p. 14624745251344568. DOI.org (Crossref), https:// doi.org/10.1177/14624745251344568.

5Digital Transgender Archive https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/

6QZAP - The Queer Zine Archive Project - Archiving Queer Zines since 2003. 2 Aug. 2025, https://gittings.qzap.org/

7LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/

Art by Olivia Baldacci

GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE

refuse to accept invisibility as an inheritance, choosing instead to amplify voices that were silenced and stories that were buried. The work is painstaking, often pieced together from marginalia, handwritten notes, flyers, oral histories, and photographs rescued from obscurity, but it is precisely this attention to the overlooked that renders these archives so powerful. They bear witness not only to persecution, but to survival, resistance, and joy in community.

Moreover, these archives operate as radical pedagogical spaces. They offer tools for learning, unlearning, and reimagining history beyond heteronormative frameworks. Educators, students, and everyday seekers turn to them not only to understand the past but to make sense of the present, drawing strength from the continuity of Queer resilience. In a time when Queer histories are under renewed attack, the archive becomes not just a repository, but a shield. It is a living, breathing force of collective memory that insists: we were, we are, and we will always remain.

To examine the Lavender Scare alongside today’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies is to understand how fear is rarely about facts. It is instead about power: who wields it, who fears losing it, and how that fear becomes weaponized against the vulnerable. In modern and historical examples, Queerness is framed as a contagion, a corruption, and a threat to national cohesion. The state asserts its right to determine which lives are legitimate, which type of love is safe, and which bodies are welcome.

But where history wounds, it also teaches. And what it teaches Queer communities is that solidarity is stronger than fear. The joy of a drag performance can silence shame. The underground ballrooms can outlive boardrooms. Love, especially when forbidden, teaches resilience like no other force.

In many ways, the United States is still reckoning with the Cold War’s ideological leftovers—its obsession with conformity, its distrust of difference, and its fantasies of moral purity. Queer liberation disrupts all of that. It says: The future does not belong to those who fear change. It belongs to those who are the change.

The ghosts of the Lavender Scare may be deep behind us, lurking in history, but we are no longer afraid of those ghosts. We call them by name now. We’ve read their files, recovered their stories, mourned their silences. And we’ve learned that the state cannot erase what our community insists on remembering.

Today’s battles are not repeats; they are remixes. We fight with more tools, more voices, more history. Every pride march is a funeral and a birth, a prayer and a protest. Every Queer child reading Fun Home, Stone Butch Blues, Gender Queer, Orlando, Tipping the Velvet, or The Price of Salt in secret is a rebellion. Every drag queen in the Deep South is an archive. Every Trans person surviving in a hostile town is a revolution.

We honor the past by refusing to repeat it.

And we build the future by dreaming beyond it.

Because if history has taught us anything, it’s this:

Queer joy is not a side effect of resistance. It is resistance. And it’s how we win.

Flying Your Own Freak Flag

Words by William J. O’Brien

How a Unicycle Drill Team Taught Me to Stay Upright, Stand Out, and Become Myself

There’s no casual way to bring up that I was part of a traveling unicycle drill team as a kid in the 1980s in rural Northeast Ohio. To make it sound even more like a tall tale, the St. Helen’s Unicycle Drill Team is based in Newbury, close to Novelty, a small town just east of Cleveland.

It’s one of my back-pocket party tricks. It always lands like a punchline, usually followed by awkward silence, disbelief, fascination, and then me fumbling through my phone for photographic evidence.

Fiction or not, the St. Helen’s Unicycle Drill Team was, and still is, very real. But as a young pre-teen Queer kid growing up in a conservative place, it was deadly serious: yellow-and-black V-neck uniforms,

choreographed routines set to Neil Diamond’s “America,” and long road trips with minimal adult supervision, stopping at rest areas across Pennsylvania and Ohio.

It was the perfect marriage of my athletic side—dying to be the next Mary Lou Retton, doing backflips off homemade jungle gyms—and my less permissible feminine side that danced and listened to Neneh Cherry, quietly rapping to “Buffalo Stance” in the back of bedroom closets. While most parents signed their kids up for sports, mine enrolled us in the intricate, demanding art of balancing on a single wheel. Or, as I like to say: I was raised to be a circus freak in the most empowering way.

Early imprints shape us. The difference between embracing or shaming a child for

WILLIAM J. O’BRIEN

something eccentric can leave a lasting mark. I did not even realize I was different until the world around me, as it does for so many of us, felt entitled to give constant feedback on the “right” and “wrong” ways to express a Queer spirit. If you grew up anywhere outside a city and had the courage to leave, chances are you left because you didn’t want to meet the expectations of that place—or couldn’t.

and to later carry those same knees as an adult, sliding across Queer club dance floors with defiance and joy.

Queer joy is a public battlefield right now. Our individual expression and joy come from the bravery to listen to ourselves and resist the rules of the binary. The tension between expectation and survival for any young Femme Queer kid in rural America is very real. Most of us learned to hide our hand gestures or secret hobbies just to stay safe. And if we were lucky enough to make it out, we were only allowed to let those parts of ourselves flourish later. Now the culture is shifting again, and I find myself thinking about—and frankly worrying about—those rural alterna-kids. Especially the ones hiding in terror, afraid of being found out. Or worse: playing the role of the straight guy or girl getting married, then later sneaking off to Queer bars during business trips to the city.

Performing on a unicycle was an early form of living drag. It was an analogy for resilience. To keep going after being knocked down again and again, you had to try and dust yourself off and keep riding, no matter the feedback from the crowd.

Most often, it was shock, praise, or taunts. But sometimes, it was genuine fear.

My rekindled love affair with the unicycle began over a decade ago on my fortieth birthday, when my boyfriend—an unapologetic fan of the absurd—surprised me with one. It was the perfect gift: a ridiculous object that made space for me to reconnect with parts of myself I had forgotten or thought I’d lost. Of course, now that I’m nearing fifty, my body can still ride, but my crotch doesn’t fare as well in the saddle as it did when I was twelve, sporting an asymmetrical skater haircut.

As I look at the person staring back at me in the mirror, and count the gray hairs, I’ve been trying to stitch together the version of myself I used to be with who I am now. Deep down, I still feel like that kid in the New Order Substance T-shirt, riding a ten-foothigh unicycle through town with a crooked bowl cut.

Learning to balance on one wheel, then ride with confidence, is no small feat. It requires dedication, a little delusion, and the kind of weird hilarity all of us need right now to offset the darkness unfolding around us. The first steps require the courage to look both ridiculous and radiant. As a preteen, it meant leaning against the Kelly Irish green cement walls of St. Helen’s gym for support. To lean into my fear, to take small steps, to fall down, and to try again were all strong similarities to what I now understand as Queer empowerment. It was a determination to be tested, to fall repeatedly, to skin our knees on gym floors,

Some would say I ran from the place I grew up. Maybe I did. But I also miss certain parts of it—namely, the innate comfort I once felt being myself without the constant pressure to conform.

That sensibility has come in handy lately, as we face a wave of so-called normalcy and a return to conservatism. A culture that thrives on the belief that anything different is wrong and should be erased from view, especially Queer joy and happiness.

As I get older, l’ve returned to the activities of my childhood that once made me feel free. Maybe out of desperation to avoid confronting my own mortality, or the limitations of my body. I know that it’s not just out of nostalgia; a series of traumatic life events left me needing something to bridge the darkness with joy.

It’s also a form of rebellion. A refusal to quietly bow out, fold up my mat, and start aging “gracefully.” Instead, I’m chasing the feeling of freedom again. I’m trying to reclaim the version of myself that once felt most like me, refusing to let him disappear. The same freedoms that people keep trying to reclaim or rebrand are not what they

appear. Our basic civil rights and liberties have been stripped into a limited, stale, and bland version of Americana. I believe it is time to recover that sense of freedom for ourselves again, the kind that is lived in the body and not borrowed from anyone else’s definition.

Sometimes healing shows up in unexpected forms. Sometimes you take tap dancing lessons to become a better painter. Sometimes riding a unicycle—or relearning how to—can help bridge childhood trauma. It can reconnect you to what once felt safe and joyful.

Whether it’s nostalgia or a textbook midlife crisis, I believe there’s value in mining the past. It can help you link the brighter threads of where you came from with who you’ve become.

What I’ve discovered, revisiting the painful parts of my childhood with a genuine desire to heal, is that I needed something somatic and positive to bridge the past and the future. The unicycle became that bridge: a playful, physical memory I could reclaim as safe. Something to help me move forward.

Sometimes we have to lean into the things we were once told to hide. We pretend, we exaggerate, and we revive the parts of ourselves that feel dormant in order to regain and relearn the parts of our past that were viewed as negative. The things we were told were shameful. The clothes we liked to wear. The hobbies we genuinely cared about but were told weren’t meant for our gender.

The camaraderie and teamwork of the Unicycle Drill Team became training for what resilience looks like now. The high school kids at the back of our traveling seventies bus played Joan Jett on mixed cassette tapes as we dozed against one another’s shoulders, riding through the night from venue to venue, sleeping on church gym floors. Those same shoulders linked together on parade routes, steadying us through summer heat and keeping us upright as a single unit. I now see that same need for support in our Queer households, where we need to lean into one another when we no longer feel strong enough to stand alone.

There remains a deep well of pain and complication from my childhood in Ohio. Much of it centers on my relationship with my father, the expectations of conservatism and religion, and the weight of being the firstborn son in a working-class family who happened to grow into a Queer identity. But I’m trying to lean into the good memories, especially now, as a way to ground myself and regain the confidence to stand on my own. Looking back, I think being part of a renegade group of teenage misfits gave me something rare in rural, conservative Ohio: permission to be myself as a Queer kid.

Yes, I learned movement from unicycling. But more than that, I learned how to give myself permission to be a confident, unapologetic weirdo. That training would become foundational to my life as an artist, the early pairing of body awareness and theatrical risk teaching me to break the rules, trust my instincts, and take up space, even when I didn’t feel welcome.

Muscle memory becomes our magical Queer strength. For me, it was embedded early on as I rode playfully in clown makeup, skipping rope and jumping ramps to the songs of 10,000 Maniacs, performing for senior citizens in Midwestern parking lots.

Finding comfort in your voice isn’t easy for anyone—regardless if you were taught to flip off a bar or jump rope while riding a unicycle, or not.

For many Queer kids, there is no real choice. You either learn to hide all the wonderful, uncontainable parts of yourself just to survive, or you go the punk route: dyed hair, black eyeliner, vintage thrift rebellion.

My hope is that in our collective Queer communities, we continue to mine and reclaim the dormant parts of ourselves that were tucked away in shame. That we learn to see them not as weakness, but as the kind of strength that helps us stand tall with confidence, walk the parade route without fear, and reconnect with what makes us great—our bold, different nature as Queer unicorns.

Art by Mausoliere

the last free skate

Words and Photos

by Maya Vasquez

this photo series was taken in the Sonoran desert on the last day of july, 2024 in 103ºF heat in the Slab City skate park. Slab City, also known as “the last free place on earth,” is a community of off-the-grid artists, weirdos, and creatives living in one of the most beautiful deserts in the world— with no access to water services or the main electrical grid and 30 miles from the nearest hospital. both the community and its art are created through and maintained by the oppressive desert climate. i attempted to convey this through the quality of the photos themselves and visually capture the effects of the heat on the space. the concept of Slab City is rooted in the concept of repair, specifically the idea that outcasts and drifters can mold and shape society, reborn in the desert as their idealized version. there is a camaraderie among these slabbies, even those not looking to build it but simply trying to be safe and free. but beyond its ethos, the whole “city”—especially the skate park—is a space of physical repair as well. Slab City was formerly an artillery training base for the marines; the steep curves of the skate park’s walls were once the sides of an olympicsized swimming pool. so many pieces of the landscape are repaired and repurposed for a new life: old rusted-out vans become seating for people around the edges of the park; scrap wood is transformed into ramps scattered across the floor of the pool; old, rusted bedsprings tangle with tree stumps to offer a little bit of shade. everything here is in a constant state of flux, of repair and repurpose, from its quirky physical features to the unique individuals who call it home.

Words and Art by Míša Štorková

By exploring LGBTQIA+ history of the First Czechoslovak Republic during the Interwar Years (1918–1938), the series Zapomenutý Hlas [A Forgotten Voice] brings to light the inherent existence of Queerness across time and place. Queerness is a concept which is often considered alien to Eastern Europe, as within these countries, acceptance is considered a “Western” concept infringing on Slavic cultures. This homophobia commonly leads LGBTQIA+ Eastern-European immigrants in the west to feel isolated from Queerness and/or cultural background. The First Czechoslovak Republic saw the publication of the first explicitly-Queer Czech and Slovak magazines, novels, and art. However, the subsequent rise of the Nazi and Soviet regimes immediately following the Interwar Years led to the destruction, banning, and censorship of records, and a decades-long crackdown on Queer culture. In this body of work, surviving archival images and texts are the basis for new creative pieces, transforming a largely lost history into contemporary artworks.

ZAPOMENUTÝ HLAS [A FORGOTTEN VOICE]

These pieces consist of unbound textile pages featuring significant figures and texts from the early Czechoslovak Queer liberation movement. The image Lída Merlínová contains a portrait of the key Lesbian figure of the same name in the 1920s and ’30s fight for Queer emancipation in the First Czechoslovak Republic. Hlas Přírody [The Voice of Nature] draws text from the eponymous Queer magazine from the 1930s in the First Czechoslovak Republic, which fought for legal rights for Trans and Gay individuals. In these pieces, cyanotype is used for image transfer, referencing the historic photographic practices of the time. Mediums such as these would have been used to originally print these texts and visuals of Queer liberation in the 1920s and 1930s. Erotické Povídky o Láskách Absurdních [Erotic Stories of an Absurd Love] uses an illustration from the text by the same name, an explicitly Gay book of erotic short stories published by Lída Merlínová in 1933. In this piece, I replicate an illustration in low-contrast, white-on-white hand stitching to mimic the ways that this text has been hidden and suppressed. The scrappy and unfinished nature of these pieces, with many loose threads and raw edges, showcase how little is known about these people.

Textile mediums are reminiscent of folk-art practices, which are typically underrepresented in the art-historical canon due to their association with women and the working class. This omission mirrors the ways that Queer history is lost over time. In some of my pieces in this series, Slavic folk-art designs and motifs are explicitly used to cement the existence of Queerness within Czech and Slovak history. These patterns are stitched into the fabric to showcase how interconnected Queerness is to cultural identity. The use of textile and a primarily neutral color palette highlights the ephemeral nature of a suppressed history; the choice to quilt white-on-white means that the imagery is not immediately apparent to the viewer due to low visual contrast. Works must be closely examined in order to see the details, mimicking the exertion it takes to find information about this suppressed history.

Overall, this series takes archival imagery and text from the Queer liberation movement of the interwar First Czechoslovak Republic. Through the transferral of these images using stitching and cyanotype, they are abstracted and reclaimed. This aims to reconcile both my own relationship to my immigrant and Queer identities, as well as a cultural repair of my peoples’ histories which have been so violently suppressed.

MayaArtbyVasquez

Words and Art by Car Aldana HANDMADE

When conceiving Handmade, my intention was to express a deliberate creation and a committed repair of the body. In this work, I drew with an oil paint stick across a spread of cotton bodily adhesive pieces. This tape was first adhered to a body, is now adhered to a canvas board, and is used by many Transgender people to temporarily modify their bodies, through methods such as binding and tucking, to better reflect their gender identities. The adhesive’s material resemblance to a bandage evokes themes of repair, healing, and growth, both physical and emotional, as it fills the figure’s body and covers the canvas. I have permitted the viewer a glimpse at the figure’s back, but not the physical results of their bodily repair efforts, nor the figure’s identity. In this way, Handmade seeks to challenge notions of visibility and presentation in repair and identity.

A Mirror Love

Words by Eli Langfere

Photos by Anna Franzen

Although this is an account of real events, details have been concealed to protect the identities of those involved.

A square of glass remains from the pandemic. In it is my reflection. Behind the glass, beyond the school style desks of each member of the court, is a television screen. My reflection is bisected by the edge of the screen, so I see half my face reflected on the right, and on the left, the television. Footage of her police interview begins. The room is small, the camera is angled from slightly above, she speaks of sexual violence. She is casual, and laughs often. The poor quality of the court’s speakers screech under the weight of her laughter. It is an alien and garish sound against the white walls, and wigs, and wooden tables, surrounded by black gowns. The laughter does not say I am scared, or I am ashamed. It says, I am not the one who needs to be embarrassed here.

But this is not the story that I am telling. Here is the story: The perpetrator of sexual violence is just like me. They are a Dyke. Short hair, soft body, tattoos. Their legal representation has encouraged them to wear feminine clothes. Do they think Butch will scare the jury? Looking at them like this turns my gut cold. When we make eye contact, they look embarrassed. One Dyke

is always aware when another enters the room, and this is no exception.

Rosi Braidotti writes that the body is a threshold of material and symbolic forces.1 The body is not essential, not an anatomical destiny, but a construction subject to the culture which transforms it. Despite this, the body is one’s location in the world, one’s primary situation in reality. In light of the body, the self is something which has been assembled both physiologically and symbolically. In this context, trauma is a forceful reassembling of the self.

The Dyke sits in femme clothes, and is forcefully reassembled. Institution has collided with their body, but has not quite transformed them. The automatic and undeniable nature of their masculinity is clarified as the days in court go by, and they soon return to masculine clothing. Their Butchness, their primary situation in reality, cannot be quieted or denied.

When I hear them speak, it is like a reflection. They are the thing that remained on shore when childhood was swept away to sea. They plummeted into water, swimming towards adolescence and

somehow, adulthood. Their watery gasps are a song on absent fathers. Long story short, their father was a dread more than a horror. I know the pains they speak of in court. I see their life unfolding beneath the surface of their words, feel the way they reached for lovers in the quiet discomfort and loneliness of neglect. The lovers see their boyishness; the way they walk, cross their arms, touch their fresh cut hair. The Dyke believes that these women love them not because of their Butchness, but despite it. This shame burrows deep in them, slouches their shoulders, lowers their head. They are pinned in the crosshairs of Butch Transsexualism, and working class experience, and violent men. Their Dykehood manifests as the collision of these symbolic aggressions, and Butch corporeal realities.

I fall asleep listening to a fox bark. I dream of a lurcher breathing heavily from a run, staring at me with his chestnut brown eyes. They are as dark as that of the defendant.

They only feel like themself when they fuck a woman. They don’t say this aloud. They don’t need to tell me. When they top, they are no longer the physical repository for violence. Instead, it is their body that articulates power. The aligning of their material self with an assertion of power, rather than pain, feels like relief. It’s a gentle power. The relief that floods their body is as soft and reassuring as the woman underneath them.

There are multiple occasions in which they consensually strap a woman who believes them to be a ‘man’. She believes she is being penetrated by flesh, but in reality, she is being penetrated by silicone. The perpetrator—because now, the Dyke is a perpetrator—is probably not aware at this point in time that this is sexual assault by penetration with an unknown object.

During the weekend of the trial, I go to the countryside with Mum. It is early summer. The bird songs and insect wings are loud. I smell new blossoms, and cow parsley. On Monday, the verdict will be decided. It is their last weekend of freedom. Just beyond where I can see, into the dense foliage and tall grass and green woodland, there are beating hearts hidden in furred animals, and I am thinking about freedom. At night,

I call this week the week from hell. I see the hell dog in town this week. There are no flames, he is not bloody. He is just a normal, polite young man. He looks at me blankly, only a shimmer of recognition in his blue eyes. He has not seen me since I was a young teenager. The last he heard of me was from a police officer. She asked him questions, quoting my graphic account of his rape as plainly as the barristers in court have been discussing in the Dyke’s trial. I cannot stop thinking that it could have been me on the screen, me on the witness stand, him sitting next to the security guard, both of us judged as equals by my group of twelve strangers. I am stuck in their time loop, and stuck in my own too, and in that court room, up and down the stairs to court, in and out of the waiting rooms, a witness sat at my table, looking at my notes, considering the innocence of this rapist, I cannot help but think that there is a good chance that they are innocent. My stomach churns that many would have thought that about my own rapist.

Why can’t I stop telling this story? My rapist is not mine, and yet I fear he will always be mine. On his first novel, James Baldwin wrote that before anything else, he had to deal with what hurt him most: his father.2 How many times will I deal with my father, how many times will I deal with my rapist, how many times will I deal with violent men? When will they be rung out of me? How do I reassemble myself? How do I reassemble you, Dyke? As scarred as I am, as you are, by these strange men, don’t you know what you did to her? Did you reassemble her precisely because you know how it feels? I hate you for your violation, I hate you for the men that have violated me. I hate how much I understand you. That loneliness that made you want for any kind of desperate power. I hate the way that detective looks at you in court, I want to put my body in front of yours. I am so angry at you, but when I look at you, I think, iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou.

2 Leslie Bennetts, “James Baldwin Reflects on ‘Go Tell It’ PBS Film” The New York Times, January 10, 1985. https://www. nytimes.com/1985/01/10/books/james-baldwin-reflects-on-go-tell-it-pbs-film.html.

A MIRROR LOVE

Today I went to the beach and sat on a hill with my mum. We watch, below on the sand, two little girls playing. They boost their bodies up onto the cement wall of the boardwalk, and from there, leap into the sand. Like cubs tumbling sexlessly around, learning to maw and roll and bite. Shuffling on their butts, making lines through golden, sea-stained earth. Short shorts and sandy shins and bare legs in the sun. They have not yet learnt shame for their bodies or fear of strangers. I wonder what freedom is for a baby Dyke with a violent dad and no love. No love in the whole world. I wonder who we get to empathise with and why, and I think, no, you’re not so hard to understand at all, are you?

bubbles towards their melancholy, popping quietly on the glass of the defendant’s area before it reaches them. The security guard is a Butch Dyke too. Sometimes we make eye contact and are heartbroken. I am reassembling all my pieces, I am thinking about freedom.

My rapist will never see a day in court. This Dyke used silicone instead of flesh, and here they are. In court, I stare at them for all the times I have been too ashamed to look a Butch in the eye, in case they see my desire. I stare, and my love floats in great

Dykehood walks alongside all my traumatic memories. My Queerness is a mirror in which I see you. My Queerness is a mirror in which I see the woman who put her body beneath yours, and trusted you, just as I have trusted. I’m unsure how to locate Queerness within the realm of healing, and not just in the realm of trauma. At the moment, I have settled on this: I think about you so often, it’s as though I miss you.

Art by M Alzamora

think therefore i am

Words and Art by Amanda Zhu

i think therefore i am compounds the ins and outs of dysregulation, warping the soul’s perception, and the struggle of returning to oneself and reality. In Adventure Time Season 8, Episode 2 (“Don’t Look”), Finn the Human is cursed with “hermit eyes,” causing him to inadvertently transform everyone he sees into how he perceives them. Jake the Dog turns into a jock big brother, BMO turns into an angel, and Finn accidentally turns their robot friend, Neptr, into a non-sentient microwave. Finn freaks out about warping Neptr out of existence, and his internal dialogue becomes negative. When he looks in the mirror, he transforms into a monster.

Anxiety and depression have similar qualities of transforming self-perception. During panic attacks, the brain is put in a defensive fight-or-flight survival mode. The human body is replaced with that of a rabid, cornered dog—a creature made angry out of habit. If this experience resonates with you, you know how quickly the mind can turn on itself, how being aware of this process makes it all the more frustrating. You know both that the source of your behavior is legitimate and that the behavior itself is disproportionate, the cognitive dissonance of feeling simultaneously valid and irrational, making the cycle even harder to exit. Like Finn, negative feelings of shame, anger, frustration, and guilt arise. In this headspace, it’s easy to think the worst of yourself and the world, so it becomes your reality.

Across both ends of the emotional regulation spectrum, to believe is to become. There is no arbitrary, one-time, or aesthetic fix for a body at war with itself, but the constancy of self-discovery keeps the soul within arm’s reach. This form of repair can be laborious and cyclical. At my most dysregulated, I take on a form that once served me but no longer does. Still, I roll up my sleeves and reach into the depths of my head to offer a hand to my inner child. I cry out every feeling until I worry about mold growing in the wet floorboards of my brain. I remind myself that the world is still spinning and of where my feet are planted. Grounding myself in my breath, body, and surroundings reveals my human reflection, but it is a slow, fatiguing, and deliberate process.

Art by Jamilé

Heartstopper vs. the Real World

The summer of 2022 is a blur in my memories, a haze of heat that my brain largely refuses to return to. I was 21 and living at home for the summer after a horrible semester filled with health complications. I was still closeted, except for a few close friends and siblings, and still deeply insecure in my Queerness because of my intensely catholic upbringing. My clearest memory of that summer is some offhand commentary from my mom about a Gay man she didn’t know, “How sad it is that he’s gay. How he’ll never know real love. What could have happened to make him like that, what sort of trauma he experienced.” I remember the static that filled my ears as I walked away—the numbness I felt petting my dog to self sooth.

Heartstopper was one of the first pieces of Queer media that I truly let myself enjoy. I rewatched the first season more times than I could count that summer, read all the comics, and played the soundtrack on repeat. At that point in my life, in that environment, watching a show that centered Queer Joy felt revolutionary. After my mom’s remarks, I wanted to cut myself so badly, but instead I got on her exercise bike and pedaled hard while watching Heartstopper. I still ended up cutting myself a few weeks later. The show and characters could offer me comfort but not healing. It didn’t take me out of my homophobic house, but it showed me a different way of being, and that was an enormous first step. I was raised to believe that to be Queer was to suffer, and until recently, popular media reinforced that idea. The “Bury Your Gays” trope—where romantic samegender couples are punished or killed—has deep rootes going back to 19th-century literature when writers depicting same-sex love had to end those stories in tragedy to avoid persecution. That pattern became a

Words by Tess Conner

storytelling shorthand that equated Queer identity with tragedy, which carried through Hollywood’s Hays Code era. The trope is alive and well, appearing in series from Degrassi to Killing Eve, even when such tragic endings are no longer mandated as the cultural standard.

“Tenderqueer” (a Queer cultural aesthetic centering softness, vulnerability, emotional expression, popularized on tumblr in 2010) media has recently risen in popularity with Hearstopper being one of the more popular examples. Heartstopper has been widely praised for subverting harmful tropes and affirming Queer relationships through heartfelt tenderness instead of tragedy. As much as I believe Queer people deserve fluffy, happy representation, it is not above critique and should not be the only media we consume.

Heartstopper will always be an incredibly important piece of media for me, and I don’t want to downplay the positive impact it has made. But the show is held back from being truly radical by the way it glosses over the lived realities of being Queer. Societal issues depicted in the show are often given a cursory acknowledgement but are not as deeply explored as they could be—particularly regarding the non-white secondary characters. Nick and Charlie are the main couple, so they are (of course) given more time to sit in their emotional vulnerability and explore the nuances of their lived experience. They are also white cis men (...er, boys?). While there is a multiplicity of Queerness represented in Heartstopper, it is part of a larger pattern where shows featuring white cis gays, especially men, are more prioritized and less likely to be canceled.

In season one, we watch Nick’s “proper full on Gay crisis” develop throughout eight episodes, and his friendship with Tara and

TESS CONNER

Darcy is instrumental in his confidence and understanding of his own sexuality. A Bi man being inspired to explore his identity by two Lesbians kissing is a Queer dynamic that is rarely portrayed. At the same time, while Tara has difficulty coming out as a Lesbian, we only get to focus on her struggle for one episode, and there is no acknowledgement of the unique difficulties that come with being a Black Femme Lesbian. There are hints at her struggle of defying the norms and societal expectations placed on her, but she is not offered the same screen time given to Nick to process the same level of nuance in her emotions.

Similarly, Elle mentions that she was bullied at Truham for being Trans, but the long term impact of that is never considered in the way that Charlie’s bullying is. Elle transfers to Higgs, the all-girls school connected to Truham, and suddenly doesn’t experience any transphobia, despite there being overlap in the students there and the groups that bullied her. Racism also seemingly doesn’t exist, as even the characters who are homophobic and transphobic give no indication of these biases. Of course, I’m not eager to watch these teenagers face more oppression, but when the intersections of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny are explored, the lack of acknowledgement to white supremacy is noticeable. I am a white American, and I am not an expert on the racial politics of Kent, England, but the show seems to take a “colorblind” approach. These limitations can arguably be considered a result of short seasons (as they can only touch on so much in eight episodes), but it is clear the representation on screen is not matched with an equally diverse writer’s room. White cis male

characters are seen as the default that anyone can project onto, somehow more “universal” than characters of color. Queer people of color equally deserve to see their full dimensional selves represented, rather than to be relegated as side characters.

Following the infamous aforementioned summer of 2022, I headed into my last year of college and realized I had not been living.

I felt like I had wasted essential years of my life because I was too afraid to break out of my catholic bubble. So I said “fuck it.” I stopped going to church, cut my hair, kissed a girl at a Lesbian bar—and that was all by October.

I spent my 22nd birthday drinking shitty wine and eating charcuterie with my best friend, watching Pride (2014) on the floor of my dorm. After graduating in May of 2023, I found myself living at home for the summer once again and hiding my sexuality from my parents—though it felt even more stifling and anxiety inducing. There were several times I almost just blurted it out. I decided to make a plan with my therapist, and come out via email after I moved out.

I purposefully sent The Email the night before Heartstopper season two aired, so I could spend the following day watching it as a reward and comfort to myself for being brave. My mom called me that evening, and

I let it go to voice-mail. When I eventually listened to her message, I heard her tell me that she and my dad both loved me and that “nothing changes.” She said, “I would’ve hoped that you’d already know that.” Her tone was overly sweet and passive aggressive, “I’m surprised you didn’t… I’m sorry you doubted that.” This was honestly about as good of an outcome as I could’ve expected, but it still left a bitter taste in my mouth. I compared it to Nick coming out to his mum at the end of season one and the way she said “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you couldn’t tell me that.” And I knew that I deserved better. Maybe that’s an idealistic scene, but I believe that Queer people deserve better than their current reality. I did go on to have some productive conversations with my parents and things have been better. At the very least, any tension between us is now held by them instead of me. Anyway, several hour-long, awkward conversations do not make good television.

Much like in my own life, season two shows the characters becoming more confident in themselves and their identities, but grappling with more difficult issues at the same time. Charlie’s mental health struggles and difficulty around food ramp up, as does Nick’s anxiety. The audience is also given more back story for side characters like Tao and Darcy, who were largely comedic relief in the first season and somewhat emotionally immature. For the first time, we see that Darcy has a difficult home life because of a homophobic and verbally abusive mother. This all culminates when they run away from home and spend a night on the street.

These are very real issues that Queer youth face, and there is something incredibly comforting about watching the characters struggle together, cry together,

and support each other. The key problem is how quickly their struggles are glossed over and seemingly resolved. Darcy spends a night on their own but then is immediately brought back into the safe embrace of their friends, with warm mood lighting and Taylor Swift playing in the background. We do not actually hear the majority of the cruel comments made by Darcy’s mum, whose toxicity is represented by animated purple smoke. Similarly, anxiety and overwhelm are portrayed by animated black scribbles, as are Charlie’s past bullies. The show uses animation as a nod to its webtoon origins, which adds to the lighthearted feel of the show, but it can feel like it is taking away from the seriousness of what the characters are facing. In some ways, it also feels like a shortcut that undermines the actors’ abilities to portray these heavy topics. It is difficult to balance between showing an honest depiction of teenagehood and sensationalizing triggering subject matters like media has done in the past (13 Reasons Why being another Netflix show that is an infamous example of this). Heartstopper clearly errs on the side of caution, but this can flatten complicated situations and dynamics. The pace of the series doesn’t depict how slow and uncomfortable healing can be, and audiences are robbed of true restorative moments for certain characters. When the movie Heartstopper Forever comes out, I will be sat. I’m certain I will rewatch it several times and cry through most of it. But in the meantime, I’m going to be engaging with other Queer media that shows a multiplicity of experiences and identities—reading books, following indie creatives, and interacting with my local community. Supporting my friends and finding new ways to stand up against facism.

I Listened to Mitski Until I Felt Sick…Then I Did it Again

Words by Kayla Thompson

Since I was young I have always been that girl with more feelings and bigger emotions than she knows what to do with: tears spilling over my eyelashes at the slightest provocation, choking up over absolutely nothing in the grocery store.

I was not born into a family that was inclined to vulnerability. We mostly did not cry in front of each other. We certainly never discussed our feelings. Our lives were one loss after another, taking hit after hit without a minute to just breathe. We were constantly trying to claw ourselves out of the darkness, quietly, alone, and always falling down deeper. All of us pent up and buried. Every emotion became explosive.

Later in life, I would be able to name this as growing up in, and being surrounded by, complete emotional dysregulation. But all I knew then was that I was primarily alone with the cornfields and my tortured, angst-riveted, circuitous thoughts.

KAYLA THOMPSON

With little else to do in a town whose biggest attractions were skating rinks, I gravitated toward music. My mom raised me on sound, her collections of CDs in towering stacks in the living room. I loved the reverberation of beat through the surround sound speakers; the movement that music inspired. Our family’s feet pressed indentations in the carpet as we danced around the coffee table, if we were feeling particularly festive.

Listening to music was a blissful full-body experience. Every note and every melody moved me, genuinely. The artists I loved gave vocalization to the maelstrom of feelings that I did my best to suppress. By the time I was a teenager, my daily life was a project of locking vast swaths of myself away every day, somewhere deep in my body’s recesses, trying to keep them under wraps as I’d been implicitly taught to do. Listening to things put so plainly and unashamedly in music left me electric and free for short stints of time. I became obsessed with the many different ways a song could lift me up and make me visible.

Like everything though, the soaring and euphoric freedom I found in music had a flipside; even as a song made me feel illuminated, unalone, even as it drew me in, it could also plunge me further into the depths of myself.

I first discovered Mitski through a friend at my seasonal summer job in 2020. Although Be the Cowboy had been released two years prior, “Nobody” was only then beginning to gain popularity after blowing up on tik tok. That’s when it made its way onto our summer work soundtrack. I hated “Nobody,” but was curious about her other work, which is when “Francis Forever” entered the picture.

From the first line, I was hooked: “I don’t know what to do without you.” It was so honest, so bare. I felt it to the very core of what—of who—I am.

After that, I listened to Bury Me at Makeout Creek obsessively before moving on to Retired From Sad, New Career in Business and Puberty 2. With each listen—with each new song—I discovered more, and I spiraled deeper. The further I moved into and through her discography, the further I retreated into myself. You do not lay in bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling and crying while listening to a looped playlist of “I Want You,” “Francis Forever,” “Class of 2013,” “Fireworks,” “Geyser,” “First Love/Late Spring,” and “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” and emerge unscathed. I spent that summer dazed. Lost in the labyrinthine channels of my own mind. I would not find my way out for many years.

I did not find the courage to commit to, and invest in, therapy until the summer of 2022. When my therapist and I were breaking up in the spring of 2023, we talked at length about the progress I’d made over the previous ten months.

Our last session was a painful postmortem of our therapeutic relationship. The reality was that we didn’t want to part—or at least I didn’t want to part from her—but I was losing her to another practice that didn’t take my insurance. Before the hour was up, I could already feel the panic clawing at my edges, worming its way back inside of me. I didn’t understand what I would do without her. How could I possibly keep going alone?

Staring down the barrel of our final fifty minutes together, the lyrics began ringing in my ears again. I felt like I was standing in the bathroom, looking at my own devastation in the mirror, listening to “Francis Forever” as tears ran down my cheeks:

Photo by Anna Franzen

Francis Forever

“I don’t know what to do without you I don’t know where to put my hands I’ve been trying to lay my head down But I’m writing this at 3AM”

sat be

Despite feeling like something was slowly crumbling away inside me, feeling like I was headed back into that constant freefall, I sat on zoom putting on a brave face. Per usual, she saw through the facade I erected: “It’s okay to be sad, Kayla,” she said. “This is the end of a very intimate relationship, and it’s okay to be upset.”

KAYLA THOMPSON

During that last conversation, as we discussed my various breakthroughs and growth, as we outlined a plan for how I would cope after she was gone, she said something else that I’ll never forget: “You can stand to be in your body now. Before, you couldn’t tolerate it.”

It was a problem we had talked and worked around: my lifelong need for constant distraction and my inability to sit with or feel an emotion. But she had never named it so explicitly, and neither had I. I didn’t realize though, at the time, as we worked through it, how deeply that inability ran. At least not while I was in it.

For most of my life, I had been putting myself into a near-constant dissociative state. Avoiding my every emotion and feeling through varying degrees of repression and distraction. I once watched the entirety of Game of Thrones over the course of five days. All eight seasons, 73 episodes, 70 hours and 14 minutes of it in one sitting, effectively numbing myself to the world for that stretch of time. Quieting my brain’s steady stream of thought by overlaying it with an even stronger surge of entertainment.

Once, at a party thrown by a friend of a friend, surrounded by strangers, I listened to a girl talk about how she had to stop listening to Mitski because listening to Mitski was like inviting suffering. Courting a negative headspace. It has been years now since those nights of laying in the dark and crying, or silently screaming the words to “Francis Forever” in the bathroom mirror, and I see it all very differently.

Although I once believed Mitski’s music was helping me to drive myself to rock bottom, I’ve come to understand it another way. I was not obsessed with her music because I wanted to suffer. I did not listen to it because I simply wanted to feel worse. Her music was the only way I could put myself firmly in my body then. I want to feel it, she sings in “I Bet on Losing Dogs.” And I did. I just wanted to feel it. Then, her music was the only way I could feel it.

I can’t fault myself or Mitski for that. Her music is not, and never will be, the problem. It has always carried me through, always returned me to myself, no matter how badly it hurt. I remember those earliest days of music: sound traveling down my body from head to toe, dancing with my family in the living room. Feeling present, alive. It has always been the way I find my footing. The way the light gets in.

It has been years now and I have learned that all pain is just suffering on its way to healing. That pain can be a sign of the good to come. You have to feel it first, feel something knitting itself back together, before it ever gets any better.

Recently, I went to Dyke Drag Night at Ginger’s Bar in Park Slope. During the second set, the first performance was a lip sync to Mitski’s “First Love / Late Spring.” When the opening note rang out, I immediately reached for my friend. Put my other hand over my heart. There are no words to describe how it feels: to have come this far, to have arrived here, to still feel this bad but, also, to feel so much better than I ever imagined I would.

I wanted to cry under the orange neon sign, the house lights low around us. My shoes stuck to the tacky floors and cigarette smoke blew in through the open door and everything was so brutal and lovely.

Instead of crying, I sang the lyrics quietly. I smiled. At the end of the show, I stepped out into another potential night. The rain had stopped and life went on. I got on the train back toward my apartment, and while I knew that there would still be pain, I understood suddenly that there would also be an endless amount of beauty after it. There will always be this constant unresolvable tension.

I try to be okay with that.

A Playlist for the End of the World

Words by Starly Lou Riggs

The year is 2016 and I’m crying on the L train. Tonight, I’m riding back to my Bushwick apartment near Myrtle Ave from the school I work at in East New York. Someone I hooked up with a few months ago gave me a sweet discount on some pink beats by dre, and I wear these sonic dream-weavers on my regular commute. Now, I’m drowning out the city sound because I had to leave my job—americorps doesn’t pay for shit—and I need to block out reality. I found another gig paying an actual living wage at a popular Norwegian bakery in Greenpoint. It’s disappointing that working part-time at a celebrity-renowned bakery in the gentrified pocket of the city pays more than working with elementary school kids from dawn to dusk. Over the sound of the train on track is Oddisee’s “After Thoughts,” drilling pointedly into the emotional center of my brain. I can’t hear my body sob, each sample repeating hits the movement, every synth riff twinkle lets the night of the city breathe with me.

Music is medicine. There is something deep within us that this sonic landscape speaks to. Why do we, as humans, tend to be so in tune with a whistle, a stomp, the vibration of a string? We feel it, even if we do not know how. Intrinsically, we are programmed with desires to shout, move, and play—and when a melody hits, most of us can sense it deep in our guts. It can bring relief in sharing with one’s grief, or it can bring sparkle to an eye—singing alone in a room to a hairbrush, or dancing in a club. In a society that pressures us to clam up and hold in our feelings—one that attempts to enforce some strict law on emotions—music is a beautiful instrument for letting loose and bringing people together.

Not long after that ride back to my New York apartment, I returned to Portland, Oregon. I wasn’t quite ready for the harshness of big city life at that time and I needed a reset. NYC was an incredible, gritty city that chewed me up and spit me back across the country. Since then, I have come to find that no matter what place I land in, I always fall directly into the music scene. Be it New York, Portland, Montréal, or São Paulo, I live and breathe the movement. And it’s not just the sound—more than anything, it’s about the people, movement, and the way music unifies us all as humans in this bizarre experience of existence. It brings joy, it relieves and validates our grief, it holds us close when we feel alone. In a world of constant decay, we can put on a track that hits.

Yes, the internet can seem like such a turbulent, soulless sinkhole. It can also bring those without access closer to their sought communities. AI is a capitalistic parasite, flooding social media, spotify, and other corners of the internet like some sludgey tar. It often feels we are in the midst of a mass societal collapse, and while it’s easy to feel stuck in the muck, in the end, there are still people here giving it their all to create.

With that, let’s celebrate the people who are making and will continue to make music for the love of it all. I like to keep my playlists diverse. After all, we have a wide range of emotions—from shouting off a cliff to dancing in a sweaty club. There’s just something special in knowing that others out there have the same capacity to feel it all too. Here is my playlist for you, dear reader, and anyone else who needs a little something to help heal, feel, or cartwheel to while the world burns:

Splendor Dysphoria - SuperKnova

Cartagena - Reyna Tropical

ASHO - La Valentina

Feelin' Fuzzy (毛绒绒的感觉) - Chinese American Bear

CPR - Wet Leg

PLAYBOi - Vana, Sophie Powers

Rust (feat. Tom Misch) - Yussef Dayes, Tom Misch

Petal Dance - gingerbee

Ripped Apart By Hands - Weatherday

If I Speak (Shut The Fuck Up) - Soul Glo

Time loop at hot slit - PISS

FAULT GOD - Kill Michael

My Own Dead - Black Ends

Replaceable Heads - Soko

The Reason I Could Sleep Forever - Scarlet Rae bones - hemlock

Feeling - Billie Marten

Words by Taylor Michael Simmons

“The body naturally moves towards healing.”

This is something my dear friend said to me. Supposedly she got it from EMDR therapy, which is the one with the tapping and the lights. I’m more of a traditional cognitive behavioral guy myself, but that’s really just because I have the incessant need to prove how smart I am to my therapist through my own psychoanalysis. And I think it’s true. The healing thing. When you get a cut there are things you can do to assist in the healing process. Like thoroughly cleaning the wound and putting on the appropriate bandage and maybe even adding some nondescript topical antibiotic ointment (no free ads). But you can also hinder the process. Anxiously picking at the wound or continuing to engage in the activities that led to the wound in the first place can slow your body’s attempts at healing. But, despite what actions you are consciously or subconsciously taking, your body is working on healing the cut either way. Now stop picking at it you freak.

There was a long list of movies I could have selected to review for this issue. Film history is littered with characters undergoing some degree of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. And for good reason. These movies make us, the viewers, feel good. We clutch our seats as beloved characters are confronted with overwhelming challenges and then we cheer as they subsequently overcome them. Watching our protagonists as they grow and develop and defeat both their internal and external demons provides us with a level of catharsis we may have difficulty finding in our real lives. We are all in need of some level of repair, and while our bodies will naturally move towards healing, why not help them along?

Scenes from a Marriage (1974) by Ingmar Bergman FRAME

My friends are getting married! And of course I’m excited for them, but I’m going to use this opportunity to make their monumental life event about me. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a romantic relationship that is not my own. And I’m single right now so, for better or worse, I’m living vicariously through them. I feel honored to get to observe their love so closely. They have become a model for what I want my future romantic relationships to look like. Since I don’t particularly aspire to the relationships found within my traditional family system, I have turned to my live-in surrogate Lesbian parents for inspiration. They are forging a new path and allowing me to follow in their footsteps, and I am grateful. They are Buzz Aldrin, stepping out onto the surface of the moon, taking an enormous risk on behalf of humanity. And I’m the other guy, watching from the safety of the lunar module. Sure, nobody will remember my name, but at least now I know going out there won’t kill me.

Something I have learned from my friends is the importance of the cycle of rupture and repair. Rupture refers to the disconnects that can happen in relationships: the misunderstandings, fights, and hurtful things we say and do. These things are a part of every relationship. We cannot totally prevent ourselves from harming one another. It’s human. And inevitable. What we can do is work to repair these ruptures and thereby strengthen the bonds we share with others. I often think of the Japanese art of kintsugi, wherein artists mend broken ceramics with gold, creating a stronger and more beautiful work of art than would have existed otherwise. Or those Thai boxers that kick trees as hard as they can, creating micro fractures in their shin bones that heal and strengthen their legs. My friend’s relationship is just like the leg of a Thai boxer. And I’m happy to watch them kick the tree.

In Scenes from a Marriage, Marrianne and Johan are a married couple being interviewed and photographed by a local magazine. The subject of their interview is their glowing relationship and apparent love for one another. They have been married for ten years, have two daughters, and have successful careers. From the outside, they have an ideal marriage. But of course that’s not the case, as nobody has a perfect relationship and even if they did that would be a pretty boring movie. After the publication of their interview, the pair have dinner with some friends to celebrate (a married couple who clearly despise each other and openly ridicule one another). This further strengthens Marrianne and Johan’s shared delusion about the quality of their marriage.

Or, perhaps, plants a seed of doubt? Maybe they can relate to all of the insecurities and resentments espoused by their dear friends. Or maybe they’ll just go on pretending otherwise. As the audience we are forced to watch the natural and gradual degradation of their relationship. And without the presence of repair, we watch as their marriage totally disintegrates. But not their love. Even after it all falls apart and despite the ongoing dysfunction of their relationships with each other and themselves, these two people still love each other. And there is some beauty in that. Now imagine what could have been with a little mutual effort and marriage counseling.

Initially released as a six-episode series for Swedish television in 1973, Scenes from a Marriage was later edited down to a more manageable 2 hour and 50 minute runtime to be released theatrically. I watched the theatrical version because I am a procrastinator and a coward. The series/film was written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, who is often considered one of the greatest directors to ever live. And like most acclaimed film directors, probably not a very good person. For example, he was a nazi as a child—an ideology he claimed to have abandoned in his adulthood. But that kinda feels like something that sticks with you. Like sure, maybe you stopped openly supporting fascism but you’re probably still an asshole. Anyway I’m sorry for recommending a movie made by a former nazi but, to be fair, it is pretty good.

The Parent Trap (1998) by Nancy Myers

I used to go to a christian bible camp every summer as a kid. Of course there were plenty of normal summer camp activities going on, like going for a swim in the lake, or playing capture the flag, even developing a little crush on someone you’d most likely never see again. But we also engaged in slightly more esoteric activities, like watching just the crucifixion scene from The Passion of the Christ in order to elicit the level of guilt necessary to gather around a campfire and publicly confess our sins to the big man upstairs. Luckily, I wasn’t a child of divorce and shouldering the burden of rekindling my parents’ love for one another. I could instead devote my time and energy to the ever-growing anxiety eating away at my core regarding the eternal fate of my soul. Maybe I would have been better off with divorced parents. (Initially this paragraph ended there but it has been brought to my attention that my take might be insensitive to the children of divorced parents community. Particularly those unlucky few who had to deal with having divorced parents AND debilitating anxiety disorders. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all you poor bastards. Sorry y’all. I heard your folks don’t love each other anymore and you get nervous sometimes, that sucks.)

Hallie and Annie are two young children of divorce who meet at a summer camp during an anonymous and very acrobatic fencing match. Their meeting is not unlike the many chance encounters that happen between children everyday in classrooms and playgrounds around the world. But what makes this encounter unique is that they look remarkably alike, identical even. Besides some piercings, differing hairstyles, and their respective nonregionally-specific accents. But despite their striking resemblance, they develop a bitter rivalry, engaging in an escalating series of malicious pranks against one another, ultimately resulting in their banishment to a remote cabin. It is here that, thanks to each possessing one half of the same photograph, they realize they share the same parents and are consequentially twin sisters. After basking in the gratitude of newly found sisterhood and longing to be reunited with the parents that abandoned them, the girls come up with a plan. They will alter their appearance, swap places, and assume each other’s identity. Actions that involve one of them fraudulently using the other’s passport to travel internationally, an act that I can only assume is a felony. But they’re willing to risk everything for the chance to spend some time with their parents and maybe even convince them to reunite in holy matrimony. ‘Cause nothing makes divorcees remember their love for another more than their kids pulling some manipulative bullshit.

The Parent Trap is a timeless classic. A film that I fondly associate with my childhood. I definitely watched it multiple times on VHS, probably in my grandparents’ playroom with a plate of goldfish and apple slices (shout out grandma). Maybe it was my naivety or general lack of understanding of filmmaking at large, but I truly believed that Hallie and Annie were played by two different actors. It wasn’t until later that I realized Lindsey Lohan played both roles and somehow was not nominated for an oscar. [Speaking of Lindsey, I’ve been seeing her a lot in those commercials that interrupt whatever movie or show you’re watching on your favorite unnamed streaming service. This is of course despite the fact that you’re already paying a subscription fee. But that’s simply not enough revenue for these faceless corporations and because there are only so many potential subscribers, they have to find other annoying ways to make more money because growth and profit is all that matters. And if they stop growing, they die. But as they grow, they just slowly kill the rest of us. Anyway, get the bag queen (Lindsey Lohan)! But also someone cast her in an actually interesting feature length film already, and no, Freakier Friday doesn’t count.] In an increasingly cynical world where everything seems to be going to shit and fascism is popular again, a lighthearted movie that makes you believe in love again can be quite soothing. It might even fix the hole left behind by your parents divorce, who knows?

The Beast (2023) by Bertrand Bonello

I feel like something is wrong with me. Maybe everyone does. Especially those of us dealing with mental health disorders or the short/long term effects of a single or series of trauma(s). I often wonder what it must be like to be an ordinary person with a regularly functioning brain. Like the people that drink michelob ultras at a rooftop bar after a long day at the office/running a marathon. People who can focus when they want to. Or remain calm in social settings. Or experience joy. And I’ve never been one of those people. I feel incomplete. Broken. In need of prying open and fixing. Like if I could just cure myself of my anxiety or depression or ADHD or unfathomably low self-esteem then I might be happy. But there is no cure-all for my afflictions. And even if there was, I’m sure I’d find something else to torment myself with. If I was somehow able to purge myself of everything ‘wrong’ with me then I simply would cease being human. Because life as a human being is inherently imperfect. And as it turns out the idea that there are “normal” people walking around living a life of all encompassing total happiness without any single flaw is a lie. There is nothing to fix. Everyone suffers, that’s the point. We suffer and we live anyway.

It’s the not-so-distant future and, ironically, artificial intelligence has saved humanity from the existential threat of climate change. In the process, we have been forced to give up control. The AI does not believe that humanity is capable of the rational thinking necessary for effective decision making. We are controlled by our emotions and therefore cannot be trusted. But there is an option for those of us who wish to lead a more productive life: Humans can subject themselves to a process of DNA purification by returning to past lives and reliving traumatic events. Gabrielle agrees to undergo this process, hoping to purge herself of her emotions and become eligible for more serious work. By returning to her previous lives she becomes aware of Louis, a fellow candidate and her apparent soulmate. First they meet in a Parisian salon in 1910 where she is an acclaimed pianist and married to a guy that owns a doll factory. He is an English expatriate who clearly wants her to cheat on her husband. When they meet in “modern day” 2044, both express their hesitation to further undergo purification and agree to stop for the time being.

Finally, the pair meet in 2014 Los Angeles in what is by far the most striking section of the film. Gabrielle is an aspiring actress, working as a model and commercial actor and partying late into the night while making some money house-sitting in a beautiful Hollywood Hills home. Louis is an incel. He is 30 years old and has never had a girlfriend. This is, of course, not his fault. He has very expensive sun glasses and a cool car. The problem must be with all women everywhere. Including Gabrielle. Who becomes the target of his misguided frustrations. Unsurprisingly, purifying ourselves of the very things that makes us human does not lead to a happy ending and instead towards a figurative, and sometimes literal, death. When we numb ourselves to pain, we alienate ourselves from an integral part of humanity, from ourselves, and from each other.

This film was inspired by a short story from 1903 titled “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James. In that story, the main character is possessed by the belief that his life will be defined by a single catastrophic event. This belief paralyzes him with fear, preventing him from pursuing a relationship with the woman he loves. As he grows older he realizes that the tragedy he feared was of his own making and that, while anxiously awaiting catastrophe, life had simply passed him by. In The Beast, Gabrielle shares a similar belief that some cataclysmic event lies in her future and that she is destined for destruction. I’m afraid that I see myself in these characters. So terrified of life that I refuse to ever actually live it. A self-fulfilling prophecy of fear and dissatisfaction.

Anyway this movie rocks.

Sorry, Baby (2025) by Ava Victor

I have been thinking about how life really sucks lately. It can be overwhelming being constantly inundated with the ongoing horrors. Thanks to the immediate and constant stream of information being beamed directly into our eyeballs, it has become so easy to doomspiral about the state of the world and our own lives. And the feelings of anxiety and helplessness are seemingly by design. A direct consequence of living in a techno-fascist hellscape wherein those in control of the information and the means of distributing it directly benefit from our paralysis. But some would argue this is the greatest time to be alive in human history, and they might be right. How can those beliefs be held simultaneously? There are numerous ongoing genocides, but also I can order any imaginable human comfort directly from my phone. But this feeling, the oscillation between the good and the bad is not new, it’s only been amplified and quickened. Contradiction is a fundamental reality of humanity. And, admittedly, it’s strange.

A bad thing has happened to Agnes. When Sorry, Baby begins we aren’t entirely sure what happened to her, but there are clues. Her old friend Lydie has come to visit. Together they do what old friends do: fall asleep watching old movies on the couch, eat sandwiches on the beach, and talk about how fundamentally weird sex with a man can be. Agnes is a newly tenured professor at the small college she once attended (the youngest in almost 50 years). She is a home owner, she has a cat. She seems to be thriving! But Lydie is worried about her. And we are too, though we aren’t sure why. The film flashes back to the pair’s grad school days and while Lydie is overwhelmed with the process of completing her thesis, Agnes seems to be navigating it with ease. She is the envy of her cohort and lauded as ‘extraordinary’ by her advisor. Increasingly we begin to fear the impending nature of the bad thing that happened to Agnes. And when it finally arrives it is horrifying. But the aftermath, which is also terrible, is infused with love and support and joy and laughter. Agnes does not have to deal with the bad thing alone. She can lean on her always supportive friend Lydie, who offers to commit acts of arson and even homicide should the need arise. Further support arrives in the form of an awkward but well meaning neighbor/lover, an old man who makes sandwiches and does box breathing, a little kitty cat, and a newborn baby.

This is Ava Victor’s directorial debut and it is beyond impressive. They masterfully walk a thin line between two diametrically opposed tones. Depicting the most harrowing of human experiences alongside the most joyous. She is able to craft sequences that would be at home in the most deeply unsettling of horror films and place them alongside some of the funniest moments I’ve seen this year. Many filmmakers have attempted to deal with the horrific reality of sexual assault and few have done so with the grace of Victor. A lesser filmmaker might force audiences to experience the assault alongside Agnes. But Victor seems to understand that, like the creature in a monster movie, something is even more terrifying when we can’t see it. If it lies at the edges of the frame, it somehow forces us to face the reality that this horrific thing often goes unseen and unnoticed and yet is happening all around us. But Victor also shows us that life goes on. And even though healing is not a linear endeavor, that healing comes nonetheless.

Natalia

Theodoridou Words by Elijah Buth

Words by Meg Streich threadbear Words and Art by Yvette Sin

A Warning is Not a Repair:

A Review of SourCherry by Natalia Theodoridou

Words by Elijah Buth Art by lil

Before reading Sour Cherry, I was assured in my belief that every retelling of a myth or folktale functions as its own form of repair: it offers a viewpoint otherwise discarded, or gives the reader an alternative ending. It is a promise of how something should go, rather than how it actually does.

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou is a prescribed “modern retelling” of the tale of Bluebeard, a folktale that I am familiar with because I have read every iteration that I could get my hands on. In most versions, the reader encounters a young woman who moves into the secluded castle where her betrothed, Bluebeard, lives. She is told she can roam freely, except she cannot enter one particular room. Her curiosity, or maybe her intuition, gets the better of her, and behind the forbidden door she finds a ghastly scene: a number of bodies of other young girls that Bluebeard has murdered. In some retellings these victims are her own sisters, also wed to Bluebeard. Sometimes Bluebeard’s mother is also trapped alongside her. In all instances, the tale of Bluebeard begins with the resolute force by which these women have no choice but to enter the castle, and a warning of what dangerous men are capable of. The ending follows many different paths: in some iterations the young wife is killed by Bluebeard, or in others she escapes and her townspeople, in turn, kill him. But here is the snag for me. The tale of Bluebeard already offers the option of staying or escaping, and I have held these two in simultaneity every time I encounter it. My own formulation of repair was challenged because a different ending doesn’t offer a solution to why someone was put in peril in the first place, or why in this world we need to have warnings. We know who the monsters are. The story goes exactly as expected. I believe that Theodoriou has shown the ways we have not even started the process of repair. Doing so would change the way we tell stories of those who have survived, and the stories of those who haven’t.

Knowing the story, and all of its routes and endings, doesn’t stop it from happening. If a warning exists, we already know who the monsters are, and that there are victims behind the door. This is a point that Theodoridou hones in on in his version. Turning past the cover of this book was like stepping into a house I already knew was haunted, or biting into fruit

highlights a shift in focus from where most of these stories start, describing the ways in which a man can become a monster, as the reader follows how Bluebeard’s wealth informs his actions from a child into adulthood. It describes the painful hardships of staying with an abuser. Much of the text also revolves around Bluebeard’s first wife Eunice, who remains alongside Bluebeard after he kills her son, and even after she begins to feed young girls to him in order to mitigate her own pain. The reader is constantly confronted with the question of why anyone stays, and why cycles of abuse repeat. And asking these questions is an important part of locating what needs to be repaired. This book hinges on ghosts who speak through the unnamed narrator, a person definable as not-quite-wife, but surely just as bound to Bluebeard, as she describes the stories of her lover’s victims to her son. Their ghosts huddle around her, and just as we enter these tales of different women and men that become Bluebeard’s lovers, inhabit them, or peer into a window of their lives, it becomes apparent that the whole text operates as a house. Of doors of soured by honesty.

Sour Cherry who to these locating to unnamed describes her, apparent text house.

A WARNING IS NOT A REPAIR

and dead-ends, and a monster always lurking. We have turned the knob to see what we already know is behind the door. Every time a new wife enters, she is entangled, and sometimes entranced, by the maw. Sour Cherry dares to stitch the frayed edges of many voices, and many iterations, flowing, knotting, and complicating each other. Each ghost presents their story, each body becomes a text to be read, but one I must read and think about where I am holding blame. I am given something that might be more poignant to our present moment, beyond a sharp clean repair I was searching for.

Theodoridou takes the tale of Bluebeard and offers a refocus; this is the fairytale that I know, but I am challenged in my own assumptions of who is a monster, and a more thoughtful meditation on the fact that Bluebeard is symbolic of many things at once. He is a monster that takes many forms. He is the world, as any abuser ends up taking over the scope of the panes of the page, and regulates control over other people’s actions and decisions. He is the embodiment of entitlement, toxic masculinity, and legacies of patriarchal power. He takes another victim then asks, “Who will love me next?”1

they scars in blame. this I monster,

I am confronted by my own anger at the transgressions of the world I have experienced as I see them reflected in Sour Cherry. In a world that normalizes young women and men in peril, whether that is in castles, in dorm rooms, or in our own homes, how do we stop this cycle? So much of our culture is constituted around rape, and around abuse. It is the air we breathe, and the land we stand on. It poisons everything to the point that, as is true in the book, wherever you escape to, the ghosts are sure to already be there. If you listen closely, you know the stories they will tell you. To that point, “...[g]hosts exist always in the present. They’re like scars that way. In the past, they’re wounds. In the future, who knows?”

Although Sour Cherry allows me to locate not just the wound, but the whole body around it, I am not sunken in grief at its real portrayal of limited options and unsurprising traps that exist in our world. I am spurred to make something different. And I think that is what Sour Cherry is best at, promises of “never again” means something when we look at the whole problem. No matter how painful it is. It allows us to come up with routes out of this world to a place where we may actually walk free. The stories told here are true, “because the land of this story is everywhere. The people are us, the time is always.”3 You may be familiar with what is behind the cover of this text, but still I invite you to step inside.

Photo by Sienna Joya Haag

Words by Meg Streich

Art by Carter Austin

There is something innately unsettling about your landlord/lady/person summoning a stranger-company you’ve never heard of to fix a problem you may or may not have caused. It is not only a game of social-awkwardness roulette, but can often present a real safety risk. We have all experienced the impulse to take down a flag, turn around that picture on the fridge, or hide our identity in some other way so as to not aggravate the man here to unclog a drain. Butch-4-Hire aims to change that. Butch-4 Hire-is a “Queer handyservice for Queer people,” local to New York City, employing 18 Butches skilled in various trades to perform services such as moving, painting, and other large-scale jobs.

Butch-4-Hire is exceptionally needed in our community. They carve out a bubble of safety for their employees in a field largely dominated by heterosexual men while also reassuring people that, with something as vulnerable as letting a stranger into your home, they are in good hands. Wanting to hear more about the story behind Butch-4-Hire and where it’s headed, I sat down with its founder, Sam Golub.

What inspired you to start Butch-4-Hire?

I started Butch-4-Hire in spring of 2022. It was just me. After witnessing some friends and members of the community experience harassment from task rabbits and general contractors, I saw that gap in the field; [there’s] a deficit in the community. That was the sort of origin point: protecting members of the community. It takes a lot of vulnerability to allow people into your space and in your home. We developed this really great thing that is solving a huge issue in the community—keeping this spirit alive that we help each other. If I could solve one problem in the world, it’s to not have strange men enter the homes of people in our community.

How has your idea of Butch-4-Hire evolved since you started the company?

It’s evolved tremendously. Initially, it was me just trying to pay my bills in New York when I was unemployed. Once it started to gain traction and people started to recognize the name, I had blue-collar Butches reaching out to me to join our team. Currently, we have 18 Butches on our team and anywhere from 1-2 appointments a day. We are in our busiest season right now with people moving. [Butch-4-Hire] has grown exponentially, and grown into something I couldn’t have imagined when I started it. I do most of the administrative work. In the past year, we have become an official LLC and now we can start to grow the business more.

I work in nonprofits, so this isn’t my only gig. I actually had an interview for a job in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was for an LGBTQ+ nonprofit—they not only knew about Butch4-Hire, but asked if I would bring it to New Haven. We [also] sell tank tops that are screen printed by the Butches, and we’ve had people in almost every state in the country get one and tag us. Someone in the Netherlands [bought] a tank top, and I went through this whole process with customs to make sure they got their shirt. In a very roundabout way, my partner at the time ended up having to go to the Netherlands around that time, and I had her deliver it to the customer. [The tank-top-buyer] ended up housing my partner, who got this cool underground Queer experience in Amsterdam because of me trying to ship this tank top.

Have you faced any challenges navigating the industry as a Queer-owned business?

As a woman and a young girl, I was never taught any handy skills or tools for success with home ownership. I had to do a lot of learning myself to get on the right track. That was the first hurdle I came upon—understanding that I was an amateur and was doing this to help my community.

I think the way that Butch-4-Hire has evolved, a lot of people on my team are now in the trades and unions and do Butch-4-Hire for the extra income. There is the difficulty of being a Queer or Trans person in blue-collar work. One of the really impactful things that Butch4-Hire has done is provide a space for LGBTQ+ contractors.

MEG STREICH

Business ownership is not something that was ever taught to me. Things like how to file your taxes or how to manage a team of 18 tradespeople—these are things I had to learn alongside the Butches and alongside my community. I have learned how to be a leader, how to be a business owner, and how to be a productive member of the NYC Queer community. I have learned so much from Butch-4-Hire and I am so grateful. If you told me four years ago that [I] would be running this, I wouldn’t have believed it. I run Butch-4-Hire with the mentality that I don’t know everything. I am open to feedback and hearing from my team and evolving the business as a unit. The Butches have a lot of input into hiring, etc. to really create the team they want. I feel very fortunate to be supported by a really exceptional group of people.

Because of this, we have gotten to work for a ton of unique businesses and organizations, and gotten to know other Queer small businesses that have hired us or done work for us. There is always a bigger community than you think there is.

Can you share a particularly memorable moving job whether that was funny, difficult, or especially meaningful to you?

My favorite job that we did was for the Leslie Lohman Museum. They are one of the only Lesbian museums in the country featuring Queer and Lesbian art, and they hired us to do some consolidation work. They not only knew about us, but hired us and had us come in. We were all so giddy. At the same time, there was a Catherine Opie exhibit. I was taking things in and out with the Butches while looking at Catherine Opie’s work. [Getting to witness] this artist that I have loved forever as we were moving things out into the u-haul felt surreal.

We have had wonderful moments at Queer small businesses. Recently, we did a job for NYCbased candle company, The New Savant. They were doing a trade show and had hired us to set up and take down. It has felt amazing supporting Queer businesses and supporting one another. The fact that these companies thought about us and knew to hire us always blows me away.

How do you think Queer labor is reshaping traditionally gendered/male-gatekept industries like moving, carpentry, or trades work?

Now more than ever, as political regimes continue to remove our rights and challenge us, we need to lean on each other to support each other in everyday life. That philosophy is presenting itself more and more as Queer Trans groups are emerging. We are part of many other amazing programs popping up throughout the country, and I feel really fortunate to be a part of that.

It is vital for the Queer community to rely on one another and sustain one another through any needs we might have inside or outside the home. Queer people exist in every facet of life, and we must continue to support one another.

What’s next for Butch-4-Hire?

We have piloted a Butch-4-Hire New Jersey branch this year with some Butches that I met through Lezapalooza. The focus now is just growing that program and continuing to test the waters. I get messages all the time asking for a Butch-4-Hire in this city or in this state. I would love to see where this can go and if we can get more Queer people in trades and involved in their community in this way.

If you are looking to book a Butch, you can contact Butch-4-Hire by visiting their website. If you also want “no cis-men invading your space, but rather a fat Butch in a sports bra trying her best,” support Butch-4-Hire.

Words and Art by Yvette

Sin

Poetry

ODE TO ENDOGENOUS OPIOIDS Words by Elliott Sky Case

Middleground Words by Noelle Kriegel

If You Claim to Keep Secrets Words by Alyx Chandler MECHANICS IN THE VOID [BUTCH] Words by Mika Deneige Light and Heavy Words by Amy Spade A SINGLE WIDTH OF SHADE Words by Alexandra Burack

Participation Words by Judy Thorn enter the kitchen Words by c. rivera Song for Morning-Star Bright-Headed Words by Chris Gylee GEOLOGY OF INTERTWINED DNA Words by Amy May Jarvis

ODE TO ENDOGENOUS OPIOIDS

Words by Elliott Sky Case

A sudden realness hits like a colliding timeline where my two bodies merge back into one. The text won’t go through, hovers at almost sent. When I was a child at my dad’s house, I’d take my glasses off for bed and watch the fairy lights above me pulsate, the sound of my sister’s breath deepening into sleep across from me. Big, small, small, then expanding again in a way I could never explain to someone with 20/20 vision. I take my glasses off when I kiss, and I put them back on to see a lover’s face, and back off again to feel my own against skin, and there’s a stone fruit in summer or the ghost of a permanent scratchiness no matter how recent the shave. I’ll always love everyone I’ve ever loved is a sentiment I’ve said myself verbatim, but in another voice it’s like a cover of a song you almost know

the melody of, you can’t look it up because the words are evading, I don’t want to witness the way I glance across a room. Someone’s got a case of the Fuckits. Someone’s got a too-visible vein. Look at you, same as you ever were. He was right the whole time. A scab-kneed child—reality is only the sum of how much you’ve slept / consumed / considered / desired in 72 hours. A clunky number with the wrong scansion. My name hovers in the first real cold of fall, stale taste in my mouth, arid valley between my shoulders, early dusk and staring at the pulsating light.

Every day I’m getting better, except for the nights I get a little worse. Pleasure and shame have split custody and I ride passenger seat back and forth across town, past the burger king sign all the birds shit on. Some things are or should be obvious by now: don’t drink slowly but consistently through a Sunday after five hours sleep, don’t power through with caffeine, don’t tune out every creeping realization. Hold hands with yourself once in a while, feel the softness of your own sheets. There is a lot to love. There is a lot to be grateful for, and still the gleam

of sharp metal. 12 years. My self-harm habit is old enough to start self-harming. But what’s the problem, really? How often do we ask others to hurt us instead? I handed my friend the knife and she put it in her fur-lined pocket without a word. That’s love. If resentment is drinking poison and waiting for the other to die, guilt is drinking poison imagining it could be someone’s medicine. Shame wants more of my weekends. The window is down and we coast 20th Street, all lanes empty. I watch the flock of birds rise up to return to their roost, a home I’ll never see.

Art by Jamie Pittinos

Middleground

Words by Noelle Kriegel

I surrender my desire for a logical conclusion. I surrender my desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive. — Richard Siken

When I did shrooms I could see clearly. I mean it. Vision struck through by perfect arcs of light—no, not arcs. It didn’t bend. Refused to. Was certain, not slant. So I didn’t stop doing shrooms. Blue was itself. I wasn’t. So I was jealous. So I didn’t stop doing shrooms. When I was inpatient, everything was oriented to the middleground. Diametric. I liked the sound of that word. I liked the sound of myself talking but I wasn’t myself. Voice ancillary to the body. My body lurking somewhere imprecise, composed of oblique vectors. I wished the nurses had read me poems instead of parables. Language the crux and the angel. I couldn’t blow money on it, but it was striking enough to rival the coke I would reserve after getting out of the hospital. Small rewards. Shooting stars. Poetry in motion, among other cliches. I wrote poems about coke and they were almost as good as the coke itself. I was in the mist of it. Shut up. It all gets blurry. All my wanting to be better amounted to nothing. It was static, unclear. I didn’t sleep. I texted girls at all hours howling at the moon, a rabid Lesbian transformed by nothing but need. I played with my makeup, fixed my face and then pulled at my skin until I bled. Inside out I still wasn’t myself. The nurses told me I was a work-in-progress. Close, but not enough. They told me there were layers to experience. Too many good times and the whole thing folds. I’m terrible at shuffling cards. I’m fantastic at playing the game. Good times. At the center of the fold everything is cruel and wet. I’m at the center of it, looking up. The sun looks like a white eye. I cover mine. Refusing.

If You Claim to Keep Secrets

Words by Alyx Chandler

you gotta play telephone right whisper-pull twine through a

hole in a black-eyed peas can emptied and pierced

with sewing scissors by a girl with lips airy-sweet as angel

cake lined with strawberries you gotta kiss her closemouthed take

your paisley dress and hike it up till the bunny fur on your

thighs tickles like tulle in the wind

you gotta catch a ruby-throated

hummingbird in the palm of shaking hands you gotta paint

stop signs on your cheeks with momma’s blush called sweetpea

gotta brawl like a stray cat in a gutter you gotta love accidents

share melted coconut chapstick find an American Lady Butterfly

and shove it deep down your throat till it flutters in your gut

you gotta be sure, so sure you won’t tell nobody’s momma

how you touched yourself after lake water soaked your panties

algae green you gotta swear to never let a Queen Snake pry open

that sweet mouth of yours never let the slit of golden eye hypnotize you

into forgetting what they want forgotten

MECHANICS IN THE VOID (BUTCH)

The appeal of the dream is twofold: changing the slender for muscle-bound, oiled and shorn, smoothed in the grease of repair, and cradled, of course, in weightlessness.

Out here beyond the ideas of atmosphere, where temperature fades into distance, I construct the fantasy of myself. Toolbelt and callus between the belted meteors drifting like so many gravel roads. Still worn, intermingled with stars.

I am working, always, on the car.

Words by Mika Deneige

The car is all there is, breaking and reforming first the brake lines, then the oil. Advancing in tandem through unfettered space, crashing and coalescing cables tangling, snapping, steel folding whole again the body.

There is a moment in the crash where the crash is the only moment. Where the loop, beginning, sets itself as the unmoving state.

And I am working, wrench in hand, straightening the wreckage of this life. It wraps around me, metal on metal, to where muscle ends and frame begins; shaping the silent expanse of the body shop like the opening of doors into forgiveness.

So strike again the broken fender, steady out the form even as the body rusts from under us. When all is quiet against the distance of the world, the grind of wrench on bolt, the hammer strike that pulses out the dent, and still, in the silence of all that space the echo of a black hole singing.

Light and Heavy

Words by Amy Spade

Our banter was open, lively: witty verbs and flaunting skin. Then you got quiet— something old disturbed you. In text quiet feels different from in person, more keenly like disappearance.

The heart’s chambers push blood to lungs, circulate the aerated back to distant posts, yet valves are weighted, anchored to muscle by delicate, lush heartstrings. Eight ounces to reckon with, to take care with. No wonder the heart is metaphor, the blue and the red pumping together, intertwined, alive, the organ what makes us all resilient.

Slightly to the left of breastbone, sits hurt, hope. I’ll risk the heft.

Words by Alexandra Burack

A SINGLE WIDTH OF SHADE

Into the sandpit’s curved ridges, the rock-strewn brook sweeps up from the low trail. The bent sky: a row of dwarf trees rooted on the crusted lip of soil, angled so each shades a thatch of brush-grass and micaed sand. Always childhood summer, bellows of the named world slip again into my mouth, hours redgold spread across my back. Returned after years, but scattered rocks don’t recognize me, no matter how I polish them with breath. The I the greedy ticks ignore is landless, does not remember heat so heartless. No breeze, but a struck triad of sobs eddies around the treeline: the grandmother held beyond a river’s reach incants her empty house uphill alive, and a shudder of birds departs. I, too,

own nothing here, claim no tree from first seed, no rocks arranged to bridge a worm’s traverse along the stream sinkholed with moss. I cannot discern one sliver of stone from another, or the thick moment I could have saved the woman crumbling in the red house, repaired the ruptured solder between generations, but did not. I merit not a single width of shade against this caustic sun. The empty pit exhales me, my back bent over a crèche of pine needles, where my hands nest a robin’s egg, whole and blue.

Participation

Words by Judy Thorn

Billy-Ray Belcourt was like Madonna to us. He spoke at length of a small world. We sat on our shins at the top of the stairs. One of my favorite professors was there in a tan peacoat. The next day in class, I sat beside her at the table, and her throat was growling. She must have eaten pasta with tomato sauce, something brave and acidic. I asked for subtitles during the documentary because there might have been someone who needed them. Not me, but someone. Now I can’t hear out of my left ear for hours at a time every day, on and off. I haven’t seen my friends in five years. The border is thick with dogwood, thick with dogs. Isles and catamarans and fishnet tights; what crosses through us becomes part of us, engages with our oddest tendencies as a generation, and forms mycelia below the rotted rock walls. They spoke over my body in English and French and tried to resuscitate me with Jordan almonds. In the cottonwood wisps, an arrondissement was formed out of our student loans. We were removed from that place and put through several sieves. Told to find peace. Commanded to make a living. Because of this, I live without wifi. I go without decent meals. My underwear is ten years old. I get the feeling the apartment is going to crush me. Sex doesn’t interest me. Cannot convince me of its importance. Cannot move me. It was called depression when I was fourteen. It was called depersonalization when I was twenty-one. I renamed it, renamed it, pulled it apart like pork, but it kept its head on straight and heavy. Parallaxes relax it. Time glues it back together. I hope to be a good woman, choosing the right books to feed my soul. We are graded on how we submit ourselves to a wounded language. I can understand fragments of a whole.

Art by Torey Usrey

Words by c. rivera

enter the kitchen

& in your haiku’d tongue tell me about the whales that fall what blooms out of the benthos of their marine-snow offering & offer them up to me / your hands, I mean, & i’ll lean in, nose touching nose, & tell you about matsutake how they emerge from wounds of violent occurrences, human disturbances like bomb-blasted / earth & with one hand up your skirt, we’ll do our best to deserve this this? like so ‘cause when folx need to know what collaborative survival looks like, we will tell them about new communities of life thick-carpeting whale bones, & the after-rain flushes around the roots of red pine, we will tell them how— just like that, like them, like so—

enter the kitchen

we went looking for love in this ruin now please put the knife down, you must tear each matsutake apart with your hands with your hands with your—

Words by Chris Gylee

Song for Morning-Star Bright-Headed

I want to be a soft scudding cloud

I want my life perpendicular, a right angle to the ways we used to be

All the mistakes determined & forgiven

You said all this to the quiet yard & the old hens brooded

The sky listened & as it listened it turned aubergine grey

The dogs listened with their front paws high on the fence, their stomachs exposed

Often barking thick, heralding together the borderline, they fell quiet for you

We searched, we promise, but there was no end error

To conclude, we shrug, there was no remainder, nothing left over

This realisation, this too, is bracing

Come be with all these other limbs, in the tea lake, in the flat cotton grass

Everything stuck is just a bad idea & now it all thrums loose

Let’s push uphill happy, our legs still strong

I’m skimming the wind, you tell us now, in a gust, breath sharp & darting

Words by Amy May Jarvis

GEOLOGY OF INTERTWINED DNA

Once, I unintentionally planted my brother’s baby tooth in the backyard garden. Everything is about circles & we were tripping in one—bumped heads & my palm found his teeth, knocked clean out. Our fingers entwined, then, ritualistic in the New England dirt, all sharpened whetstone. We dug until all that was left below us was a history of roots, familiar & tumbling. After years of barrenness, that small patch of earth is still ringed & sown. The ground fertile & reaching upwards. A mausoleum reinvented as lilacs, that purple colosseum a reminder of perennial closeness. If we are playing architects, he is bone-heavy, sprouting impossibilities: skyscrapers, chess boards, a roaring laugh. Now, we overlap only in sleep & dream collaborative flowers, share bird bones & DNA. But we were borne from the same sandy deposit, my brother & I: we bisect our own wreckage. We have become binary after growing out & away from each other. Sometimes, we still share the same shooting star, or break a wishbone perfectly down the middle. Two seeds grow in the purpled dusk of April, brined in our shared Atlantic, & it brings me to our backyard garden. We, too, are something prehistoric & violet: two flowers still woven together after years of fractured bones.

Art by Jessie RDB

Mother’s

Five-Minute Crafts Words by

Synchronicities Words by

The Dinner Words by Katie Catulle

Favorite Glass Words and Art by Jake Breiter

Sarah Chin

Alicia Vane

The Dinner

Words by Katie Catulle Art by Mausoliere

We didn’t dare pull into their driveway; we just sat on the side of the street, staring up at the long lawn.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Jay squinted past me.

As if I wouldn’t know where my own daughter lived. But I looked again, and there she was, sitting on the porch with the Asters, laughing and drinking a bottle of beer. How strange. Charlotte Mae White drinking a bottled beer. A light breeze ruffled her long hair and flowing skirt.

Jay honked. I worried she might not recognize our car, but she picked up her skirt and descended the sidewalk running down the Aster’s front lawn. Jackie stared after her, and I almost felt sorry for the girl. Even from the road I could see she had the look of love—unrequited, no doubt. How many times have I seen that look follow my daughter? I don’t think Charlotte knows how to let someone love her. Another thing she’d want to blame me for, but she’d always been that way.

“It certainly didn’t seem like they were sick of you.” My voice came out sharp. I cleared my throat.

Charlotte kept smiling and stared out the window. She sat with a serene stillness, the kind of stillness that could scare a mother, and watched the town pass by. The motel. The car wash. The mcdonald’s.

I looked at her in the rearview mirror, then turned around. “You could have brought Jackie along.” I said it loftily, like I didn’t know what I was saying. But I wanted her to know I know. I wanted to reach across this abyss with my knowing.

“Sorry?” She tilted her head slightly with that smooth, placid smile. She showed no reaction, not even a non-reaction, and I realized I was wrong. There was nothing to react to.

Then, halfway down the steps, Charlotte turned around. She just stood there for a moment and looked back at Jackie, whose face lit up like a firefly.

I looked over at Jay.

“How many of these houses are there?” He looked down the street at the rows of old Victorian houses. He didn’t appreciate their difference, their beauty—the colonial columns here, the bay windows there.

Charlotte climbed into the backseat before I could get out to hug her, but I wasn’t bothered. Nothing could bother me now. I knew something about my daughter, something she was never going to tell me.

I turned back so she wouldn’t see my face flush. This was something we once had in common—our emotions always played out on our faces one way or another—but she seemed to have found a way to control this. I wanted to ask her where she got her foundation. Not that she would tell me.

I turned back to Charlotte. “How long are you in town?”

She smiled. “Until she, I mean they—you know, the Asters—get sick of me.”

The host led us to a table. The restaurant was empty, but she sat us in the back corner across from a mirror. I tried not to obsess over my reflection, on all the things I needed to fix. Instead, I stared at Charlotte, who stared down at the menu like she was preparing for a quiz. Of course, we always got the same thing: chicken enchiladas, the spiciest they would make it, which was still not very spicy—small town palates—but it was enough.

“Can I grab some drinks?” The waitress’s enthusiasm made our table feel like a funeral.

“I’ll just have a water,” I said. “Corona.” Jay said.

“And I’ll have a spicy marg with sugar on the rim instead of salt, please,” Charlotte said, without even batting an eye. An Aster habit, it seemed.

“Actually, I’ll have the same.” I reached across the table with a guilty smile.

Charlotte didn’t react.

“Great. Can I put in some food orders?”

Jay pointed at a picture of a steak burrito on the menu.

“Two orders of the chicken enchiladas?” I asked, smiling at Charlotte.

“I’m actually a vegetarian now,” Charlotte said. “I’ll get the veggie fajitas.”

“Got it.” The waitress chirped and read back our order. “I’ll be right out with those drinks.”

We sat in silence for a minute.

“Is it hard being a vegetarian?” I asked. “At the Asters?”

She lit up. “Well, you know Frank—”

I nodded. Mr. Aster was an ass, but I didn’t say this. I was afraid to find another thing we no longer had in common.

“I think he’s just happy to have something he can make fun of me about. But it’s easy enough. Except when the grandparents are there.” The floodgates had opened. She told me about how Mrs. Aster’s parents came over every week for her father, Kurt’s, doctors’ appointments, and they’d always make this huge dinner. And one time they had wanted to do a whole big turkey feast—like Thanksgiving, in the middle of June—and Anne’s mom, Robin, was already at the store, and of course there was no service out there, so Jackie drove after her to make sure she got vegetarian stuffing.

“Oh, you know, he has his good days and his bad days.” She shrugged. “I think he remembers me, though, which is nice.” I nodded. “I ran into him the other day at the doctor’s office, and he looked at me like he knew me. He must have thought I was you.”

She picked at her fingernails—a disgusting habit of hers. She couldn’t be bothered to care, of course. I wanted to strangle her with her own blasé. It used to infuriate me when she was a child. I would scream at her, begging her to react. We are not equal, I would say, and she would just stare back at me with those dead, empty eyes—as if she was on a completely different plane, somewhere far, far above me. I wanted to bring her back down, make her respond, react, engage.

Charlotte had that distant, dreamy, unmistakable look of love. I remember when I used to talk about Jay with that look—not that I really had anyone to talk about him to—but I remember what it felt like to be taken care of, to be loved, to believe in someone so much I would throw away everything to be loved by them. And now I’m sitting here stressed about ordering a margarita.

But in the same sense, I realized I had already lost her. I looked down. “But then another time, he didn’t recognize me at all.”

A whole staff seemed to accompany the arrival of the fajitas. They sizzled in a cauldron placed in front of Charlotte, livening up the whole table. Charlotte replastered her smile. She was lost in thought, not even pretending to listen, much less carry on a conversation.

She picked around her food like her dog Sandra when I’d put a pill in it. That dog is too smart for its own good. Oh, how Charlotte had begged for that dog. The powerpoint presentations, the essays, the long, passionate speeches. Then, of course, when she finally got the dog, she didn’t like it. I knew she wouldn’t. I told Dave we should get a cat. I could tell she was a cat person. A mother always knows. But she never admitted she didn’t like it. Then, after the divorce, she went to live with her father and left it with me.

“Sandra has this adorable habit of sleeping by the window so she can protect us from the mailman.”

“Poor Sandra.” Charlotte mock pouted. “Poor mailman,” Jay said.

I laughed. “I feel bad.”

She sipped her drink. “Sometimes I think she absorbed all our anxiety and now

“And how is Kurt?” I sipped my drink.

THE DINNER

she doesn’t know what to do with it.” Then she laughed, remembering herself. “I don’t know what I’m saying.” She brushed her hand away, like swiping to the next topic of conversation.

But I was not ready to move on. It felt like we had reached an understanding, or at least an opening. “I hope I didn’t mess you up.”

She looked startled.

I stared at her, waiting for her to respond, to say she understood how difficult it all was; to say she forgave me. Wasn’t

that what she just said?

“When you were just a baby, you would look up at me with these big, judgmental eyes, like you knew I didn’t have a clue what I was doing—” My nose burned. I felt myself starting to cry, and blinked furiously, desperately. “Like even then you hated me.”

Charlotte smiled and looked around the restaurant.

“Don’t you think that was hard for me?” I started crying. “I tried so hard to do everything so perfectly, to do everything

exactly right, and it didn’t matter. You still turned out awful.”

It was a good bathroom. It had a high ceiling and bright yellow walls that seemed even brighter than the ones in the restaurant, even though they were almost certainly the same, probably from whatever paint they had leftover in the can, because why would they buy a whole new can of yellow paint just for the bathroom, the most discarded room of any establishment? Most importantly, it had one of those locks on the main door, for safety, or for changing a baby or something, but I used it for my own personal wellbeing while I ran my hands under cold tap water and took deep breaths. I would have run my whole head under the water if I could have, if I hadn’t had to go back out there in a minute. But I couldn’t go back out there in a minute, not with wet hair.

I was being ridiculous, I knew, running from my problems, running cold water over and over my hands, but staying there would only make everything worse. Why did my presence always only make everything worse? Why did I often feel this way when it was just Jay and me in the kitchen? He would be cleaning something that was already spotless, no doubt wondering why I hadn’t cleaned what I thought didn’t even need cleaning, but who knows what goes through his brain.

What was going through his brain now that I left him at the table with my daughter? The daughter I insisted he accompany me to dinner with, even though no one wanted it, not Charlotte, certainly not Jay, not even me not really. But of course I had to invite him. Maybe Jay will come in after me, comfort me, tell me it’s okay, and that Charlotte was being a bitch, though it wasn’t really his place to say. Even though it was true, and it would make me feel better to know someone else thought so.

forward, because if he wasn’t there then what was the point? Why, then, were we estranged? Because then it really was all on me and then I would be in here all alone. One bathroom really was just like the other. Wasn’t it just like this one? Yes, perhaps slightly less bright, but no less yellow, walls. It seemed all bathroom walls were yellow. Just like the ones in the mcdonald’s bathroom where we used to meet like I was some high school bimbo. Like I wasn’t a wife and a mother. It was fun to pretend, wasn’t it? We built whole worlds and destroyed them in those stalls. Then we had to slip the leering old men a happy meal not to say anything. Not that they would, it was always the women who you had to look out for. The bored unhappy wives who got off on taking others down. And of course, it was his own bored unhappy wife who took us down, wasn’t it? Airing all our messages out to my husband after we had already ended things, after I had already decided just to stick it out and suck it up in my regular life with Dave and Charlotte and that obnoxious yapping bitch Sandra. What a name, Sandra. Who names their dog Sandra, like she’s an old movie star or something? No one, only the high and mighty Charlotte, and in came his high and mighty wife, ex-wife shortly thereafter, with hundreds of printed pages sticking out of her purse ready to destroy us.

Yes, I’d wait in here for Jay to come and comfort me, and then everything would be okay. Wasn’t that why I brought him here in the first place? It didn’t matter what happened as long as he was there. Wasn’t that the choice I’d made, knowing full well it would upset her? But it was the only path

No, that wasn’t really fair. We destroyed ourselves. We had to take the consequences for our actions, otherwise we’d feel powerless. And we weren’t powerless. We had agency, we made choices, that was the important thing to remember. They were going to talk about something, better that they talked about us. Jay was always saying shit like that, turning our affair into a downright case of charity. It was that shit that made me fall in love with him.

Although I was already falling, tumbling midair. So really, I think I would have grabbed onto anything. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? There’s no room for logic and reason when you’re looking for any ledge or tree branch, any anchor anywhere to save you.

Someone knocks. My heart races. I can’t help but smile. I check my reflection and open the door.

Words and Art

by Jake Breiter

Five-Minute Crafts

Cleo was the one who made the hot glue hammock.

It wasn’t her proudest moment, but it was the one that got the most views on CraftHacks’ YouTube channel—twenty-seven million and climbing. Her hand had starred in that one, steady and pale and powdered against a millennial-pink background, squeezing line after squiggly line of glue onto a wire frame until it hardened into what Alix, her boss and head producer, generously called a “lifestyle hack.”

No one should sit in a hammock made of hot glue. It would snap like sugar glass. Cleo knew this. She had never tested it. The point was never utility; it was the shimmer, the thumbnail bait, the promise of absurd invention.

Cleo’s job title was officially “Content Crafter,” though Alix referred to her as a “creative engine” when she was feeling generous. Her workspace smelled like glue, acetone, and stale ambition. The walls were lined with shelves of glitter, googly eyes, epoxy resin, empty jars, pool noodles. All props for what they called “quickies”— thirty second viral videos designed for phones, for swiping, for forgetting.

Sometimes Cleo could feel it happen—the precise moment her soul slid out, replaced by something algorithmic and hollow.

Cleo had moved to LA for love. Or maybe inertia. They felt the same at the time.

Her then-girlfriend, Kit, had won a prestigious postgrad fellowship from a contemporary performance art center with a name that sounded like a cough. Cleo hadn’t gotten any of the jobs or fellowships she’d applied to, so when Kit suggested

Words by Sarah Chin

they move to LA together, Cleo said yes. Kit found a loft with industrial light and three fellow artists who left power tools on the kitchen table. Cleo started working at CraftHacks because it was the only job she could find with the words “artistic” and “paid.” They were happy, the two of them. They even talked about getting married.

The first month in LA, Kit had kissed her in public. The second month, Kit had brought home a dancer named Jules and said, “Maybe we should think about opening things up a bit.”

By month five, Kit had left a Post-It on the fridge that read:

“I need to be with someone who pushes me.” - Kit

Cleo had stared at it for an hour before taking it down, putting it in a resin mold with glitter, and making it into a coaster. She had downed one Corona and then another before posting it on her art Instagram. It got three likes. One was her mom.

That had been three months ago. Now Cleo lived in a shitty sublet in a different part of town. Mondays through Fridays, she woke up at 7:15 a.m., took the bus to a converted warehouse in Echo Park, and thought up crafts no one would ever make. Pasta chandeliers. A chair made of tampons. Cat-shaped wall sconces molded from old flip-flops. All calibrated to trigger the algorithm. Shock, outrage, and confusion took over utility, aesthetic, or purpose.

SARAH CHIN

The crew filmed her hands as she worked. Her face never appeared. She liked it that way. It was easier to pretend she wasn’t part of this.

“You’re an artist,” her mother said once over the phone. “This is just temporary.”

“I’m a fabricator now,” Cleo had replied. “I fabricate.”

Was the washi tape coffin a comment on consumer death? Was the Barbie crucifix about gender? Was the glitter glue vacuum an indictment of unpaid domestic labor?

No. But also, not no.

The turning point was a video titled 5-Minute Fix for Your Broken Dreams.

Cleo had meant it as a joke. A collage made from junk drawer detritus: a broken pencil, expired coupons, an old photo of herself and Kit on the day of their art school graduation. Cleo glued them onto a canvas and covered the whole thing in Mod Podge until it looked like a glistening ruin.

The producers thought it was edgy.

“Very post-ironic,” said Alix.

They posted it on a Thursday. That weekend, a painter with 237,000 followers—best known for life-sized nudes—shared a clip on Instagram with a question: “Are the CraftHacks girlies okay??” It went viral.

The algorithm caught fire. Suddenly, people were poring over Cleo’s old CraftHacks videos like they were relics from a long-lost performance art archive. They slowed them down, analyzed her hand movements. One TikTok creator stitched the original clip with side-by-side footage of Marina Abramović’s hands and said, dead serious, “This is the same impulse to create.”

Cleo watched the comments roll in, heart pounding, from bed at home. She lay on her stomach and pulled the quilt over her head, creating a tent over herself and her phone. Someone wrote: This is the most honest thing I’ve seen all year. Another said: This girl gets it. I don’t know what it is, but she gets it. She stared at that one for a long time.

Then someone—an internet sleuth with too much time and a knack for facial recognition—dug up a group photo from the CraftHacks holiday party the previous year. Red lipstick, glitter reindeer ears, plastic flute of prosecco. This is the girl, they posted on Reddit, circling her face in red.

Cleo didn’t say anything to her coworkers. No one brought it up. Maybe they didn’t see it. Maybe they chose not to. She just started inserting herself more. Not overt things. Not obvious. But strange little ruptures in the pastel surface. A flowerpot with the word “HELP” stamped into the clay. A mirror frame lined with plastic teeth. A “DIY mood board” that included a matchbook, a bandaid, a photo of the ocean with the caption: You can’t swim forever.

No one noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. Engagement was up.

Cleo started keeping a journal again. Late at night, after she got home, she’d sit on the fire escape with a cup of tea and write about things she used to dream about. The installation made of heat lamps and velvet ropes she had planned as her thesis project. The Queer, anarchist collaborative studio space she and Kit once dreamed up over cheap sangria at the bar down the street. The way she wanted to make people feel unsettled and seen, like good art always did.

Cleo didn’t know if she could still do that. But the comments helped.

Not all of them, of course. There were plenty that called her work stupid, fake, try-hard. One person said her “aesthetic” made them want to walk into the sea. Another accused her of copying an obscure performance artist from Prague, and then tagged said artist three times.

But mixed in were quieter voices—people who didn’t seem to need anything from her. A couple from Finland wrote that they watched her videos every night before bed. Someone else said she reminded them of their sister, who’d passed away. Another simply wrote: You’re doing something. I don’t know what, but please don’t stop.

Cleo screenshotted those and saved them in a folder she titled Maybe. She didn’t look at them every day, but it helped to know they were there.

She came into work one morning and found a piece of paper waiting on her workstation—a screenshot of a DM sent to the CraftHacks account, printed out and left neatly beside her glue gun. No note. Just the message itself:

I know it’s just glue and stuff. But it’s also not.

You made me want to make things again.

SARAH CHIN

She read it once, then again. Her chest went tight, like something small and sharp had lodged beneath her ribs. She looked around the open-plan office, fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead. No one was looking at her. Everyone was typing, editing, crafting, pretending.

She got up, walked calmly to the bathroom, locked the stall, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. And then she cried. Not delicately, not the way people cry in movies—with a single tear tracking down a perfect cheekbone—but full-bodied, shaking, forehead-pressed-to-knees crying. The kind you don’t even know you’ve been holding in until it rushes out of you all at once.

Cleo stayed there for almost an hour. No one came to check on her. When she finally unlocked the stall and looked at herself in the mirror, her face was blotchy and raw, but her eyes felt clearer than they had in months Alix asked her to come up with something “bone-related.”

“Like Halloween?” she asked.

“Nah,” they said. “Like, real bones. But fake. Craft bones. Y’know. Skulls are trending.”

Cleo went home and sculpted a skeleton out of bubble wrap and melted spoons. It was beautiful in a grotesque way. She made a time-lapse of herself building it, set to a slowed-down version of Britney Spears’ “Lucky.” For the first time, her face and body were visible. She was more than just hands shot from the top-down.

CraftHacks uploaded it with the caption: 5-Minute Spooky Decor You’ll Die For. It went viral. The painter who first posted about Cleo reposted it again. This time she

tagged Cleo’s art account. Cleo didn’t know how she found it, but her follower count shot up to a thousand overnight.

She bought better clay. A new set of tools. A secondhand DSLR camera from a girl on Craigslist who showed her how to use it, her soft fingers brushing over Cleo’s. She smelled like violets, and Cleo leaned into the touch. In the evenings after work, she started working on her own pieces. Quiet things. A sculpture made of fused plastic cutlery that bent toward a flickering screen. Paper mountains dipped in sugar water, collapsing into themselves one droplet at a time. A lamp that pulsed like a heartbeat. She didn’t post them online. Not yet. But she photographed them carefully. Labeled each one. Gave them titles. Appetite. Sea Change. Wish You Were Here.

She didn’t quit the job at CraftHacks. Not yet. Rent was still due. But she worked faster. Gave them what they wanted, and saved her real ideas for herself.

She applied to an open call group show, the first thing she had applied to since graduation. No guarantee, of course, but she sent them her portfolio with a note: These are my five-minute crafts—the kind that take years to make.

She didn’t tell anyone at work. She just kept making—not because it was necessarily good art. But because it reminded her that something had survived. Something inside her still moved, still made, still reached.

One night she stayed up until 3 a.m. building a tiny diorama of the loft she and Kit once shared. She made the Post-It for the fridge out of wax paper. It was too small to write on, but Cleo knew the words by heart. I need to be with someone who pushes me.

She brought the tiny house out back by the dumpsters. Then she lit it on fire and filmed it burning.

Synchronicities

Words by Alicia Vane Photos by Sienna Joya Haag

Mads wakes before sunrise, she always has. Two breaths before the cockerel. She allows herself to lie still in those moments, savouring the peace, before the day unfolds its list of jobs for her.

up the wood. Retreating to the warmth as Mads releases the hens from their coop.

“Good girls,” she says, palming six warm eggs. The brood jostles past her to peck grain from the winter-hardened ground.

It used to be Mads’ father who woke first, set the pace for the day. But it’s been almost five years since his death. Lung cancer, they said, spread through his body like wildfire. Mads still hears his cough rattling around the house. That low, quick hack of his deep chest. The beat of a fist to clear the echo. For so long his face remained unchanged, thick-jawed and ruddy-cheeked, going through the motions of the day. Only in those final weeks did the disease suck the marrow out of him. And there was nothing Mads could do to ease the pain.

At the final crow, Mads pushes back the quilt and lets the cold spring air prickle her skin. Her body is heavy with exhaustion, fingers stiff and sore. The kind of tired that lives in the bones, a lifetime of labour knotted in the muscles. When she was younger, Mads had been strong and fast—a ropey teen shaping into a broadchested woman. A sure pair of hands. But 43 summers on a farm can feel like 60. Can push the body to its limit, sometimes beyond.

The collies are curled in front of the fireplace. They stretch out their arthritic legs to join Mads in the yard. Circling the fence to scour for foxes, pissing their scent

Rising at 6 feels different for Caryn now. No longer jolting awake to the panicked sound of a phone alarm, the grumble of her husband tugging at the duvet, the overwhelming feeling of dread. She still sets an alarm, but wakes earlier, enjoying the silence of her new place. A life that doesn’t feel like it’s rushing ahead, snatching her breath as she tries to keep up. Her body resetting its natural rhythm, untangling the threads of her nervous system.

They said it was a mental break. When she turned up to the London office an hour late, after the overground train had backed up and she tried to bypass the tube rush by walking the last mile in four inch heels. Stiff leather rubbing her tendons raw. By the time she reached the office, she was sobbing, mascara bleeding down her cheeks. And once that seal was broken, the rest spilled out like shook-up champagne.

Tucked away in this rural Yorkshire village, things feel easier. She looks forward to a slow breakfast in her flat. Preparing a flask of coffee, sliding it into the postal bag, hopping on her bike and cycling to the sorting office to pick up her stack for the day.

The last stop is a grey stone farmhouse beyond the village envelope. Clouds twist darkly into drizzle as she approaches, smearing dust across the windshield. Caryn fiddles for the wipers, accidentally flicking on the indicator, cursing her fallible memory. The van lurches forward, dropping heavily into a deep pothole. Something tips in the chassis as she swerves back onto the road, the van hobbling the last few meters up the drive. Caryn pulls over and circles the bonnet to assess the damage, the familiar grip of panic tightening her throat. “Afternoon.”

Caryn startles, twists back to the house. A figure stands in the doorway: tall, broad, dressed in a sun-faded shirt and jeans. A tangle of dark, wet hair falling to their cheekbone.

Mads prefers to shower after the morning’s labour. The churning of soil, the shucking of hay, the changing of oil in the tractor covering her in a fine layer of dust. She can smell the metallic, loamy scent of her skin as she kicks her boots off at the door. It was her father’s scent too, sitting in front of the unlit fire, dozing. Exhaustion catching up with him early, the afternoon slipping out of his grip. She senses the inevitability of this cycle, already fighting the urge to sleep through the quiet slump after lunch.

Dirt gets deep under Mads’ bitten down nails; she scrubs them first with a wire brush, then scratches her scalp with shampoo to unearth the last of it. She rakes her fingers through the ends of her hair, knowing she’s long overdue for a turn with the clippers. Another job for the list.

“Sorry to disturb you, I’ve got a parcel for… is it Madeline—”

“Just Mads.” Her voice is low, surprisingly soft.

“Sorry. I only moved to the village last week, so I’m still finding my feet.”

Mads peers down at the van parked clumsily on the drive. The strange tilt of its frame.

“You got a puncture?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Caryn has been given a small round to start, but it takes the morning to cover ground in the old van. Outside the village proper, most roads are rural, dirt paths up to isolated houses and Caryn is glad of the satnav to guide her. She steers the van tentatively over bumps and pits, slowly, carefully, taking her time. The van has endured twenty years on the road like this; she wants to continue that legacy.

Mads clicks her tongue. “I’ve been meaning to fill those potholes—”

“Oh no, it’s not your fault. I’m new to driving a van, I’ll get the hang of it. If they keep me on, that is.” Caryn tries to laugh, but the sound catches in her throat.

Mads can hear the anxiety, can see it twisting her up, hunching her slender frame. And though she’s a grown woman, probably in her mid-thirties, Mads is struck by a curious urge to soothe her.

“Let me have a look.” Mads crunches across the gravel to the van, drops to a crouch at the wheel. Caryn follows, tugging the hood of her jacket over her brow. The rain has turned sheeting, coming in at an angle across the fields.

“Please, Mads, don’t worry about it. I’ll call the office—”

“I can patch it up to see you back to the village. They’ll put a new one on for you tomorrow.”

The steady assurance of Mads’ voice eases a little of the pressure in Caryn’s chest.

“That’s very kind of you.”

Mads laughs again, a deep sound in her chest. It’s been such a long time since she’s laughed like this, it feels almost cathartic.

“My dad’s quiche recipe, a true and tested relic from the seventies. Probably still warm if you’re hungry?”

“Oh gosh no! I wasn’t angling for lunch too.”

“Honestly, have a slice. There’s more than enough. My girls had a bumper lay this morning.”

“It’s no bother. Might take half an hour or so. Best wait inside so you don’t get soaked through. Those postie uniforms are not fit for purpose.” Mads chuckles as she leads Caryn into the house. The smell of something rich and heady hits as she crosses the threshold, like garlic and rosemary fried in butter. Without thinking, Caryn says,

“Wow, what smells so good?”

“That’d be lovely… thank you.” Caryn smiles then, her face breaking out of its nervous mask, light returning to her pale blue eyes.

“D’you want to wash your hands—sorry I didn’t ask your name?”

“Caryn,” she says, joining Mads at the sink, accepting the milky white soap. Mads rinses her hands and Caryn notes how swollen her knuckles are. Thickened by years of hard labour or perhaps stiffened by arthritis. Caryn imagines running a thumb over that weathered skin, soothing a fictional ache. She switches off the faucet and reprimands herself for having such an absurd thought in a stranger’s kitchen.

“Caryn, I’ll start you off a tea and then head out. The dogs’ll keep you company.” Mads fills a steel kettle with water and carries it to the stove. The collies perk up from their lounge on the flagstone as she passes.

“Is it just you and your dad here?” Caryn asks, watching Mads step into mud-caked overalls at the back door, shrugging the straps over her shoulders.

“Dad passed a few years ago. It’s just me and the pups.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“He’s at peace now.” Mads unhooks a ring of keys from a nail in the wall. “I’ll leave the door on the latch—shout if you need me.”

Alone with the dogs and the whistling kettle, Caryn thinks about how easy it is to sit at the table and drop the tension from her shoulders. The space feels more homely than her new flat, well stocked from generations of use. Cast iron pans hanging from the ceiling. Plates and cups stacked on the dresser. Leggy herbs growing up the windowsill. Her attention catches on an electric hair clipper discarded on the counter. Odd, she thinks, then remembers Mads’ wet-haired appearance at the door. A prickle of guilt climbs her neck realising that her visit must have interrupted a haircut.

switch up the clipper, assessing its power. It buzzes loudly in the silence.

“I usually do seven all over. The blade’s already set.”

Caryn positions herself behind Mads, eye level with her grey-shot hair, her broad shoulders, feeling suddenly shy, unsure how to begin.

“Okay,” she breathes, then places a tentative hand on Mads’ neck. It feels as though her skin is charged with potential, a spark of static in the touch. Mads feels it too. The rousing of nerves under the surface of her skin, body more alive than it has felt for some time.

Caryn sets her focus on the task at hand, relaxing into it after three runs of the clippers up Mads’ scalp, enjoying the clean lines of the razor, the tufts of hair gathering in the blades. Brushing fallen strands from Mads’ shoulders and her sun-freckled neck. Tiny hairs lifting to her touch.

When Mads returns, oil smeared and satisfied, Caryn is washing plates at the fireclay sink.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mads says, wiping her fingers on a stained towel.

“It’s the least I can do.”

“Well, the tyre’s all sealed up so you’re good to go.”

“Thanks again.” Caryn pauses whilst the tap rushes, then adds, “Were you about to cut your hair when I arrived?”

Mads laughs, a deep sound from her belly. “Yes, how did you—ah!”

Caryn nods to the clippers. “I could give you a hand if you like. Repay the favour?”

But when Caryn steps around to the front, there is a peculiar shift in energy. Both becoming aware of their bodies, the space between them. Mads inhaling long, slow breaths, Caryn trying to do the same, keeping her eyes ahead, her attention on the cut.

The final chunk of hair falls away, a thick strand catching on Mads’ cheek. Caryn reaches to brush it loose, moving tentatively across Mads’ weathered skin. She lingers a moment, feeling the heat rise under her fingertips.

“You don’t owe me a favour.”

“But I’d like to do something for you.”

Mads watches the flush climbing Caryn’s face. Again, that overwhelming desire to appease her.

“Alright.” Mads sits at the table, running fingers through her hair to comb the tangles.

“How do you like it?” Caryn slides the

“Thank you.” Mads’ voice is barely a whisper.

“I hope it’s how you like it.”

“It is.” Mads lifts a hand, closes it gently over hers.

Caryn looks up to meet Mads’ steady brown eyes, sees a flicker of something in the depths. A heat spreading through her body. Aches slipping away. Thoughts quietening. Caryn leans closer, and Mads meets her halfway, reaching for her face. Their wind-chapped lips press together with an urgent tenderness. The loop closing between them. A new cycle emerging.

The Official Fruitslice Word Search

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Autumn Inner Sprite Oracle Reading Words and Art by Ké Kampeas-Rittenhouse heartbreak & other musings Words and Art by Renee O’Connor (r.e.o.)

Autumn Inner Sprite Oracle Reading

Words and Art by Ké Kampeas-Rittenhouse

Welcome to the autumn Inner Sprite Oracle Reading! These readings tap into the wisdom and magic of the mischievous, curious, playful, and open-hearted child within.

Papa’s Home! The Long, Gay, Breezy, Lively Underworld

This fall, your guide to the underworld is a delightful little monster from a Paul Klee painting. Cloaked in blue, they strut confidently through the murky haze, their huge E.T. eyes taking in everything with wonder (you can’t spell underworld without wonder), while their stalactite teeth proclaim: “I’m goofy as hell… but I bite.”

Your inner monster’s motto: the underworld is what you make of it. As the nights grow longer, they invite you to repair your relationship with this much-maligned netherspace by Daddy-ing up and taking charge. No more endless corridors of soul-searching, shadow work, and healing—it’s time to head to the party zone! There, you’ll find a space where all your pointy-feral-grotesque bits are free to mingle and play. And don’t worry, just like our toothy friend, you’ll always have your little blue blankie by your side to keep you safe and cozy.

Suggestions for making the most of this time: Extroverts: Throw an underworld-themed party and invite everyone to come as their inner ghoul, goblin, or Gorgon. See where the night takes you…. Introverts: Create a portrait of your underworld monster and name it. Find out what superpowers are lurking in its nooks and crannies.

The Coming of the Cold — Change the Annual Cycle (Lazy Daisy Stitch)

Meanwhile, above ground autumn is in lush orange bloom, and the trees are filled with critters preparing for winter. According to prevailing squirrel wisdom, this entails relentlessly hustling to gather and hide as many nuts as possible to last through the cold, dark months ahead.

But lo! In a sermon-on-the-mount-esque tableau, a guide appears before our squirrel friends in the form of a wily opportunist preaching a new and exciting approach to harvest time: chilling the fuck out.

Yes, this fall your inner raccoon urges you to repair your grind mentality by gathering as much rest and relaxation as your paws can carry. Their motto: rest = abundance. Discover the magic of this maxim through naps, baths, books, jerking off, nature hangs, baking, mini-getaways, taking classes for pleasure, or picking up new hobbies. And as Papa Monster decrees, this also means taking a break from heavy inner work. So enjoy your permission slip to relax guilt-free, and don’t be surprised if an unexpected cache of nuts shows up on your doorstep.

Level-up Tip: Collective rest! Like the Three of Cups, the three figures in this card speak to the exponential power of socializing. Think cuddle parties, stitch-and-bitch sessions, game nights, or a video chat with your bestie where you both take a nap.

the underworld is what you make of it

Words and Art by Renee O’Connor (r.e.o.)

How to fold a zine!

Step 1: carefully cut the zine out of the magazine.

Step 2: fold in half vertically, then unfold.

Step 3: fold in half horizontally, then unfold.

Step 4: take one of the top/shorter sides and bring it down to the horizontal middle crease. then, fold and unfold.

Step 5: repeat step 4 for the bottom half.

Step 6: unfold the paper. there should be eight boxes that match up with the panels.

Step 7: push the outer/shorter ends of the paper in towards each other. the central fold will lift up.

Step 8: cut along the lifted center crease only.

Step 9: open zine by gently pulling outside corners of the zine together. this will create a booklet(ish).

Step 10: fold each page down.

Step 11: enjoy!

Repair Word Search

mend

Contributors

Alexandra Burack (she/her), author of the chapbook On the Verge, has recent work in Metphrastics, ucity review, and The Sewanee Review, among other venues, and poems forthcoming in Pangyrus, The Mackinaw, and Dumbo Press. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions, and a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and Poetry is Currency. She enjoyed a 45-year career as a college multi-genre creative writing professor, and currently works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor. website: www.alexandraburack.com ig: @crwprof fb: facebook.com/alexandra.burack

Alicia Vane (she/they) is a queer and sentimental writer based in Yorkshire, UK. She enjoys stories about sapphic relationships, isolated women, and strange little cults. Her recent work can be found in Snowflake Magazine and Bi+Women's Quarterly. You can find links to her writing and other bookish rambles online. ig: @aliciavbooks x/bluesky: @aliciavwriting

Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South who now teaches in Chicago. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Montana, where she was a Richard Hugo Fellow and taught poetry. In 2025, she won the Three Sisters Award in Poetry with Nelle Literary, received a Creative Catalyst grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and was awarded residencies at Ragdale and Taleamor Park. Her poetry can be found in the Southern Poetry Anthology, EPOCH, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. website: www.alyxchandler.com ig: @alyxabc

Amanda Zhu (they/them) is a Queer, Chinese-American environmentalist and artist based in Orange County, California. Their work explores common themes in humanity and ecology, including identity, memory, and land. They currently serve as a programs coordinator at Parks California, reducing barriers and building access to community-engaged arts, careers, and climate-resilience strategies in green spaces. You can find them reading, visiting museums, rewatching a comfort film, reconnecting with nature, or playing a video game in their free time. website: www.amndazhu.com ig: @schmoond

Amy Cook (she/her) is the author of “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose” (Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies). She is a 2024 finalist for Tablet’s First Personal Essay Contest. Her essays and poems have been featured in more than two dozen journals and anthologies, including Anti-Heroin Chic and the+ Los Angeles Review. She is an Editorial Assistant for CRAFT. Rainier Writing Workshop (MFA 2025), Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. website: https://amycookuws.wixsite.com/website/work

Amy May Jarvis (she/her) is a bisexual writer from New England. She is the returning recipient of the Janet C. Weis Prize for Literary Excellence and a two-time winner of the Erik Kirkland Memorial Prize. A staunch defender of the Oxford Comma, she spends her time writing, reading, and passionately discussing Star Wars. Amy is a poet, a lover of light, and a hopeless romantic—although not necessarily in that order. Find her writing at: www.amymayjarvis.com/published-work/

A Best of the Net Nominee, Amy Spade (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in over 30 journals, including North American Review, Nimrod, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and most recently, Frozen Sea and Sinister Wisdom. Originally from Detroit, she lives and writes in Oakland, California. ig: @spade_amy

anna franzen (she/her) is a visual artist based in cologne, germany working mainly with textiles, natural materials, performance and photography. anna explores in her works how memories and stories can be found on our bodies and in our surroundings (once we are gone). stories are hidden, lost, changed, merged with others and rediscovered, ever changing. anna creates a spotlight for small details, exploring old and used materials and cooperating with the coincidence. ig: @anna__franzen

Banner Beard (he/him) is a comic artist based in Memphis, TN. His work often tells stories focusing on introspection of characters while dealing with the stress of change. Lately he has been exploring punk zine methods, mixed media, and local music scenes to incorporate into his work. He is currently a student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design studying comics and teaching. Previously, his work could be seen in The Towers latest issue ig: @Naraki__

c. rivera (they/she) is a queer disabled poet and recipe developer from NYC. They were named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow for Fall ‘24, a prize winner for Eavesdrop Magazine’s Queer Joy issue, a contributor in Querencia Press’s We Were Seeds anthology benefitting Palestine, and in the latest issue of The Plentitudes. ig: @crystal_e_rivera

Car Aldana (he/him) is an artist and art historian from Florida. He has exhibited work in Florida and Ohio and holds a BA in Art History. His work explores themes of gender, ecology, and time, and his research interests include contemporary and Asian art. He loves figure drawing, dogs, the ocean, and a good sandwich. ig: @joecoolings

Carter Austin (he/him) is a Virginia-based interdisciplinary artist and a recent graduate with a BA in Studio Art and Religious Studies. He is a queer and disabled individual who works across a variety of mediums, which include sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, and installations. He uses art as a method to reconnect with himself and explore his identity and expression, as well as the vulnerability, intimacy, and connection within relationships. ig: @toolongnightradio

Chandler Gates (any/all pronouns) is an emerging writer with a background working adjacent to the film and media industries. Currently living in Brooklyn, NY, along with three of five sisters, a cat-son named Rufio, and the ghost of Southern Baptist trauma, Chandler is writing a queer psychological-horror fiction novel and plotting a move to the PNW.

Chandra Iftekhar (they/them) is a photographer and multimedia artist from San Francisco, currently attending college in Vermont. They are studying Visual Arts, Education, and Literature with the eventual goal of becoming a librarian. Their work focuses on distortion, loss, and identity, typically using fabric to alter their images. ig: @bananaslug__

Chris Gylee (he/him, Stockport UK, 1983) is a Queer writer and artist living and working between rural Finland and Berlin. His poems include the online collection FORTY, and the micro-chapbooks Ten For ‘A’ and Songs for Our Future Selves (both Ghost City Press). His writing has appeared in & Change, Feral (TUO TUO), Frozen Sea, Fruit Journal, GARLAND (Fifth Wheel Press), Ink Sweat & Tears, Powders Press, Tidskriften Astra, and Under the Radar (Nine Arches Press). Chris was long-listed for the Cúirt New Writing Prize 2023. website: www.chrisgylee.com ig: @chrisgylee"

David Milley (he/him) has been writing since the mid-1970s. Recent work appears in Eunoia Review, 3rd Wednesday, RFD Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Friends Journal. David lives in southern New Jersey with his husband and partner of forty-nine years, Warren Davy, who's made his living as a farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. These days, Warren tends his garden and keeps honeybees. David walks and writes. website: www.davidmilley.com Bluesky: @davidmilley.com ig: @david.milley fb: @davemilley

Eli Langfere (they/them) is a Dyke and writer from Cambridge, UK. Their writing explores themes of radical lesbian feminism, and has appeared in Lacuna Human Rights Magazine. They have a BA from the Warwick Writing Programme and are currently researching the presence of horror and eroticism in lesbian visual cultures. They work as a coffee roaster. ig: @elilangfere

Elijah Buth (he/him) is a trans* space cowboy and writer. You can find him right here as a Senior Editor for Fruitslice, and read more of his work in Room Magazine, or in the diary that he accidentally left on a park bench. He desires the liberation of every/body from every/binary. He loves you. ig: @elijah.buth

Elliott Sky Case (they/them) is a poet, arts & culture writer, obsessive song repeater, little sibling, multimedia artist, and zine maker under the name Dank O’Hara. Their writing can be found in Metro Silicon Valley, Frozen Sea, Hot Pink Magazine’s Bisexual Issue, and elsewhere. Elliott was born and raised in California, holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, and lives in Queens with three other trans people. website: www.elliottskycase.com ig: @dank.ohara

Falcon Laina (they/them) is a multimedia artist based in Northampton, MA. Working in clay, welded steel, ink, charcoal, and analogue photography, his images are largely drawn from scenes in his dreams, inviting audiences into strange and intimate moments. website: www.falconlaina.com ig: @falcon_laina

Gwendolyn Hill (she/they) is a Queer Disabled Chinese creative living with Long COVID who currently resides in occupied Tovaangar (Los Angeles Basin). A believer in the power of storytelling and organizing to build community, Gwendolyn’s art often reflects on identity, disability, vulnerability, grief, love, and resistance. Her multimedia work has been published by various groups including Antifragile Zine, OutWrite Newsmagazine, and FEM Newsmagazine. website: https://www.gwendystarmedia.com ig: @gwendystar.media

Jake Breiter (he/they) is a queer multidisciplinary beastly art lad, makin' daily draws and writings in the big apple. He just graduated from the School of Visual Arts, with a bachelor's in Comics. Website: jakebreiter.com ig: monty_mulberry

Jamie Pittinos (they/he) is a lover of obsolete process. He was born by a lake in Michigan, and built their life in Detroit with their tiny dog and beautiful partner. Currently attending Wayne State University for a BFA in photography and a BA in Gender Studies, Jamie’s work in both fields question the colonialist replicability of image capture. Instead, their work catalyzes a type of image release through an intimate relationship with, and erotic embodiment of, process. ig: jaybird_jpg

Jamilé (they/them) is a writer, collage artist, teacher and lesbian goth born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Utilizing horror, fantasy, and nostalgia, they create art about being a disabled femme-queer under colonial power. They are completing an MFA in English at the University of Puerto Rico. Jamilé has been previously published in Fruitslice, The Caribbean Writer, and Latino Book Review. ig: cuir_bookseeker

Jessie RDB (she/her) is an analogue photographer and collagist whose work explores bodies as sites of connection. ig: @jessierdb

Judy Thorn (she/they) was raised by a family of working class artists in the US, the UK, and Canada. She attended Concordia University in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke where she won the Irving Layton Award. Thorn is editor of May Wall Press, a trans-operated literary project based in Portland, OR. Her recent or upcoming creative work can also be seen in addanomadd, carte blanche, Cirque, and The Gravity of the Thing.

Katie Catulle (she/her) is a writer from rural Appalachia and is currently based in Cambridge. Her work (fiction and poetry) explores themes of liminality, fragmentation, and home, and has appeared in Forever Mag, Poetry Ireland, and The Reverie. Katie is working on her debut novel.

Kayla Thompson (she/her) is a writer living in Brooklyn. She graduated from New York University (NYU) with a degree in English and American Literature and is a candidate for the MFA in Poetry at Hunter College. She is currently the lead Senior Editor of Poetry at Fruitslice, and her work has previously appeared in both Fruitslice and Bitter Melon Review

Ké Kampeas-Rittenhouse (they/she/he) writes magical stories for kids of all ages, makes art, and creates custom 'Inner Sprite' oracle cards using images from children's books. Their writing has appeared in The Toast; cléo: a journal of film and feminism, where they were a senior editor; and Lickety Split, a pansexual smut zine they edited. They recently published their first children's book Mara and the Bad Wolf, a gender-magical fairy tale. Personalized oracle cards are available through their website. website: www.sunportalmedia.com ig: @kekampeasrittenhouse art ig: @mspainter_2000

Keegan Smith-Nichols (he/him) is a librarian living in Iowa. When not tracking down missing books, he can be found collecting rocks, looking for birds, and propagating houseplants. He is a graduate of Antioch College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He visits his mom in Nevada as often as he can. ig: @tetracorals

lil (they/them) is a multimedia artist based in Florida exploring themes of nature, self expression, and adaptation. lil's work has been featured in publications including Fishnet Magazine and Fruitslice, and they are currently working toward their first group exhibition. lil holds a BA in Communications and is currently teaching middle and high school. ig: @lilyrugar

Lo Lundeen (they/them) is a performance artist, producer, and painter based in Los Angeles. Their artwork delves into counter-convention, taking the mundane and flipping it on its head. Their work has been included in the Junior High Gallery's CommUnity Extended exhibition, and will be featured in the upcoming GenderF'cked independent exhibition. Lo holds a BFA in Theatrical Performance from Chapman University, and is currently performing and teaching in the city. website: www.lolundeen.com ig: @lo_lundeen

M Alzamora (she/they) is a writer and artist based in Atlanta, Georgia who cares deeply about justice. She likes playing around with style and form to create what exists inside her head. Her two cats provide moral support. Prior work has appeared in From the Sublime. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and the rest of the world!

Maria Iacob (she/her) is a multimedia artist based in Bucharest, Romania. Their work explores themes of identity, transformation, and political struggle. Drawing from both personal and collective narratives, they engage with questions of resilience and change. ig: @artspacezz

Mausoliere (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Quebec, Canada. Their work is an exorcism of feeling, wielding the dream-like synthesis of images and words in collage and found poetry to explore themes of queer identity, sexuality, childhood, religion, relationships, and mental health. Their pieces oscillate between the visceral, animal imagery of the body, the hard, confining lines of man-made structures, and the comforting softness and texture of the natural world to craft visual reflections on the experience of being.

ig: @mausoliere bluesky: @mausoliere.bsky.social

Maxwell Brad Peterson (he/him) is a photographer from Idaho, currently based in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in Film and Television from Boise State University. His work focuses on documenting the daily lives of family and friends in rural communities, with an emphasis on everyday moments and familiar spaces. He photographs friends from rural places like Idaho, Missouri, and Nicaragua, capturing quiet details and personal environments that reflect resilience, care, and belonging.

Maya Vasquez (they/elle), aka punky brujx, is a Chicane printmaker, textile artist, and amateur photographer. They publish their art under the name alienaturex. Orginally from Pasadena, CA they are currently based in Jersey City, NJ. Their work focuses on the nature of being in flux, caught between two or more worlds, trying to figure out one's place in the mess of it all.

ig: @punkybrujx / @alienaturex

Meg Streich (she/her) is a writer and nonprofit director based in Philadelphia. She is an alumni of both Columbia University and West Chester University and uses her professorial skills to run The Big Gay Writing Project, a nonprofit focused on sloppily attempting new creative endeavors as an adult. She draws lil doodles for Fruitslice sometimes as well. She is presently trying to stop her cat from eating granola. You can find her online at www.megstreich.org, @meg.bert, her nonprofit www.biggaywritingproject.org, @biggaywritingproject, or in the wild at your local Trader Joes.

Mika Deneige (she/they) is a poet and theatremaker from Treaty 6 Edmonton. She holds a BA in Theatre and International Relations from the University of Toronto. Mika's work has appeared in Funicular Magazine, The Spadina Review, and others. ig: @mika.deneige

Míša Štorková (they/he) is an emerging artist, craftsperson, and arts educator currently based on Treaty 7 land but originally from Czechia. Míša’s primary mediums are fibre arts, printmaking, and analog photography, though anything employing a tactile mixed media approach lies within their interest. Their art practice focuses primarily on the Disabled experience, matrilineal relationships, and generational trauma – whether that be in regard to biological and/or found family. Míša strives to make works questioning what we view as Fine Art, and to give voice to the ‘Othered’. ig: @mold_munchr

Noelle Kriegel (they/them) is a lesbian poet hailing from South Carolina. Their work explores landscape and themes of memory, embodiment, and recovery and has appeared in Beloved Zine, Overgrowth Press, Lunar Journal, among others. Kriegel is currently pursuing a Master's degree in English at Clemson University. ig: @carolinastunned443ver & @noellenellanneliese

Olivia Baldacci (she/they) is a mixed-media artist based in New York City, originally from Bangor, Maine. Her work explores how media helps form our cultural norms, specifically our conceptions of identity and has appeared in Feral, Brawl, The Amazine, and The Olivetree Review. Olivia holds a BA in Media Studies with minors in Art History and Women’s & Gender Studies from Hunter College. website: www.oliviabaldacci.squarespace.com ig: @oliviabaldacci

Reann Jeline (she/he/they) is a queer Filipina illustrator and painter based in California. Their work explores all kinds of love and both the intricacies and beauty of life. They hold a BFA in Illustration from Cal State Long Beach and is currently a body artist and a freelance illustrator. website: https://linktr.ee/reannwenceslao ig: @reannscanvas

Renee O’Connor (she/her) is an expressive artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores themes of self-discovery, mental health, and healing. Renee holds an MA in Marital and Family Therapy & Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University, as well as her BA in Studio Arts from UC Irvine, and is currently an AMFT and Art Therapist at a local nonprofit school. art shop website: www.etsy.com/shop/reoartshop ig: @r.e.o.art

Sarah Chin (she/her) is a writer with a day job in politics based in Chicago. She was a finalist for the 2025 SmokeLong Flash Fiction Award and was shortlisted in both the 2025 Sine Theta Magazine Fiction Contest and the 2025 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, HAD, Points in Case, The Apostrophe, and elsewhere. website: www.sarahchin.net ig: @sarah_chinchilla

Sienna Joya Haag (she/her) is an artist primarily using film photography as a medium for expression. Her work, also featured by i-D, immortalises fleeting moments in her daily life, highlighting the subtle wonders that often go unnoticed — a shadow, a ripple, a reflection. She reminds us that when you take a moment to stop and give the world the awareness it deserves, so much beauty reveals itself. Alongside this consistent devotion, she also shares glimpses of the earth through her eyes as she explores a variety of landscapes, cultures, and environments with calm curiosity. ig:@sienna.joya

Starly Lou Riggs (xe/they) is a writer, musician, visual artist, filmmaker, and model currently based in São Paulo, Brazil. Xe is a Senior Editor at Fruitslice, Editor-in-Chief of Noise Made By, and writer for The Luna Collective and The Line of Best Fit. Previous accolades include managing Eleven PDX Magazine, and contributing to Also Cool Mag, Coy Culture, Polaroid, Fotofilmic, Moody Zine, and Ouch! Collective. They can be found screaming into the void on socials as @starly.kind and under musical moniker and mythical creature Starly Kind.

Tabitha Morris (she/her) is full of love and intensity. She is a mid-twenties, woodlanddwelling Radium Girl who seeks out classically unlovable stuff, adores new wave music, and kicks it in very strange places. She likes insects and vigilantism and probably has asbestos poisoning from the abandoned fridge company on Commerce. She is back in her hometown and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks!

ig: @deferred.salavation

Taylor Michael Simmons (he/him) just turned 30 and has been thinking a lot about death lately. Not that he's planning on killing himself or anything. Just feeling forced to face the reality that we all inevitably die one day and maybe he's spent too much time on instagram reels.

Tess Conner (they/she) is a genderqueer writer and poet from Georgia. They are a literary staff member for Fruitslice magazine and published a poetry collection, Every Bald Guy Looks Like My Brother, with Bottlecap Press. Their work centers on religion, sexuality, family dynamics, and community.

Timothy Arliss OBrien (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist in writing, music composition for film and opera, and works in the visual arts. He founded, curates, and handles all the bookbinding in the podcast and small press publisher The Poet Heroic, along with its metaphysics imprint, the spell-crafting and tarot publishing Healers Coven. He is also a culinary-trained pastry chef, has a diploma with distinction in marine biology, and moonlights as the psychedelic makeup artist and drag queen Tabitha Acidz. Check out more on his website: www.timothyarlissobrien.com

Tori Usrey (they/them) also known as Fig, is an illustrator, graphic designer, and mixedmedia artist currently pursuing their BFA in Graphic Arts from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. With focuses on illustration and printmaking, they aim to process personal experiences and educational material through the intersections of sustainability, digital, and tangible analog work.

website: www.likethefruitarts.squarespace.com ig: @likethefruitarts

William J. O’Brien (Billy, he/him) is an artist, teacher, and writer based in Chicago. He works across different mediums to explore identity, memory, queerness, and ritual. He is currently writing essays and a memoir about growing up in Ohio as part of a traveling unicycle drill team.

website: www.williamjobrien.com ig: @william.j.obrien

Yvette Sin (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and bookseller living in the Hong Kong diaspora, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From found objects, intrusive thoughts, and good gossip, she creates: poems, mistakes, and moving images. ig: @artboysin__

Acknowledgements

Repair is at times painful, and always deeply necessary. We cannot start repairing without looking towards each other to net ourselves together. We are grateful for all the hands that have touched the work here.

To our contributors: Thank you for making your art and your writing. Creation is a reparative process, and we appreciate the energy you took to look at scars, locate wounds, and make stories that are repairing, that are caring, that are grasping for something better.

To our staff: We thank you deeply for your labor, and for working together to stitch this issue into something whole. Thank you for riding the road of repair and weaving the art and stories here with your love and energy.

To our readers: Thank you for opening yourself up to the many iterations of Queer repair found here. We hope that you find something you want to finish repairing, a twin stitch, or even something you can take with you to patch in your own life.

We are honored to be building, smashing, and repairing alongside you.

Art by banner beard