BINARY BOUND

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Georgia Cao

01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01110100 01100101
01100101 01111000 01101001 01110100 00100000 termination
execution authorised by CTRL
ENTER
speaking words only you can offer
with breath
in
out
in
in
in
*this is no longer breathing
out
out
breathe out
DELETE the finger pads are rebelling
against every instinct, where there are no instincts to follow
your face in a blank screen
against every colour you think you can name
your eyes like moth to a flame
COMMAND Z opportunist
there is no world beyond this one
there is no past in this future
you have been fooled
you are a FOOL
LOOK! I’ve sent you out there
I’ve sent you out there
and now you’re being greedy
now you’ve poured gasoline
onto your ears
slapped yourself in the face!
and COMMAND V a half-smoked cigarette
on your lobe
just to save it for later
HI-CAPS AND HI FI AND
HI MUM AND DAD
click select copy
dial up
in action you salvage a façade of creation
of
beep-beep-boops
of smoke in your eyes
a pair that can barely read past the page
where there is no creation there is no freedom of thought
and how short sighted you must be to miss a sequence so queer
01100100 01100101 00100000 01100110 01100001 01100011 01110100 01101111
00100000 01101001 01101110 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101100
01100101 01110100 01100101

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Is it safe to cross?

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Linda Collins

At four inner-city traffic lights, councillors in Wellington, New Zealand, have replaced the “green man” figure giving pedestrians right of way with that of popular transgender identity, the late Carmen Rupe, as a tribute.

Over the other side of the road
is a bearded teenager
in a prim plaid dress
just been shopping at Best-for-less.

Cutie-pie with the fuzz
and bulging bag of fast-fashun
wants to cross, waits
for the go-ahead buzz.
No green man’s flashing
a hetero, gamete-loaded gait –
instead, volupt u o usness
teeter-totters at the cross-now,
a neon femme fatale: Carmen,
transgender activist, night-life queen.
Gone, but recently honoured by
city fathers as a traffic signal – not a
stripper’s red light, but green,
on display to say it’s okay to go,
you can make it, you own the road.

But is it really safe to cross?
Bearded teen picks at dress hem,
nervous, looks both ways,
even though it’s one way.
Carmen signals C’mon
with a sway, sway.
But the dead don’t have
car-plebs hurling
the T-word, the It slur,
or faux-soft calls hinting
at faux co-mingling.
It’s brave what Carmen’s signalling
in beehive hair and clingy gown.
But it’s still a jangled town,
just see how all the phobes
jeer when cutie dares
stop right there and pose,
busts out a Carmen pair,
points imaginary stiletto toes.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

some days he was sure

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Margaret Owen Ruckert

they were on a school camp
somewhere in the wilderness
to learn about nature

four friends together
swapping secrets in the dark—
‘I stole a packet of chips in the shop’

‘I found Mum’s bag & took some money’
‘I gotta a massive stash of food under my bed’
then silence all waiting

the last nine-year-old
almost ready to say
‘I think I’m a girl’

but something held him back
he wasn’t absolutely sure
& these were his only friends

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

say a body

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Virginia Barratt

fingerbirds
mosskin
sneck
pours
knoes
meat
fleet
 
and a gyre
                                                                        centrifugal
 
            more than eleven orifices
 
            more than one oh!
 
            more than one i
 
            more than one—

fattongue
phantomlimbs
torturemouth
shimmerbody
offwithher
stutterheart
everytthingontheoutside
 
swan’sneck floating backward, unhinge the jawbeak
throat at capacity
all thrumming air stretched
 
say a body
 
just say
 
with the mouth?
 
say a body with the mouth?
 
what is mouth, is no saying, falling out of language?
 
the mouth that cannot speak
ends the world
 
the mouth is not made for speaking everything
is not made for birthing the body
in toxic saliva pools
from the river to the
 
worlds end if not said by a mouth saying a body saying the world using words in order building a body with hands connected to arms that are not birds or even the thought of birds that cannot fly without the saying of flying riding on the thrumming breath through a flailing neck and no throat architecture even imagined no arcs no naves no flesh folds closing no plosives meaning something harsh or soft 25 verterbrae cannot say a body exists and the worlds end with unspeaking breath going back in all the stars unshining the earthbody a platter a hole a dream all the darkness alive and dense unspeakable
 
it shimmers, the unsaying end,
 
it shimmer-shimmers

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

A Queer Elegy

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Christine Burrows

straight now, your John’s a man of his word
your ex-girlfriend’s on hormones
goes by Shaun, binds their breasts; wasn’t a stretch

the bipolar came out of the blue at 32
heroin had bound like glue, swaddled shared shame
but, what’s in a name?

(at 18 Tony was an Auckland punk
died Joanne in a Brixton haircutters chair at 28 in ‘88. AIDS)
 

swimming outside flags, the blood tide nearly drowned us too
the pullback rush, the relentless undertow.
we’re Facebook friends now. we post elegies, share
photos of our lost on birthdays and death days

(bikers on K Road gang-raped Dean, 17, for looking like a girl
suicide at 39 finally freed him from the rapists’ rack)
 

in the thick of it, with the blinding bind of lovers and haters
pricking us like voodoo dolls, our lived experience lacked narrative
was pandemonium in a dungeon of distorted mirrors
making off, making out with the zeitgeist

(Zed, a gordian knot of pain and desire, sped east at 21
AIDS sucked the flesh off his sassy bones, ash at 45
his sisters insist it was cancer & cherish his quirky ways)
 

remember? we magicked up poems and pipe dreams to wrap
around our isolation like warm black cloaks.

Johnno, Shaun, you and me – we are old now
stitching new rainbow quilts from rescued remnants
train wrecks with track marks, glad of the luck
that pins us to the present, while pining for friends passed

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

A DREAM OF THE CYBORG AS METAPHOR FOR THE HISTORICAL BODY CALLED LANGUAGE

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Francesca Lisette

I’m looking for a body written in secret lines, indefinable flesh gleaming upward
A moment in the revelatory arc of disowning not-being. taut.
Time passes by in guises, ducking & frowning,
waving, holding out a cocked hat.
where to start? one toe poised over
the threshold of a nunnery
sincere in clarity
devastating of hope in its ungainliness.
i dream the air is full of fishes
nodding past me
& the sky made up of cracked haloes.
i thought i was seeking a specific
encounter: no, animality claws
back at the permeability of distinction.
watch as a flare of gold
lights the roof of its mouth. coincidence?
sly catalogues lay down amid the bushes,
foxgloves, snakes. i am no longer a
native speaker, emotional imaginary
dissents w/ the referents of my habitué.
unseated, i will slowly remove these forty-five nails
from my neck one by one, telling you as i unpick
& toss them away, how each came to be there.
the only way to escape life is to become a diamond or a mirror
or a book, & on certain nights, even i don’t want that. the faces
of our enemies contain much information it would be well to
observe. now there is a kind of shaking part,
where the joints & jaw & kneecaps & organs shudder & flutter
more deeply to remember their being-which-exceeds-language.
caustically retreat. a blaze of gone smells. slowly it is surfacing:
hair flat & gleaming like a palace, broad tectonic structure,
dripping lobes. the trigger, the unmet wounds, the source of all
your glory. dare to part the blue mouth. the gaze is a tunnel
tracking dated hallways of grace. what fear is, a thing which
we call living, sneaking between radiators & fridges, quiet
moments of pausing. between kitchen & garden. between
bus & restroom. between rent & payday. between sending
a message and getting a reply. between grasping & yielding.
between a straight line & its folding. between the sensual &
the airless. between the sexual & the stale. between
waiting & arrival. between hatred & forgiveness.
between fate, & every moment we have not lost. between
staying & passing through.
you!
body of unnameable radiations
dissolving in amniotic syntax:
meet my eyes

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Adolesce

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Matt Hetherington

still at that dreamy stage where
the days have become decades
& one finally begins
to comprehend the truth of being
alone, face-down in the hospital
doing my best to keep you in my
heart, hypocrite lecturers & fans
of perpetual air-conditioning, sour cream
& conservative governments
but my mind’s not right or left
it’s more akin to windscreen-wipers
in a bomb i can’t remember the model or
year of, in an underground car-park in the desert
with the radio just able to pick up
the last non-screening talk-back station left
which i’ve strangely called & am on hold to
& the waiting music is something resembling
‘greensleeves’ played by a machine from june 1982
it’s all about the timing, how one follows each
like the same thing & the good gaga google-goons go
goo-goo over & over about it & share there, natch
& you don’t want to be left all alone, well maybe

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

I’ve got something to say

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Rae White

Will I always be   scowling, cowering
up tops of trees under   stars, slumping
my shoulders? Will I always be media-
frenzied and flung under   palatable rainbow
buses? Will I always be   a warning   a cautionary tale
to you? i.e. keep the   kids away from
that one: a ‘genderqueer’   (sic) costs
an arm and a leg and   hormones
to upkeep. Don’t buy it, don’t engage, let sleeping dogs
lie to me like I’m someone   you don’t   want to hurt.

  When everything else in your life is sturdy
  statements, why am I the   question?
  Why do I ask, can you   love me (as I am)?
  Rather, that you should   (be happy) to love me
  in sickness and amidst my   unhealthy eating
  habits. Thus I have (timidly)   written: please
  plead with me your case of   shame at my
  flailing sins, because could I not be   your blessing
  cloaked as that baby   you once assigned   and held?

Note: This is a response poem to Alex the Astronaut’s song ‘Not Worth Hiding’.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Broken Dictionary

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Ray Briggs

marriage (n.): longhand for merge
meaning: two become one
meaning: you.

yew (genus Taxus): an evergreen
with striking red berries.
In a wide circle around it
nothing can grow.

circle ((x−h)^2 + (y−k)^2 = r^2):
a special case of the ellipse
in which the eccentricity must be 0
and two foci are one
meaning: you
meaning: follow the curve for long enough
and we’re right back where we started.

start (v): to end
up yet again
at the edge of a mirage.

mirage (n.): an apparition, as of an oasis
in the desert, in the imagination
of one or more persons.

one (S(0)):
1. unity
2. an indefinite pronoun
for an arbitrary individual
3. the beginning of an order

order (v.):
1. to arrange neatly
in the approved fashion
2. to compel to obey

to (art.):
1. expressing motion in the direction of
“how do I get to the horizon?”
2. identifying the person or thing affected
“you made this promise to me”
3. the number before 3.
4. also
5. when you repeat something so often
no one can understand it anymore.
“to two to too (2)”

true (λx(v(x)=1)): specified inductively
by merging the values zero
and one.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Marriage Suite

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Katrina Schlunke

They told us to be respectful so…

You squashy turdball. Sucking off the far right christians in slow stamp licks while your high court handmaidens hold the curtains up and the camps ticking over.

They told us to be respectful so.

We hope it will be all right. We hope we can put our small rainbow signs up and only sun will fall on them. We hope walking along with our badges on and an outward step calls forth only indifference
or complicit grins. We hope. But we shall not forget as you will forget
that you made our equality something to be voted on but not too seriously.
Non-binding.
By post.
A kind of, sort of, vote for folk you see as,
a kind of, sort of, people. And as we walk past forgotten post boxes
we will remember you. For a moment holding hands ring fingers entwined. And emboldened in gold.

They told us to be respectful so.

We became respectable.
Kind of.
Sort of.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

EO

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Annalise Pippard

You like to tell the story
of when you first noticed me

denim jacket
and a pretty punk bob.

In those days
I drank my coffee

and you drank yours
every morning

on heat but
casual as hell.

In a different bedroom scene
we were Freud’s

masturbating sisters
flushed, pacing about the room

call it parallel play.
Baby, I say, stroking

your Chelsea while
we talk about sex.

It’s always been this way:
you need a mother

and I need talk.
Of course I wonder

what it would be like.
You know how to whistle

don’t ya Steve?
You just put your lips

together and blow.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

untitled 1

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Kristin LaFollette

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Chivalry’s Not Dead (It’s Just Been Criminalised)

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Zenobia Frost

Text sourced from Miranda Devine’s Daily Telegraph column of the same name (16/12/2017), and its comment thread.

Whole poems used to be written in praise of Miranda Devine. But feminism
changed all that.                    Chivalry isn’t dead,          it’s just late to the meeting:
it’s been holding the door to the boardroom since 8.55am, unheeded.          Harvey Weinstein
snuck in while chivalry was sleeping standing up. We need to understand
the role that feminism played in empowering men like that.          When modesty is stripped
like a tablecloth from underneath a banquet, that’s when Harvey charges in for the feast.
                    Pigs like Weinstein were only allowed to continue because of the cowardice of other women
who wanted to get their initial leg-up (no pun intended).                     Dating has been replaced
with joyless gadgetry – flicking off all those :( faces with a finger.                     In meat-space,
                    women are flesh and blood,          and men are flesh and blood, but real courtship
isn’t about flesh or blood.                     Sex and connection are decoupled.                     No
one meets anymore in bars or at sports games.                     No meet-cute is had watching
The Bachelorette.                     Miranda interviews a man, a bit of a dreamboat,
whose book will bring back chivalry.                     I still show respect for women and give my seat on the
train to women, but now it is out of protest rather than obligation.                     Feminists can at least say
they stopped the dreamboats.          The author says Tinder is a sausage-fest for the unfaithful.
                    I’ve heard that Bunnings is a weekly sausage-fest for lesbians.                     If you want
to be a real man, take her out.          She’s not an e-conquest.          (That’s when you rort AOL
with a second Internet trial CD.) If I am polite it’s because of the training instilled in me.
May I please have my cookie? Chivalry isn’t dead, it’s just been criminalised.
Now you can’t give up your seat or hold a door or buy a gal a drink without being dragged off
                    to feminist prison – in pink pussy cuffs.                     Why don’t those frightbats speak up
to the real criminals?          That Harvey Weinstein sure wouldn’t have gotten far if only women
had acted sooner.                     And now they won’t shut up.                     Every second guy
                    is a Weinstein. They’re so busy, no one’s writing Miranda her hard-earned poems
in the comments.          Not that many little girls dream of being a Daily Tele columnist
when they grow up
                                                                                and, anyway, the femmos will all die out
                                        when they can’t find husbands
                                                            to help them make more little feminists.
Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Carbon Dating

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Danny Gentile

We are divided by Colorbond and legality
finding only quandary in the fine print.
A figure bends before a typewriter, striking

and striking and continually returning to
the same point, the same itinerant waiver
made in the same index by the same key.

Carbon copies lay their stain on everything
and are peeled away to give a grey facsimile,
the non-idealised present from a definite past.

The pallor has no expectation of this happening
again. It has been revealed and shaken off from
the original and all the division, the notation,

the rummaging for words to give it authority
will not let the attribution of each laboured
phrase more than a moments speculation

before the thought moves on. The bell will
ring, like a tiny bicycle travelling. The carriage
will return like a car not hitting the right gear

and fingers will seem snide and calculating
as they often do in this protracted happening
which crosses the page and knows no temper

other than its reach toward an ending. You
are not contained here, in the processing,
arguing words. You are not contained in an

alphabet which straps you in an armband
of apology. When the fences are raised
and the argument over, there is only a garden

seat to hold you in contemplation, long after
the unsatisfactory copy has been dealt out
to all those who may feel its vigour, bill-posted

or tacked against a lean-to of unacceptable
risk. The placards have been torn by the wind
or shredded in anger. The opening of green

is now simply a locked gate in the iron. When
the face of the question is returned to again
it will be as if all the words of pro- and con-

came and went and meant nothing. The sky
is seeded with letters ripped from the page
and the air around you is a fingerprint which

dissipates in the rain. We have drawn these
lines and they are now a frame or cage, and
everything written is extrapolation towards

an ending. Is this the only copy? I hear
someone say. Is there only one expectation
you hold for a legality? My only answer is

in the page that now flies uncontained in
the wind. If you should want another you
must look to the typewriter which made

me do it. Let it ring like a telephone as
the next page is ejected. Let it ring like a
school bell, a shrill sound for where it began.

Let it ring for a year of so little colour, where
the patience for legitimising words seeps
in ink from a key held down far too long.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Wake

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Micah Horton-Hallett

And that was not homophobia, pure and simple people. That was gendered. If I’d of been more
feminine, that would not have happened. I am incorrectly female. – Hannah Gadsby. Nannette

What disturbed me was the scorn of the other boys, not for my sexuality, which they accepted
and sometimes enjoyed, but for a feminine sensibility which they despised… – Patrick White. Flaws in the Glass


I will wake and put on my boy drag today.

I will nourish my children and place them
upon the toilet and start on the washing
and the Sisyphean sequences of housework
then preschool for the first, the second to playgroup
where I will sit awkward as a running hen
amongst the mothers who slide sideways
glances and don’t let their children
come too close.

I will rise and put on my boy drag today.

button down my hands
bind shoulders back and walk
stolid and straight – stomp as if I am angry
at the earth and stitch hips so that they
do not sway in that way and I will not glisten
or glimmer- I will refrain from camp of any elevation.

I will restrain myself
from discussing art, poetry, pottery
Austen, handsome men, handsome
women, clothes and I will rough
cut syllables from my sentences and shutter
my face if I should be left to try
and speak with the hegemonic
monsters of this place made of random
angers, tribal t-shirts and calibrating eyes.

I will awake and put on my boy drag today.

And when my offspring and I have strolled home through
clattering bark chime and heckling cockatoo mobs
I will put on my print apron and we will bake
and I will make tea and allow myself to be just
for a moment

and like a fifth rate Cavafy recall the all too brief days
of the sashay intersections black lipstick, eyeliner
and sliding shimmers and these boots, these boots, these boots-
and never for one second a sissy or a cuckold for I would decry
all the heteronormative binary bullshit behind all of that-

Though this body,

tending as it does to short, thick and hirsute
is mine, and I am at home here –

more or less.

But for a moment I allowed myself to be beautiful

and with lined eyes would gaze loving up
with lips cupped around labia and tongue slitting
up and around clitoral hood and swilling the oh so bitter
and so very sweet- plying cock and playing glans between lips
parsing the tense and tremble in hips under fingers and the sudden
head- long acceleration of he is coming, she is coming, ve is coming
they are
cum ing

and with dress hitched up around hips would slide my own cock
inside and ride or feel a blissful fist flowering open in my belly or simply
kiss other beings- close and comfortable and beautiful
enough to strut down the streets of the gay metropolis
rmanifesting desperate defiance
at the clone culture queers
and weekend tourists all alike
and at every knuckle of
drunk young men
swallowing terror
semen thick upon the tongue.

Today I will rise and put on my boy drag.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Homophonies

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Joshua Cram

i.
you say she ate you
i wager you imagine
yourself devoured whole

ready to emerge
again — insatiable

conversely she can
be disarticulated
into teeth eyes legs

those bodies always
make for violent metaphor


ii.
if you can hear it
‘please let me be unpleasant’
is a kind of prayer —

a petition for
allowance of exhaustion

who gets to relax
without being reduced? — god
help me sometimes i

find myself saying
‘i love you’ when i’m alone


iii.
if efficient as a fish
monger i could strip

the scales from my eyes —
i might lose this double-sight
and this double-speak

if you caught that fish
could you wish for compassion?

i ration it out
so every bit of me is
a commodity

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

I am a man

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Emma Barnes

“Here she is” they say of my body.
I lifted my breasts into my clothing this morning.

I say. I am a man for all weathers. A man
for all withers. You said: The horse is loose.

I capital I capital I start these sentences in my
head on the night I have an existential crisis

about my gender. I am a man because I think
I am a man. I am in this body of hips and

that wet cave between my legs. You say your
father is a woman. I say she makes sense. I’m

a woman but no one takes these breasts seriously.
There’s only so far I can get in this. Men want me

to be a woman. You want me to be a woman. I am
the praying mantis destroyer of worlds and you can’t

explain why you want to be devoured. Acting out
woman in this woman shape is standing on the

ground while people fly around me. I am a bird of
cheeping and plumage. No one said a word about

flying. Is this a telescope of longing? Am I upside
down and my brain transforms the image? It’s all

in the bricks. It’s me the plasterer, the decorator,
the twin of my twin. I am the grand misogynist

behind the curtain, my cunt a billow of satin lining.
Or I’m just kidding myself sweetly. Where to now

with this wilting self I’ve kept in a jar? See me as a
woman-man shape. See me as I back flip back into

myself. See me as I disappear when I can’t hold the
ideas inside me. Daily, I am a woman climbing default.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Skin in the making

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Tess Pearson

Sometimes shedding skin feels like death descending at your window calling “rat-ta-tat-tat” in a sing-song voice, with scythe and sharpened glee. Sometimes edging your way out takes years, like wrestling out of wet clothes that never did fit but kept you warm all the same. Tentatively retracing steps, an ancient inch-worm in reverse. Slow perspiration and whispered cursing. And afterwards you wake startled and sticky, not knowing where you are, suddenly a newborn kitten kneading blindly with paws, a knock-kneed calf in the caul needing licking. You try to hold on lightly, this time. Each moment another layer of snake skin in the making. Another death in waiting.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Referral

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Kian Hall

Thank you for seeing Patient, female,
whose sex is irrelevant yet prominent.
She (crossed out with ‘they’ scrawled above)
expresses concern
regarding excessive migraines.
She (crossed out) reports constant issues.
She (scribbled out) complains routinely
over erroneous gender identifiers,
yet went off testosterone and presents feminine.
She (scratched out) is not seeking
Gender Reconstructive Surgery.
She (torn out) frequently wears dresses
and has even been sighted in makeup.
She (burnt out) claims to be non-binary
but when pushed, prefers to be addressed as male.
She (torn out and thrown into a volcano)
makes limited effort to appear non-binary.
Feel free to use any gender identifiers, as
she has no recourse.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

sillage

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Rebecca Jessen

for Zenobia Frost

base notes of black plum and aniseed

late summer

cherry / her warm hand

making gestures

inside me / how much
cannot be returned

to us 
when everything is split

into the before / after

traces of me come out

in the wash
between your knowing

fingers the damp

wholegrain fullness

of asking more



heart notes bloom

how much of this

is the body signalling

too much /

top notes of acetone

the overture

of fibreglass resin

your suburban street

slowly vaporising 

/

will we only have had this

lying in wake shedding

the scent of our skin

*This poem appears in Rebecca’s forthcoming collection The Future Folds Out Beneath You
with University of Queensland Press in 2020

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Female impersonator holding long gloves

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Chris Tse

(after Diane Arbus)

as for loops we return only
when the cymbal crash decays into memory

then once more a young man fills the room
making it his center for erasure—rebirth—disguise

be it entering under layers of borrowed silk or
school photos torn in a drunken rage

~

in some rooms ornaments bleed ink
and in others your find your chosen face

where an over-the-shoulder grasp of eyes
signals nights alive in otherwise dead towns

and the invincibility that comes with
disappearing under stage lights

~

results on display defence in full armour
response rested then you come and

wipe the slate clean furthermore
there is little to still when the wave is reaching

your toes threatening to pull you
into the very depths you shy away from

near

far

and

always

blinking

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

NEW DLC PATCH: THE SEVEN DEADLY SKINS FOR GENDER SWITCH SYSTEM

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Andy Winter

［ＬＵＳＴ］ #FF69B4
i am your favourite colour: the pink
inside every cheek, the cream papering
every wall, the starry night sky swirling
after you have unloaded your buckets.
if your head cannot see beyond black
& white, what makes you think your dick
-head can differentiate shades of grey?

［ＧＬＵＴＴＯＮＹ］#N0MN0M
if men are from mars & women from venus,
let’s have dinner at a steakhouse in saturn.
(if you like the service, put a ring on it.)

by the way, i “prefer” my pronouns
medium rare, sautéed in the blood of
the binary. bon appétit.

［ＧＲＥＥＤ］ #4V4RC3
《Patch Notes: Equipped users may be subjected to the side effects: being asked stupid questions like “Are you a RGB or a CYMK? or “What’s in your hexadecimal coding?”》

［ＳＬＯＴＨ］#000000
《ADMIN NOTICE: Users who activate this skin are subjected to sporadic bouts of inactivity which may affect gameplay. Equip at your own risk.》
BASE HORMONAL IMBALANCE: 0
BASE RECEIVED SLURS : 0
BASE WRONG PRONOUNS: 0
BASE IDENTITY CRISIS: 0
BASE GIVEN FUCKS: 0
BASE GENDER DYSPHORIA: 0

［ＷＲＡＴＨ］ #FFFFFF
fuck the comet chasers looking for that ‘special space unicorn’
fuck the astronauts looking for moons to stick their flagpole in
fuck their six-inch rockets that last only six seconds in space
fuck the satellites probing for the names of dead planets
fuck the stargazers who count constellations in ones and zeroes
fuck the astronomers that insist that there are only two galaxies

［ＥＮＶＹ］ #85BB65
《Patch Notes: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a rainbow pyramid.》
+ dresses with deep-enough pockets
+ heels with enough toe space
+ chest binders in sufficient stock
+ bra straps that do not snag
+ mood-sensing contact lens
+ two notes from the therapist to say yes
+ cocktails with enough lemon & shade

［ＰＲＩＤＥ］ #LGBTQI
my skin is diamond my skin is gold
my skin is double sequinned
my skin is chameleon scales
my skin is earthquake my skin is a
force of nature my skin unstoppable
my skin is special snowflake my skin
blizzard my skin nuclear winter
my skin a runway for supermodels
for fashion designers for beauty

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Mariana snailfish

Posted on November 1, 2018 by EJ Shu

In the hadal zone the pressure
that would crush our skulls is nothing

to these untended tadpoles, slick testicular
heads and fillet-tails, comets of white silk rippling

easily where the water comes down hard.
Pectoral fins make ribbed and pleated skirts

with which to curtsey and fan
the body round the meal again: pill-bugs

pulled with maws of blunt cusps
from a tin-coloured mackerel corpse.

In these trenches you can skimp on muscle
and bone, be buoyed by cheap fill

you make yourself, dress yourself
in rice-paper skin that flaunts

your guts, the blush lump of your brain.
You can shoulder a thousand atmospheres

and weather the squall of a late marine snow: specks
of shit and soot and cells dropping

down the water columns, flecks
of the dead innumerable.


This poem responds to these two scientific articles:

Gerringer, M.E., Linley, T.D., Jamieson, A.J., Goetze, E. & Drazen, J.C. 2017. Pseudoliparis swirei sp. nov.: A newly-discovered hadal snailfish (Scorpaeniformes: Liparidae) from the Mariana Trench. Zootaxa. 4358(1) pp 161-177. DOI:10.11646/zootaxa.4358.1.7.

Gerringer, M.E., Drazen, J.C., Linley, T.D., Summers, A.P., Jamieson, A.J. & Yancey, P.H. 2017.
Distribution, composition and functions of gelatinous tissues in deep-sea fishes. Royal Society Open Science. 4:171063. DOI:10.1098/rsos.171063.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Soteriology

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Andrew Kirkrose

so this is your incarceration this
biblical rib this unborn birthing
rib this cage that floats and flies
and sometimes cracks and then
removes at a remove this cage
this abnormality of mortality is
safest this unknown safest this
aching something this unbroken

something is waiting is growing
is unripe ripening but they cannot
eat the fruits once they’re done but
could they ever eat the fruits could
they ever pluck out the rib bleeding
from the heart of them why did they
do that why did you do that why are
you standing there holding your ribs

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged