Chris Tse



What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry

Poetry is booming in Aotearoa, and nobody can quite say why. What’s stirring our blood in the plague years / this sixth mass extinction / our deteriorating climate of political and literal atmospheres?

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

X / O / X

          “You never gain weight from a doughnut hole.”                          – Tori Amos the smaller the hole, the sharper the whistle / paperclip in power socket / needle eye glowing in the dark / tonight X is no name / X is …

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

Female impersonator holding long gloves

(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 …

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Belated Backstory

There were animals. They came to me with their bloodstained murmurs choking the night, the weight of misery a gloom in their throats. Beasts of all shapes and mythologies scratching at the soil around my grave, each one driven by …

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged