We are living in a time where authenticity is a finite resource. Each passing day, the digital world is feeling less and less human. You don’t have to scroll far on your phone to be bombarded by images of people who don’t exist, advertisements trying to sell you products that might not be real. Your mum sends you an A.I. portrait she made of herself as a viking warrior. She likes it very much. You want to know what year the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded (1986) and Google’s A.I. tells you to kill yourself. All you want to do is open your phone without the inbuilt assistant screaming at you.

So you turn off your phone and take a walk down the street, try and breathe in the fresh air, look up at the trees and the old crumbling architecture that surrounds you. Tacked to the windows of the shops you pass are posters churned out of some slop-factory, riddled with inconsistencies and glaring mistakes. You enter a cafe, sit and order a breakfast and a tea, or a coffee if you prefer, and while you wait you look to your left; on the wall is a mural featuring people with the exact same face, the exact same grey look in their eyes. One of them has six fingers on each hand and drinks out of one-and-a-half cups of coffee. It’s undoubtedly been pumped out of some machine. There is no humanity behind it. No authenticity. You can’t trust anything.

You’re overcome with a sense of despair. When nothing around you is real, what does that make you? What does it mean to be authentic? 

---

In this first issue of Flare we have compiled a selection of stories, poetry and essays, all of which aim to answer this question. Each of the writers published here do so in different ways, be that through Kofi Opam’s heartfelt and reflective prose in Won’t You Talk to Me, or the experimental and radical writing of Charly Murmann in The Circle, in Repeat, and David Devanny in Pea Rockeries. Dolly Nash and Janea Mancheski explore gender roles in After Eden and Playing it Cool respectively, whilst Mary Chhea and Jessica Bragg explore the female experience in A Kid’s Guide to Perimenopause and The Night Before New Years Eve. In A Chinese Family Gathering, Cece Daise reflects on the experience of not relating to your own family and culture and in Dull Reflections, Hannah Simpson deconstructs sexuality through body-horror. Rosie Kersley Williamson writes searingly in Glass Butterfly whilst William Cass explores the lives of multiple intersecting characters in Shift Change. In My Autism, Daniel Appleby discusses neurodivergence. In Astigmatism, Emily A.L. Whatley reflects on the past. In Not England but It’s Land, Andrew Searle relates the human experience to its environment and in Identity Theft, Jon Fain depicts the very human interaction that is a first date.

Each of these writers, listed in no particular order, hit on a different aspect of the human experience. We hope that, through reading this issue and reminiscing on the work compiled within, we may have answered this issue’s, and this time’s, central question. What does it mean to be human? And further, what does it mean to be authentic?

Will Alexander 2026

“你在大学过得怎么样？” Auntie Cherry asks. Everyone else at the table turns towards me curiously, loving smiles on their faces.

I nod a few times and shove the shrimp dumpling in my mouth. It burns.

“Good.” I reply in English.

My mom gives me the look she usually does when I lie. I haven’t really lied. University is fine. It’s just not something I want to talk about with them. I’m an eighteen-year-old in a sea of people in their sixties.

My mom says something back that I don’t understand, something I can’t understand.

There’s oohs and ahhs from everyone. I just smile and nod a couple of times, and reach for another shrimp dumpling.

The conversation continues in Cantonese (as it always does), a language that I half-understand but i'm barely able to speak.

I poke a hole in the dumpling wrapper and blow a couple of times before eating it. It doesn't burn as much.

“You good?” Daikaufu asks.

His English isn’t very good but I appreciate him trying. I smile and nod. He grins toothily and tells me in Cantonese to eat some more as he shoves tofu on my plate.

I hate tofu.

I still smile gratefully and eat it, making sure to keep the smile on my face even though I want to spit the tofu back onto the plate.

Uncle Christopher starts talking to him about something so he looks away.

I grab the napkin and wipe my mouth, discreetly spitting up the tofu.

Auntie Cynthia asks me if I’m celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival this year. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do that when I’m convinced that my small Australian university hasn’t even heard of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

I give my usual answer. A short laugh and a “maybe.”

Uncle Rufus, Auntie Cynthia’s husband, asks if I want any lanterns or mooncakes to take back to Australia with me. “We have plenty of extra.”

I know they do. They bought them for their daughter Rainbow, who hasn’t come back home this year. We all know they’re disappointed but they haven’t said anything. Uncle Dan makes enough side comments about the new generation not “following their duty” as is.

I grab some noodles. “Umm, maybe.” I shove them in my mouth.

Daikaufu turns back to me. “吃多豆腐。”

I shake my head, I don’t want to eat any more tofu. If I do, I might vomit all of the food back up.

“吃多些。” He insists.

“我吃饱了。” The lie slips off my tongue. I’m not full, nowhere near it.

My mom, who’s sat on the other side of me, nudges my shoulder.

She nods at me to lean in. I do.

“Do you want to go home?” I’m surprised. My mom never lets me go home early, I’m usually stuck here for hours and hours on my phone while everyone else chats away in Cantonese.

I grab my phone. “Dad said he’d pick me up.”

My mom sighs. She knows I’m lying. Dad’s too busy at work to come to Mom’s family dinner, to come pick me up from anywhere.

She says something in Cantonese to the rest of them.

Everyone sighs dramatically and starts saying their goodbyes. They tell me to say hello to my dad for them so I assume my mom told them that he’s picking me up.

Both Daikaufu and Auntie Cherry stand up to give me a hug. It’s warm but suffocating.

Daikaufu even insists I take food with me, taking out a tupperware box he keeps on him and filling it with custard buns that have just arrived at the table.

“I’ll see you all soon.” I say as I leave. This time, I am lying. I won’t see them again before I head back to Australia.

As I leave, there’s a girl sitting at one of the tables next to the aisle. She's around fourteen and sat among a group of people who are dressed quite formally. 

She looks exactly like I do when I’m eating dinner with my mom’s family. I can tell by her blank eyes that she has no clue what’s going on. She’s got an awkward look on her face and her hand keeps sneaking to her phone, like she wants to talk to someone but she has no way of doing so, but she can’t because someone, who I assume is her mother, keeps sending her glares.

I know exactly how she feels.

I pity her.

I am watching everything around the door

So that I may steady my gaze away

When it opens to your arrival

You may observe my self control

Smoothly falling into place around me

As if the slinkiest of mink coats

This remove is my tell

You might rather see my soft white shoulders

Slipping out of such a thing

Reticence, aloofness

Pooling to the floor around our ankles

Leaving my real desire bared to you

But, my not-yet lover,

Smiling like you’ve already won,

We are in public

So let me pose in this density, this luxury

If only to grant you the pleasure

Of disrobing me with those sparkling eyes

I can feel every blazing step you take

Melting me from inside out

“A woman shall compass a man,”

So says some book called Jeremiah

Here I stand, a beacon to slake your thirst

Magnetic in this chattering tempest

Come then, and know me biblically

So it’s a regular Thursday and I’m sitting in my normal spot on the left side of the sofa with my science book on my left knee and my spiral notebook on my right knee. Julie is in her usual spot on the right side of the sofa with two textbooks and a notebook in her lap. I only have one homework to do: Science. Grade seven Science rocks because we only have one assignment for the week and the answers are in the back of the book. Julie has homework every day even though she’s three grades behind me.

Mum wakes up from her after-school nap when Animaniacs comes on and goes to start dinner, just like every day. She always takes a nap in the afternoon cos she goes to work before the sun comes up so she can pick us up from school. It’s fair though cos Dad goes to work in the afternoon and comes home after we go to bed so he can take us to school in the morning. Even stevens.

Anyway, Animaniacs is blasting all its cartoony amazingness from the big, boxy TV that would make a sweet hide-and-seek spot if we could just figure out how to get the back off without breaking it. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are trying to sweep a chimney for a guy named Ludvig who keeps saying he’s a ‘pee-anist’. Cos of his German or Austrian accent or whatever, the Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister!) say if he doesn’t clean his potty mouth, they’re gonna wash it out. I know there’s a joke in there, but the only one I can think of isn’t that funny so maybe I don’t really get it. Right when Yakko smashes a bar of green soap into Ludvig’s gob, there’s a crash from behind me in the kitchen.

My head snaps toward the sound so quick that my ponytail whips around and smacks me in the eye. Mum’s arm rises above her head and swings down, like Dave Grohl smashing his drums in that Nirvana video.

CRASH.

She bends and bobs at the waist like a dashboard hula dancer and her arm swings up and over her head again.

CRASH.

Mum’s lips are pressed into a tight, pink line. The rest of her face is hard to read but looks like it does when she’s listening to Pastor Doug talk about hell or to Dad complain about our boy-crazy sister Annie, who moved out a couple years ago right out of high school. Julie scrambles over the back of the sofa and I follow her.

CRASH.

Up close and in slow motion, I watch Mum pick up another clean glass from the dishwasher and smash it into the bin on top of the other broken, clean glasses. The bin lid is sitting next to the bin.

CRASH.

Me and Julie lunge at the dishwasher, grabbing the smashy stuff from within Mum’s reach, careful not to touch her in case she’s made of hot lava. When the glasses are gone, Mum snatches at the plastic soup bowls. The plastic adds a gross thud to the clink of the broken glass that gives me goosebumps.

The top rack is empty, so Julie starts on the lower rack. Out of ammo, Mum glides from the kitchen to the sofa and sits down in her usual spot in the middle. She only floats like that when she’s raging. Like a couple weeks ago when I stomped up the stairs and she magically appeared in my room to whack my legs with the fly swatter and glided out without even making a sound. I hadn’t been spanked in like ten years before that.

I pick the soup bowls out of the bin and put them back in the dishwasher. Julie closes up the cupboards and I shut the dishwasher quietly. I tie the rubbish bag and barefoot-tiptoerun to the wheelie bin in the back garden. When I get back inside, Julie’s scuttling up the stairs like a little spider. Her school books are about to spill out of her arms.

I crouch down in front of the sofa to get my school stuff and peek at Mum’s face. She’s just perched on the edge of the sofa, not even sitting all the way back. Her face still looks like a statue but at least her lips are normal sized again.

‘Mum, are you okay?’ I ask gingerly. She hates that question. But what else can I say? ‘We’ll put away the dishes right when we get home tomorrow.’

She stays staring hard at the TV and doesn’t answer for a whole minute. I decide to finish my homework next to her and sit down cross-legged on the living room floor.

‘Red Aunt hasn’t visited you yet,’ she says. ‘You’ll think it’s bad when she does, but it gets really bad when she stops.’ She sits back on the sofa and picks up the remote control. I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what she means. So I say nothing.

In my mittened hands so feverishly rubbed together,

Land woeful snowflakes that melt in silent despair.

Until a single drifting flake twirls into my icy palm.

I breathe softly over its still-frozen form.

It unfurls with glassy blue wings

Delicately held aloft by spindly grey legs.

The butterfly shivers under my wondrous gaze.

Rough and tumble children squeal,

Tiny feet cresting the hill to appear beside me.

I quickly hide my cupped hands,

And nervously laugh as the children ask to play.

My butterfly flutters under my coat,

Settling above my harshly beating heart.

At home I carefully close my door,

Sitting on the rumpled blue duvet.

I bring thawed red hands to my chest.

The butterfly hesitantly crawls onto my finger

Its glass wings whisper open and close,

Dancing rainbows glint in the corner of my room.

At the creak of footsteps the butterfly hides once more.

Murmurs bid me goodnight and I reply with a smile,

The door clicks shut.

Smiling face sinks into a mournful sigh,

The butterfly can only be for my eyes.

Until one day I will sit in a graffitied corner,

With another quiet child.

The playground roar muffled,

By the bricks that we will lean on.

And I will hold up a tentative finger,

To show them my glass butterfly.

They will grin and blow softly,

On its delicate frozen form.

The butterfly will leap into the clear summer air,

Rainbows dancing across its snow-blue wings.

And we will laugh as it flits away

Into sun-soaked skies.

0/0/1 

For as long as I can remember, I tend to the garden. It is no great task, nor is it simple.  

Gardens take time, consistency, patience and repetition. The garden is lush and seems to grow exponentially. Every time I think I have found the trees at the edge of the boundary, I discover new shoots, waiting to be tended.  

As of late, it is alarmingly often that one tree begins to wilt. Something disturbs her and I bring my absolute focus to her. More light? Water? Space? But plants cannot complain about conditions nor demand better treatment. They speak to me in the shrivel of their leaves or subsequent budding revival, in infestations of mites or yellowing stain. It can feel thankless at times. Once I have rescued one, I discover another is in anguish.  

Though, I cannot deny there is no greater pleasure than walking through the garden. I feel weightless here.  

The trees bear fruits. Not traditional fruits, it is not an orchard here. I am not harvesting for compote or cider or wine. I don’t quite know how to explain, I’ve never really thought to try. Be it dodos or doilies, dice or draughts, discovery or dedication. Ideas, concepts, things, animals, feelings from the world that have become extinct - I tend to them here. I keep their form, their shape, their essence intact. I presume, based on how delightfully the garden is flourishing, the world must be suffering. There can’t be much left.  

Though, I’m yet to come across people in the garden – of which I would be most grateful to find, since I could do with a team. I’m tired and it’s unabating. But, as I say, walking through the garden at times is pure bliss.  

The fruits are strange and bizarre. Some spiky and visceral, reaching off the branches as though they’d like to poke you on the nose. Others are soft and plump, inviting almost. Something sensual in their plush demeanour. Though upon inspecting them they become coy and shy away. Teasing.  

I didn’t always understand the garden. I couldn’t tell the leaves from the trees, excuse the pun. I’d look at some enormous pink lumpy thing dangling ominously and wonder what on earth could that be? (It’s cancer) Now I can tell, just by walking past. Its core breathes into me, tickles my nostrils and spins my soul. Its abstraction explains itself and knows me too. I am a specialist now. That ripe flaxen pear is unmistakeably the golden toad! Those spiky orange tangerines are definitely coins! Those purple marrows growing from the ground are surely VHS tapes!  

But recently, and it comes at quite an inconvenient time, I have started wondering. Thinking and doubting and…well I suppose feeling quite existential. Which I don’t think has ever happened to me before. But you see, I can’t remember. I only know the garden. I don’t understand who I am. I feel the fruits know me better than I know myself. I feel honoured to tend to all these species, yet I feel nervous that I have no idea to which I belong. Am I the last of my own? And I worry this uncertainty in me will be reflected in the garden somehow. Something terrible might happen. A sinkhole or some rife infection. Am I a human? Or just made to appear that way? I don’t know. I somehow don’t think so.  

I was sat by the fountain, which was once only a rivulet, when I thought to try and write. Writing has always been a form of reflection and resolving. It is the Fountain of Knowing; all sorts of philosophy and musings flow through there. The ideas converge with each other and disperse, a constant feedback looping back and trying again. The waters mumble quietly to each other and bubble excitedly when new notions arrive. Sometimes I wish I could enter the conversation and instead bask in the speckles that flutter onto me. It sits at the centre of the garden and is the only structure within it. Not composed of any earthly materials. It is the life source, where I collect water for the plants. When the garden was only a nursery, it was easy to avert the stream to feed the plants. As the garden grew, sitting by the water helped me concoct a better system by weaving baskets to reach the outer corners. I have tried to gauge my reflection from its waters, yet the constant motion, its limitless dialogue, prevents me from ever truly seeing myself. This is amusing to me; their pondering shapes my abilities to reflect.  

Surrounding the fountain are rows of beliefs, some more noble than others. Several tower and command over the rest, whilst others are less certain, shying away from taking a stand. Sometimes I feel they are trying to argue with one another across the water, but the chatter of thought drowns them out.  

Beyond them are the Mother Tongue Thickets – dense bushes full of pictographs, alphabets, dialects, patois, idioms and slang too. They playfully wrestle with one another, chuckling at differences and indulging in similarity – finding words which mean one thing here and a complete other there. The vowels are long and round, the consonants kick about, particularly the clicks who are vibrantly cheeky. Ejectives scold at the concision of brevity. And they all join to sing.  

I wonder if any of the tongues are my own? Of course, literature stems from here and grows up the giant stalk.  

Further out are sweeping Construction Canopies, full of all sorts of earthly industrialisation. Here gathers entrepreneurship, capitalism, business and the like. Grouped together and discussing commerce. With coffee tables too and paperweights, staplers, Newton’s cradle. The intentions of temples, mosques and so forth remain closer to beliefs. It is still around the spiritual development. A smell of incense drifts through the air.  

I don’t know if I sleep, or if there is day and night here. Still, I convince myself of a rhythm. Is it real? I am almost certain I have not experienced darkness here, besides the shade of the Construction Canopies.  

I sit by the iPod tree and listen to it whirr for comfort.  

Perhaps if I cannot map out myself, I can continue to map out this space? 

0/0/2 

I approach this outlining idea with caution. Chronicling comes with inherent bias, who am I to impose my own perspective?  I am especially wary of this since, long ago I attempted to introduce order. Really crack down on the categorisation of space in each section. The plants defied me with childish mutiny. They know their own classification. I have learned to listen to the garden. 

There are more ordered sections. For instance, amongst the canopies is the Electrical Avenue - full of devices. They yearn to stay together. In a kind of order of invention woven also into order of extinction. Ones that replaced each other in the world, now stand and hum in harmony. The bower of Electrical Avenue is veined with live cables, their vines twisting and pulsing, with flourishes of electrons and volts littered through. At the end of the avenue lies the patch of synthetic succulents - scentless and requiring little attention. Here, all different forms of plastic flora flourish, unbothered and eternal. 

Then there are pocket districts, not strictly linear. Such as Metallic Grove. It is listless. Still, it clamours. Everything from cutlery to pipes to nuts and bolts and hardware. In amongst all this are emotions too, such as the essence of feeling irked. Emotions appear amongst creations – and that, I think, is beautiful. Animal plants pick and choose where they scatter, for instance goats and rams enjoy the liveliness of Metallic Grove and settle here. They resisted when I tried to group them together, to create an Animal Kingdom. Such labelling is not adequate here.  

The most stimulating has got to be the Eatery. If the Fountain is the heart, the Eatery is the stomach. My oh my, the smells here are divine. Every dessert and nibble and dish of your dreams. Every culture, yes, every cuisine. They bustle together; every civilisation’s variation of the dumpling gathered for reunion in a great dumpling family tree. You can’t walk through the Eatery without smiling as the sweet and spiced aromas envelop you. 

There is the Quarantine Zone too. I do not enjoy my time there. The colours are blinding and naughty. It is all coughs and sneezes. So many diseases. So many variants. Yet the bacteria are beautiful too. The Pharmacy clinks next door, full of drugs made to soothe and never quite cure.  

I think that’s enough documentation for today, I have a lifetime to complete these records after all. 

0/0/3 

I’m beginning to feel guilty that my dating system cannot be accurate since, I existed much before. Though it does suggest to me that I must experience some kind of passage of time. How else could I differentiate the days as such? 

I don’t feel like contemplating much more today.  

It hurts to come to no answers.  

It aches somewhere. 

0/0/7 

There is a new tree in the garden, and it makes me sick.  

It is already proud and fat, somehow, having never been a sapling. I can’t help but feel some kind of hatred towards it. I water the tree but (and this is terrible to admit) I spat at it.  

0/0/10 

I approach the tree last on my rounds. I am avoiding it. 

Yet, as the days go by, I notice its core is growing something. A tumour. I fear this tree is the destroyer. The one that will threaten the garden. I create a kind of fence around it made of old branches, to try to contain its menacing energy.  

0/0/14 

This is it.  

The tree is clearly pregnant.  

It must be some kind of end of the world before.  

I am going to meet a person.  

I am frightened.  

I wish I had greater clarity on who exactly I am.  

How can I introduce myself when I only know my purpose? 

How can we share the garden? 

0/0/20 

I am too anxious to write. To document. The garden is not itself at this time. The trees speak amongst themselves in hushed tones and leave me out.  

I ground myself in the verdant grass. Bare steps across perfect wishes, fill me with hope. 

0/1/1 

I check on her very often now. Almost obsessively.  

She must almost be at full term. The gestational sac is strange and red. Very bloody liquid amidst the harsh hull of trunk. The tree looks exhausted. I have taken down her fencing. I massage her bark and tell her she’s doing well.  

I don’t think she will survive the birth.  

This fact is shocking and upsetting.  

I don’t want to be left alone with her offspring.  

0/1/2 

The tree is shrieking. The whole garden is subdued against her wails. Her pain is staggering. I limp around her helplessly, wiping her with wet leaves to try and offer relief. The sac is simply enormous. An angry red bulging yolk.  

She lets out one last scream. The sac erupts. There is a splatter of amniotic fluid at her feet. She is whimpering. I hug her tightly and find myself crying too. She is close to gone.  

When her noises stop, I look down at the discharge on the floor. Amidst the fluid there is a body. The tree bends towards him, a final act of motherhood.  

I wonder if I should leave him or wake him. He looks peaceful and I ought to tidy up the mess.  

This is the first death in the garden.  

I don’t know how to proceed. 

0/1/3 

I sat with the tree through the night.  

This morning, I have tidied.  

I leave to meditate on the situation. Craving clarity. I hear a cough which startles me. The body is up and awake and standing before me. 

“Are you Eve?” says the naked man.  

I notice for the first time that I am naked as well, it never occurred to me before. My nakedness feels different from his. His is clumsy and gauche. I feel seen, and I despise it.  

I look at him and wonder, am I Eve? Eve doesn’t feel entirely appropriate. Something in his tone is as though he’s speaking to an assistant. An Alexa. I think of the Alexa tree near to my beloved iPod tree. I wish I could go and rest there instead of deal with this delinquent.  

“I think you were made from my rib,” he continues. I look at him and try not to laugh, as though I haven’t watched him mature from a tree and fall to the ground.  

“I don’t think I was.”  

He looks off into the distance and contemplates for a moment.  

“I just have this strong sense, that you are Eve. And I am Adam. And you were made of me.”  

“Listen mate, I’ve been here, the whole time. I watered your tree.”  

I have a terrible sense that this has all happened before. Or something fatally similar. Perhaps a different cast, but the same set of characters. How many times now? 

0/1/4 

A smell of rotting fruit has invaded the garden. It is sickly sweet. Hot summer refuse. 

I am trying to keep my distance, which shouldn’t be challenging in such a huge garden, but he is like a rash and appears everywhere. He craves company, I think. Socialisation.  

He asks what we do here and I tell him I garden. He seems dissatisfied with this. He wants something more.  

0/1/5 

I express to him; the tree was his mother and that we must mark her passing somehow. Where she has gone is an eternal mystery and plays on my mind constantly. Is there another garden? For this one? If there is, who cares for that one? He says he could make an instrument from her body.  

I conduct a ceremony alone. I do not wish to record it; you don’t need to know everything. There is privacy here.  

0/1/7 

I have noticed fruits dropping. This is new too and puts me at unease. I have set up a composting department. I can’t think what else to do. 

He picks up pages of these. That which I spent precious time drying to write on.  

“We can use these, to create fire!” he declares triumphantly.  

We have no need for fire. He is surely deranged.  

0/1/7 

He has eaten fruit from the garden. A concept which has never occurred to me. His excuse was his hunger. We must be different. I have only seen hunger grow from branches.  

The trees that have been eaten from look shy and embarrassed. I try to revive them. They tremble.  

The date. I’ve repeated? Something is not right with me. 

0/1/10 

Several times he has broached the subject of reproduction.  

I tell him we are surrounded by life. I feel no necessity to attempt more. (I do not tell him my uncertainties as to what I am. He is still sure I am from his rib).  

0/1/15 

He has declared he will write too, to record his perspective. At least he does not want to burn pages (for now). 

0/1/20 

He calls it his garden and I have become embittered. I am jealous.  

Some of the trees respond to him now. Not me. They do not care that I am the one that tends to them. As he frolics around, I am starting to hate this garden. There is something thick in the air.  

0/1/22 

I think I am sick.  

The tiredness never lessens.  

0/1/25 

I think I am dying.  

I am still tending to the garden.  

I am trying to teach him what I know. His spirit is strong and ungracious. I fear for the garden’s future.  

0/1/26 

I am terribly weak and beg him to pick up responsibilities. He treats me fearfully. It is uncomfortable for him to see me this way. He placates me by helping. I worry his soul is not in the work. 

0/2/1 

He rests me in the cave of his mother. He is trying to be kind and gentle, but I cannot appreciate it. Even now, he grates me.  

“Thank you,” he says, “from all of us. You don’t need to work anymore.”  

I focus on the hum of the garden.  

I think I have been planted. 

Where will I go?

"Death is not static, and life is not quick.”

- A Haitian Proverb

...

I learned about Brandon ten years ago. I was a young queer person—although I didn’t use those words to describe myself, burrowed myself in labels like lesbian—and I sat in a circle of other 18-year-olds. It was September muggy that Friday, and I struggled to maintain focus as sweat pooled in the spaces between our thoughts. It was only the second meeting of the LGBT Book Club, and we were stumbling through a discussion of Aphrodite Jones’s book All S(he) Wanted: The Brandon Teena Story.

“I don’t understand, so is it a boy or a girl?”

“Why didn’t she just move to a city or something if she was so confused?” “I mean, what do you expect…it’s Nebraska.”

“Trying to pass for a dude…isn’t that, like, anti-feminist?”

I laughed with the others, the sound making rusty bandsaw blades of my throat. I wasn’t trans at the time, not yet, hadn’t quite realized it yet. I didn’t know how close my life’s trajectory would bring me to Brandon.

Ten years, and five surgeries, and two hundred thousand dollars in medical debt, and nine-hundred and ninety-five miles driven West, and unending statuses and letters and postcards and conversations explaining my name and voice and body and arm and life…all brought me to Iowa, brought me to Brandon, brought me to a winter afternoon scrolling through blog posts.

My friend Oliver had just published an essay commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of Boys Don’t Cry, the film that made Brandon’s story famous: “Watching [the movie] again, I wrestled with the fact that there are relatable elements of Boys Don’t Cry that speak to my experience living in a transmasculine body.”

In loving prose, my friend reminds me of the Real oy that is Brandon, that boy in the cowboy hat and Wranglers, blowing kisses to girls across rural roller rinks, running laughing from their brothers through the Nebraska starlight. Brandon was a young trans man from Lincoln—locals call it the Star City—was murdered by two men who he thought were his friends. He died twenty-five years ago, my friend wrote. New Year’s Day 1993, in a farmhouse in Southeastern Nebraska.

Nebraska. Reading my friend’s words, all lit up like cigarette embers on my computer screen, I remembered that I now live in the Midwest, in a town that is the closest to Nebraska I have ever and may ever live.

...

Brandon was born on December 12, 1972 to a single mother in Lincoln. He lived with his family in the Pine Acres Motor Home Park, now a few scattered homes on the northern edge of the city. He went to Catholic school his entire life: St Mary’s until eighth grade and Pius the Tenth for high school. Brandon was an outspoken boy, apparently always getting into fights with the priests. A few weeks before graduation, he was expelled for low attendance and low grades.

He ran away from Lincoln that summer, followed Highway Seventy-Three south before stopping in Falls City. Brandon enjoyed the small town, liked that nobody knew him there.

A few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Brandon sat in an old farmhouse, talking and smoking with two of his new friends. Late into the night, two self-proclaimed rednecks named John Lotter and Tom Nissen broke into the farmhouse, stinking of grain liquor and chew. They pressed a gun to Brandon’s chin and blew away the back of his skull. His friends, Lisa and Phillip, were also shot, point-blank. It was New Year’s Eve.

His murder caused a stir in Falls City community, who felt betrayed by what they felt was a buried lede: Brandon was trans, a liar of the highest degree. He had lied to those rednecks and they had shot him, and good for them. Brandon was a liar, anyway; arrested for several misdemeanors, ranging from stealing to robbery to forgery, he always told lies. He told people his name was Billy, or Lonny, or Charlie; he told them a movie star, that his parents lived in Hollywood; he told them he was a boy. 

Dozens of articles profile Brandon: his hometown, his lovers, his anatomy, his killers, the weapons they used, where they sit imprisoned to this day. At least three books for you to read or reread on the bus: All She Wanted; In a a Queer Time and Place; Black on Both Sides. Two films to watch under the covers at night: A documentary, The Brandon Teena Story, and the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry. There’s a grainy video of Hilary Swank accepting her Oscar for Best Actress, her gown shimmering in bronze. There are two dissertations on a University of Nebraska-Lincoln database; a profile of the town in The New Yorker (written by Joan Didion’s late husband); an essay explaining the connection between the prairies where he was murdered and the rise of Bonnie and Clyde; a video that shows you how to find the place where he was shot, a still-abandoned farmhouse in the fields south of Falls City.

 On the long drive to Lincoln, I listened to a few of the podcasts I had assembled, anything that mentioned Brandon’s name; I had enough content to listen to people talk about Brandon for hours. All of these items, aggregate, make their project the life and death of Brandon Teena. One theorist, a British queer scholar named Jack Halberstam, calls all of this, collectively, “The Brandon Archive.”

I know the name of Brandon’s childhood dog. I know Brandon would be my Aunt Rose’s age, if he were still alive (Brandon is a Sagittarius, like three of my cousins and half of the people in my graduating MFA class (the other half are Pisces)). I know the name of Brandon’s lawyer; he set himself on fire in 2018. I know the name of the neighborhood Brandon grew up in, the gay bar in Lincoln he might have frequented as a teenager, the river where the boys who killed him threw their bloody gun, the prisons where they rot. I know that he was killed with two other people on that early morning in December. I know that he is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, in Plot Fourteen of Section Z.

And yet I only recently learned about Phillip Devine.

...

One night while trolling the internet, sifting through the vast expanses of Brandon’s archive brought Phillip to me. Scanning piles of articles from The Daily Nebraskan and The Lincoln Journal Star, rereading reviews and plot summaries for the books and movies and, I came across a Donna Minkowitz piece in the The Village Voice. “How I broke—and botched—the Brandon Teena Story.” In the essay, Minkowitz reflects upon the decisions she made in publishing “Love Hurts,” her initial story on Brandon. She considers her choices to describe Brandon with words like “closeted lesbian” and “internalized homophobia,” and apologizes for making assumptions about Brandon’s psychology—why he was the way he was.

The second half of the piece begins with an assertion: “All stories are about more than

one thing, and Brandon’s was also the story of a young white woman and a young disabled black man.”

Here, Minkowitz is referencing Brandon’s friends, Lisa and Phillip, And here I made my first acquaintance with Phillip Elliott Devine. I had known that those boys killed more than one person that morning, but I knew almost nothing about them, let alone that one was a man with black skin like mine. Minkowitz considers the reasons that this might be:

“As far as I can tell, none of the journalistic reports for the first few months after the murder mentioned that Philip Devine was a black man visiting an all-white town. Mine mentioned that, as well as the fact that Phillip had come to Falls City to romance a white woman, Lana’s sister, Leslie, and that there was considerable public racism in the town, including the bald denial of service to African Americans at the town’s fast-food restaurant.”

Nothing I had amassed in Brandon’s archive had told me any of this. No Phillip in Boys Don’t Cry, no black boy in those history books—his name nowhere in the credits or dedication. In a confused sort of rage, I found an interview with the film’s director. When pressed on his total Phillip, she explained that her screenplay “didn’t have room” for Phillip, that her “greater obligation was to Brandon.” I read that and felt something cool and damp in my ribcage, walked into my bathroom without realizing it, stared into the flat glass mirror for a long time, wondering what I was looking at.

He is disabled, which is another part of his experience that I will never know. I am able-bodied, walking through a world that was built for me, in this one way.

...

Once upon a time, there was a boy with oversized glasses and songsparrow skin.

 This boy was born in sunny Southern California in October 1972 to two loving parents. He was a happy baby, but his mother called his birth and the aftermath “touch and go, touch and go.” The boy was born prematurely, and twin surgeries in his first year gave him a prosthetic leg and an urge to climb. His mother named him Phillip. The boy loved to play, ran screaming after his brothers in the wide palm-lined streets, climbing Eaton Canyon, skipping steps at the Rose Bowl. When the boy was young, his parents split apart, and when his mother remarried, it was to a nice man from the Midwest. Leaving his father and brother in in the canyon falls and coliseums, this boy and his mother drove their trailer to the fields of corn and wheat and cattle and hogs. Signs welcoming this boy and his family to their new home sang: Fairfield, Iowa. A Taste of Utopia.

Less than one in a hundred people in his new town looked like this boy, with his skin black and California-shining. Farmers, aging hippies, and students of the small university mostly called the town home, were mostly white, were mostly avid adherents of a small religion called “Transcendental Meditation.” The boy’s mother was a Transcendental teacher in California, and the boy spent most of his days reading with the congregants, studying the Qu’ran and the Bible at the local library.

After graduation, the boy fled back west to nurse his dreams: Would he become a spiritual teacher as well? Move to Colorado, where he’d once hiked to the Mother Cabrini Shrine with his mother? Driving through a town near the state line, the boy met a woman with skin pale as parchment, and fell in love. He was “the right color” for her; she had a Thing for boys with skin dark like his, and he was so good looking, this boy with his oversized glasses, his big ears, his blue denim shirts and smile.

The boy spent the winter holidays with the girl’s family, west across the river into Nebraska. Signs welcoming him to this new place sang: Nebraska. The Good Life. His mother had warned him about some of those towns—towns where boys with sparrow skin might find themselves on the ends of sisal ropes if they stayed after dusk—but the boy knew better, and anyway, he was in love. A few days before the year’s end, the young couple fought and the boy fled to a small farmhouse south where some of their friends were staying—a redheaded girl with her infant, and a baby-faced boy with blue eyes and a messy ducktail. 

Late that night, two self-proclaimed rednecks from the girl’s hometown broke into that farmhouse, stinking of liquor and waving a gun. The boy recognized these men, real white power types, carving swastikas into fence posts and bragging about their days behind bars with the Aryan Brotherhood.

At one in the morning on New Years Eve, those two rednecks put a gun to the boy’s right temple and blew away the back of his skull. They dragged his body out of the room, leaving him to bleed out on the couch. When the boy died, he had only been alive for twenty-two years, two months, and twenty-three days.

A few weeks later, the boy’s mother and step-father published his name in the local paper.

His body was returned to Fairfield, where they had him cremated at a funeral home nearby. Phillip Devine’s ashes were buried unmarked in a cemetery a few miles away.

...

I’ve had so long with Brandon—ten years—but none of that seemed to matter now. I visited Brandon and Phillip’s graves within a week of each other.

...

Once upon a time there was a baby-faced boy with blue eyes and a ducktail.

Brandon is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, which is massive as a city as I roll through its wide avenues, peering out at the immaculate graves. The morning air is thick with fog, so impenetrable that the lights of downtown drift in and out of my sight like blinking

fireflies in the mist. I imagine Brandon sitting shotgun next to me with my car windows down. The Nebraska wind howls across the skylight and he cocks me a lopsided grin, handsome in a checkered shirt and cowboy boots, smoke billowing up from his lit cigarette into the fog above.

I show him my arm scar, the graft shiny and black where the surgeons tore away flesh and nerve, and he whistles. He pulls out the brochure he used to keep in his chest pocket. It’s creased and dog-eared, so ragged you can barely make out the title: Cross-Dressers and Transsexuals—the Uninvited Dilemma. On the inside page is a grayscale diagram of a phalloplasty. It looks a lot like mine.

Brandon is a liar. Every article I read is sure of it: “A woman who posed as a man is shot dead”… “The consequences of gender deception”…“Who’s that lady?”… Brandon gives himself new names: Billy Brinson, Billy Brandon, Charlie Braymin. Brandon tells his friends that his mom is out acting in Hollywood. His dad is in a cowboy in Memphis. His sister’s a model. He’s the star quarterback at his high school. He gets a fake ID to get a job. He forges checks to buy his girlfriends flowers and pizza and candy. He steals debit cards . Brandon is a liar.

I’m a liar. I tell people all sorts of lies about myself. I tell them what position I played when I was on the football team in high school. I tell them the name of the fraternity I rushed in college. I tell them who I would have been if I weren’t assigned incorrectly at birth, if I were given hormone blockers at eleven, if I were given testosterone at sixteen. I tell them that maybe I would’ve grown tall and wide, caught a perfect spiral on a slant route like real boys do in the movies. Sometimes it feels like the lies are the only past I have I tell Brandon about my boys: the rugby teams, the support groups. He tells me about his: Lotter and Nissen, his best friends. He roars to life to tell me about bumper skiing. How Lotter used to call him buddy. “Come on, little buddy,” Lotter would say. “We’re going driving.” We are platonic ideals of ourselves, constellations of all the possibilities we were never able to have.

He talks to me about his wide Nebraska streets, the factory walls and trailer parks and steel. I tell him that there’s a new top surgeon in Omaha, that the University health insurance covers some surgeries now, and his eyes are curled bluebirds of longing. I want so badly to ask him about Phillip but no words come.

I put my hand on Brandon’s tombstone and the wind whispers. He dissolves, a cloud wisping itself apart at my side. All that’s left is my own backlit voice, pebbles crunching under tire, an engine smoking. On his grave, etched in bronze below his birth name, is his epitaph:

Daughter, Sister, Friend. Sometimes it feels like the lies are the only past we have.

...

 The sun burned so bright as I drove quick quick down Highway 1 to Fairfield. We were listening to another podcast about the murders, and I thumbed the leather on the steering wheel to the crackle over the stereo. Driving down Glasgow Road in my silver sedan, the road empty but for barren cornfields for miles in either direction, we initially missed the sign for the cemetery, a blue blur streaking by off the left shoulder. There was no driveway or clear path in, just some gravel scattered across the mud, and dying grass wilting in the wet divots dug by old car tire. The sign answered the question before I even thought to ask: Wright Cemetery is not a perpetual-care cemetery. Situated on less than an acre, its marble headstones grow out of the dust like weeds. The earth was spongy from the Spring

thaw, and my boots sank into the mud piled high around the mausoleums. After I told her the name of who we were looking for, my friend wandered off north in search of something that might lead us to him.

I knew Phillip Devine would be hard to find, had been so hard to find. On a digital database of over two hundred million, I find two locations where he might have been buried. One of them lists the wrong birthday and has him buried somewhere in southeastern Nebraska. The other, which I was able to corroborate with yellowed back-copies of the local newspaper, and which therefore seems more promising, has him buried in this small roadside graveyard in southern Iowa. 

The cemetery feels translucent. In my memory it’s as foggy as the day in Lincoln even though the sun shone so bright. I try to imagine Phillip, wish so badly for him, and he does not come, a beautiful black boy with oversized glasses. This graveyard is barely an acre. I do a lot of increasingly frustrating math at my dining room table, which eventually tells me that it’s barely half an acre. Brandon’s cemetery is twenty-four times larger; a team of landscapers, florists, and receptionists care for the graves year-round; someone knows he is buried in Plot Fourteen in Section Z.

 A week later I returned to Wright Cemetery, this time with the groundskeeper, Tim. He led me to an unremarkable tree at the eastern edge of the graveyard, to an unremarkable patch of grass and stones. A long moment passed. “Well,” he said. “Here he is.” Tim looked back at me and there might have been something like expectation in his gaze. I tried to guess what he might be expecting from me.

...

 I’m all scrambled up. My photos, I mean. They’re all scrambled up. When I uploaded all of the pictures I took from the trip, they were all out of order. 

A sign for Wright Cemetery, blue and bright; a billboard for the Lincoln Children’s Zoo (“Feed Baby Giraffes!”);

trees like spiders against the sky, blue and then gray and then black;

roads and roads and roads—Humboldt 551, Highway 46, Interstate 80, US-218; pamphlets from the funeral home (how to talk to your children about cremation, how to grieve for a special friend);

notebook paper scribbled thick with addresses—Cornhusker Highway, Main Street, Nebraska State Penitentiary;

headstones in granite and marble and limestone and bronze; pine needles; plastic flowers;

a grave you can see from the road—Brandon in bronze, birth name in bronze; daughter sister friend in bronze;

rosary beads in pink and white and blue; Mardi Gras beads in pink and white and blue; shipping containers and gas stations;

homemade lawn signs with Bible verses and slogans telling me to “lock her up!”; clippings from

the Fairfield Ledger from January third fourth and fifth of 1994; a scanned copy of an obituary from the Behner Funeral Home; farmland and melting snow;

Phillip Elliott Devine; brother;

pickup trucks; son;

the view from the hotel in Haymarket Square; a double whiskey ginger at Brandon’s bar is five dollars; friend;

an unmarked grave; a silver maple tree; a memorial for Phillip.

...

I’m all scrambled up.

Phillip, how do I get you to talk to me?

...

Once upon a time, there was a boy with black skin and a silver car, and in that car he drove to two towns to find two boys buried in two cemeteries.

On their last night of living, I imagine that Brandon and Phillip played a board game. Scrabble, maybe. I think Phillip probably kicked Brandon’s ass. They joke about their girlfriends. Of course they’re sisters.

...

Brandon and Phillip are both dead. I am just trying to make some meaning out of their deaths. I survive, and I’m alive, and I can’t help but wonder why, can’t help but try and spin their lost bodies and stolen ashes into shrines.

Is it possible to amass enough information about someone to feel like you really know them? Is it possible to learn enough facts about a person you’ve never met, that you might finally justify calling them kin, ancestor, brother?

This is a fact: Brandon Teena is incredibly easy to find online, in real life, in cemeteries, memorials, movies, books. I am combing an archive, mostly created by people whose genders were assigned correctly at bird, trying to piece together a story.

This is a fact: Phillip Elliott Devine is incredibly difficult to find. He has two graves listed online; one of them has the wrong birth date. I fabricated many of the details of his life and death. What I do know: He lived, he was shot, and he died. He is buried in an unmarked grave in a small cemetery in southern iowa. He has no archive. I want so badly to identify, which is another way of saying that I want so badly to know. I am combing through back-issues of small town newspapers, reading obituaries written mostly by people with skin pale as parchment, trying to piece together a story.

This is a fact: I am trying to claw my way into something that might make these two boys mine. I read a book about evidence; it asks me to suture my idea of evidence to ephemera, to traces: evidence as smoke. The author tells me to think of this smoke as standing against “the potential tyranny” of facts. I read a book and its author talks to me about these impulses, to accumulate facts like money and rocks and cars. He says that “trans” is movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, that “blackness” is a condition of possibility. He asks me to think about the Queer Elsewhere of Blackness. “To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience.” To be Phillip is to be Brandon is to be me, or someone and everyone elsewhere. I read another book whose author calls writing theory “fixing a new constellation of ideas for a time at least.” She asks me to read her book like a song. Phillip, your unmarked grave a song. Brandon, your dead name a song. We cross and leak, slip and shatter.

You can be seven again,

squinting in the headlights

as long as you got magic & the means

to pretend.

Streetlight stretching out like sun-kissed arms

hot with nothing to hold.

My eyes can separate artificial light

into sun rays

reaching out with no hands

when Dad drives us away.

I think it wants to hold me

artificially.

I don’t want it, backseat

where nothing has ever gotten to me.

It's got my dad, his stubble in a sunset

the part that hurts when he kisses

it will burn now.

He is the one with the cactus on his face.

I wonder if he can feel it

when it pushes out of his skin.

Cold seat belt cutting into my cheek

safety and hurt are sisters

I’d like to separate.

Who let you be born

by two who cannot love?

Humming, my noise hiding behind the engine

rumbling warm like a stomach

nothing to feed on.

I'll give it something, my body–

Tell me, are you full of me?

The moon is a plate in the sky;

it offers nothing, not even a utensil.

Use your hands,

animal

and search for something hot.

Feed on

something.

Stars are just stab wounds to wish on

bleeding out, with nothing to bind them.

Have me with hands & taste,

this blinding light in me, I’m

red with oxygen

real & ready to hold onto something.

I don't need binding, leave me

open and tell me

Can something be a tradition if you have only done it once before? If there is the intention to do it every year, is that enough? My close friend Lauren was visiting from her teaching job in Dubai, and before she returned we had to have our annual New Year’s meal. This was our second one, does that make it a tradition now? The first was on the 6th January 2024, we decided that the expression of the year was ‘twenty-twenty-four the plot’. Lauren said she needed a change, wanted to switch it up that year, and I wanted to find a nice boy who actually wanted to be with me. Not just because he was bored. We joked that next year we would be sat with two lovely, wildly attractive and rich men, whose only desire was to look after us.  

This year’s table was only booked for two, 8 PM at Bodega 18 in Falmouth, the same venue as last year. The date, however, was slightly premature, 30th December 2024. Given my work schedule and her flight back to Dubai, it was the only available slot we had before she left. We got ready together at my house. I curled my hair, burnt my neck in the process and put it in rollers. I looked like a 1950s housewife. Although the 1950s version of myself would have a husband and at least two kids to look after at my ripe old age of 29, rather than being back at university, waitressing in a pub part-time and going out drinking too much and too often.  

My body didn’t feel like the one I was most comfortable in when trying to pick an outfit. It had swollen from the Christmas indulgences. Not massively, but to the extent where clothes that used to feel like a second skin, pinched and pulled sneakily, making me feel all too aware that I was wearing them. I grabbed us both a drink from my abundant supply of alcohol. A haul that had me thinking I should almost definitely cut down on the drinking in the new year. It was a potent pre-made cocktail. It claimed to be a Burnt Orange Martini. Burnt? No. Orange? No. Martini? Yes, it was definitely that. It was pure alcohol. “Are you sure you aren’t supposed to add a mixer?” Lauren scrunched her sun-kissed face after her first sip.  

“I followed the instructions on the bottle,” the more concerning part was that after my first few mouthfuls, I was used to the toxic taste. Lauren was not. She put her mousey-blonde hair in a relaxed half-up-half-down style and donned her new black dress from M&S. Being a fickle woman, she redid her hair and curled it whilst I rummaged through my wardrobe to find an outfit. One that I could feel good in whilst I consumed monumental amounts of tapas. Eventually, I settled for an old faithful dress, also black, long-sleeved and short like Lauren’s, but mine was more floaty, only fitted from the waist up, with two long strands of fabric that are supposed to be tied around the neck. I have never worn this, scared it will make me look frumpy. The open neckline suited me much better. Knee-high boots to give the outfit a sexy look, tights and a waterproof puffer for the impractical weather of late December. 

The night was bleak outside. The dampness in the air coated everything in icy droplets, and the streets were empty of life. Inside the restaurant was a contrasting mirror world. Warm not just in temperature, but in the glow of the lights, and the friendliness of the waitress. Full of people, laughing, chatting, and general merriment that comes in spades this time of year. The usual suspects behind it being the consistent consumption of booze and the spending time with those we rarely otherwise make moments for. Lauren gave me the diet version of an ‘I told you so’ expression when I said it was busier than I was expecting. Being the day before New Year’s Eve, I was anticipating everyone to be staying in and saving their energy and money. However, Bodega 18 is the sort of place that is constantly busy, and for a good reason.  

While we were waiting for our table, a couple came in after us. No booking. Rookie error. They were told it would be at least another half hour, and there wasn’t space to wait at the bar. Lauren and I were then shown to a table big enough for four and briefly wondered if the couple would’ve fancied joining our dinner, in which we assessed in great detail our highs and lows of the last year. The majority of which centred around our dodgy taste in men. It turned out that we needed the full space of the table anyway, after ordering copious amounts to pick at. Lauren insisted that they do the best bread, and I was inclined to agree, firm crust with a spongy soft centre. It was prime to dip into the perfect amount of balsamic and olive oil, a balance that is rarely achieved in any restaurant, but tonight we were successful. It was accompanied by sweet and tangy green olives. She also ordered the Pork Cheeks, something I skipped, as meat-eating has not been a part of my world for the past 6 years now, other than the odd drunken bite here and there and one major freakout in the summer when I had a Big Mac as an attempt to feel in control of my life. I soon found out that the memory was better than the reality of the mammoth burger. It had too much bread, dry patties and a blandness that was only momentarily interrupted by a thimble of sauce. So, Lauren had the Pork Cheeks to herself and in return, I ordered the Anchovy Tostadas, knowing she wouldn’t want any. And I am glad she didn’t. Four puffed-up triangular tortillas topped with an icy cold smoked tomato sorbet and a salty anchovy. A truly unique mouthful that I could have easily repeated over 50 times. Equally delicious food kept arriving at our table, creamy Mushroom Croquetas, King Prawn Pil Pil that had a fiery chilli kick and crispy Fried Calamari. 

The table behind us had a problem with their Calamari. Lauren and I went silent as they complained to the most delightful waitress, “We’ve had a lot of calamari before… this just isn’t right…we lived in Spain…” they went on. With this, Lauren and I both exclaimed how much we enjoyed the calamari to each other at a volume loud enough for them to hear, but quiet enough that we had plausible deniability. Sharing a jug of Sangria that simultaneously tasted like summer and Christmas, we started our debrief, recapping the year just gone. Lauren got her new start in Dubai, but it turned out it wasn’t what she was hoping for. “Inauthentic” was the word she repeated a lot. Being a girl who grew up in the Devon countryside and moved to the Cornish coast, a city built in the middle of a desert was never going to be somewhere she felt at home. She told me about how everyone looked the same. Bleach blonde hair, cosmetic surgery and incredible bodies. I, of course, told her she didn’t need to worry about any of that. But it sounded worlds away from the chilled fashions in Falmouth. We talked about the boys we shouldn’t have given time to and passed judgment over mutual friends’ lives. We concluded that the motto of the new year was ‘twenty-twenty-five and thrive’, it was to be a year of smaller but more meaningful decisions, of peace and contentment. I hoped that my new boyfriend, Joshua, would still be around by this time next year, and Lauren wished again to find someone to look after her. We also said that we should decentralise men in our lives. However, that one might be harder than it first seems, given we have only had a handful of conversations over our friendship that would pass the Bechdel test. 

We paid up and walked through the lifeless high street in the direction of my home, hoping somewhere half decent would be open. We made predictions before we left: Toast would be closed, Mangos would be dead, but Grapes would be a little livelier. We got two out of three correct… unfortunately, Grapes was also empty of punters. Being a Monday night, Games Room had free pool and as much as we only fancied drinks, the free offering would at least bring other human life to the establishment. Cider for me, gin and tonic for Lauren. Sitting at a table with oversized Jenga pieces scattered across it, we found the conversation going down the path of conspiracies about our families, ones we had not shared with each other before. In amongst Lauren unpacking one of her theories, I received a message from Joshua. He had a rare day off and yet somehow had been persuaded to attend after-work drinks. They were at the dodgy Irish Bar on the corner, making it our next stop.  

Before I met Joshua, I had never stepped foot in Finns, now I feel like a regular. This was only Lauren’s second visit, and she didn’t seem overly impressed with the vibe, although the cheap drinks were a slight consolation. I briefly chatted with Joshua, but I didn’t have much time left with Lauren, so I wasn’t going to ditch her. We were both staring up at the array of different currencies that were, for some reason, attached to the ceiling, when two men came over to talk to us. They seemed like regular enough blokes. Maybe they were both a bit too drunk. They told us all about their lives and their businesses. One was a financial advisor opposite the park, and the other had a double-glazing business. “The best double glazer in town!” The lanky one exclaimed about his bearded mate. They asked both of us if we were single. I said no and turned around to Joshua, who, although engaged in another conversation, had at some point positioned himself right behind me. In that moment, we didn’t look well matched. He somehow ended up at the pub in his trackies. I had never seen him wear them outside of the house. I think he might have been physically dragged there by his housemate and colleague, not just metaphorically. I was still dressed up in my fancy meal clothes. It didn’t matter to me, though. Yet, it might have looked to these strangers that I found the first man nearby and decided to proclaim him as my boyfriend as a technique to get their attention away from me. They asked Lauren the same. She said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but by no means was she giving any impression that she was interested. Her arms were crossed, and she was answering their questions with the shortest possible answers. We both were.  

They were odd, they were pissed, we did not like their company, but we didn’t feel intimidated. Near the very end of our conversation with them, they told us they both had wives and drunkenly sputtered out something flippant about how they would be divorcing them anyway. As last orders were called, they stumbled out of the pub. Lauren and I shared our thoughts of sympathy for their wives, at home, potentially looking after their kids while these men were out, hammered, slagging them off and attempting to try it on with other women. Another moment of “what the fuck is wrong with men” was shared between us as we made our way outside, where my hopefully exception-to-the-rule boyfriend was having a smoke. I kissed him goodbye, and we both remarked how peculiar it was to be going home separately. Any other night, we would have stayed together. But this was my last night with Lauren, so a sleepover was essential. We walked in opposite directions, and we kept shouting our goodbyes as we got further apart, like a cheesy romcom, but I was more than happy for my life to feel like a romcom rather than a dating horror show. Lauren and I headed towards the gargantuan hill that my house was unfortunately at the top of. 

We passed an alleyway, the hiding place of two annoyingly familiar men. Lauren shouted to them, “Bit creepy lurking in alleyways”, and we chuckled up the road. She joked about knowing self-defence and how to stop someone from strangling you. I asked her to show me. We were joking around with it, still jovial and confident. But something made Lauren turn back around, that sense you get when you are being watched. I felt it too. “They’re following us.” The silliness was suddenly snatched away. What it left behind was fear. At this point, we didn’t know for certain that they were trying to catch up to us, but we didn’t want to risk anything. The air changed. It wasn’t crisp and light and full of laughter anymore. Instead, it was barely there. No matter how much I tried, my lungs would not fill up. We picked up the pace. I didn’t want to look back, seeing them behind us would make it true. Power walking up a steeper part of the hill, a sense of realisation kicked in. That these two ‘normal’ blokes were no longer something to take this piss out of, but a threat.  

We came to the part of the hill where it splits in two. The left is towards my house, much steeper and bends around more. The right-hand side was more straightforward but downhill and by the water. Lauren was slightly ahead, so I told her to go left. The bend in the road meant they wouldn’t have been able to see us for a few seconds. Once out of sight, we ran. There was a closed pub up ahead with an outdoor beer garden filled with higgledy-piggledy furniture. In the shadows of the bolted-together tables, we hid. My heart was thundering. It felt too big in my chest. I whispered to Lauren that I was calling Joshua, and she peered over the furniture down the hill, still sheltered by the shadows. She could see them at the junction, looking bewildered. Although they were puzzled, they were not leaving. They were waiting.  I recalled the situation on the phone, and Joshua came straight away. He must have ran given how soon he said he could see the men. I couldn’t tell by his voice, calm, not out of breath or stressed, I think he knew I needed calmness.  

“Yeah I can see them, they’re just stood there…” Moments that felt like hours passed, “Oh, no, they are coming back this way now.”  

“That’s because they saw you,” I say to him. A swell of anger emerges, “Will you stay on the phone for a while, just to be sure?” He did. Lauren and I continued our journey as he recalled to me the men’s movements until they were out of his view. At this point, we were minutes from my home, so we said our goodbyes and hung up. Lauren and I paced in silence for a moment. Words finally split out of us in a mess. We were both confused. Both scared and angry and actually fucking furious that someone was able to make us feel that terrified. 

As more thoughts emerged in a jumble, my brain became clogged with questions. I couldn’t hold it all in any longer, and boiling tears escaped my eyes. I was crying not with sadness but with rage. This town that I have felt so safe in, that I had walked home by myself in the early hours of the morning many times, was poisoned. What did they want? To drunkenly talk more? To hurt us? To do something to us? What would they have done? Two regular men. Predators. They only respected the presence of another man. How is that all it took? They stole the night from us. One that was so precious and rare, was full of hope and happiness for our future, they tainted it with fear. As much as I will say that I won’t let it ruin the memory, it already has. They ruined the night. They ruined my town. They destroyed my peace. 

asks to go out for a walk,  

rise out of the unmade 

bed, keep those hands  

to myself, and dot away. 

The brain’s static has never 

been this quiet. A motorway 

of old days and premature 

stone sleighs populate 

my view. My, it’s you, from 

last night, a voice body, beside 

me. Your curly hair meets  

your clearless ears, your glasses 

encapsulates that esoteric 

roundabout passion (I’m so 

envious of) which creates  

glitter. You walk alongside,  

hand through mine: quiet rows  

of cream-coloured huts, emerald  

hills separating (us), the village  

and the abused pagan body, all  

the way to our graveyard. 

I wasn’t expecting a kiss  

(although one would be  

nice), I’m simply appreciative  

we can share this tender epoch,  

rippling precious sounds across  

the ocean. But you do kiss my  

cheek (I apologise). It tingles like  

Coca-Cola, the fur of an ochre cat,  

texture of old skin, floral like a 

barbed chrysanthemum, smooth as tar. 

You lick the sky’s flakes curiously, 

they trickle down the church windows. 

Thin dust flies and mingles against dirt. 

My condition is satisfied; washing is done. 

The sun sits atop a bent brick chimney. 

You make a crude remark, Sister, and we laugh 

together, despite the quiet, impossible distance. 

I had fallen in love with a poet who could only say the same one line to me. Over and over again, just one line. Not enough for a stanza, a sonnet or a haiku. He was so rich with words and yet when he looked at me there was nothing to be said but that one line, it broke my heart. 

The way he weaved words, it was like his tongue was cut from the finest of silks and it lashed everyone in attendance. And everyone was in attendance, the whole town bundled into that one small room of The Rightful Lockey. From the old regulars who had spent their lives out on the pub stools to the university girls who pooled in together with glimpses and nudges and too much tequila. I, of course, was one of those girls.  

Arms linked with Becca and Maddie as we ploughed through the doors and then ploughed through shots and ploughed through the noise with so much more noise.                                         

Of course, we were singularly focused when he began to speak; our eyes, minds, hearts all tied up in the metronome of his voice. Not that I minded. I knew from the very first moment I stumbled into The Rightful Lockey that he was mine. It was as if he had sprouted from the very most hidden, shameful parts of myself, and everybody loved him for it. I loved him for it.  

So, every Friday night I'd watch him on the stage that was really just the floor with a microphone and dimmed lamplight. I’d watch as the lamplight dimmed all that more, and I’d watch as the only light left was in the vibrations of his voice. I’d watch and I'd watch and soon enough I couldn’t just watch. It was torturous to know someone so well without ever having spoken to them. I began to daydream; poetry about the vastness of the world became about what he would think of me. 

And then, One Friday night, I couldn’t bare it anymore. Once everyone was clearing out and while The Poet was fiddling with his microphone, I walked up to him and smiled and fluttered and charmed and waited for him to shower me with all the platitudes only a poet could make true. He didn’t.                                                      

He barely said anything. Just that one line and a pat on the shoulder. A dull pat which made me dull all over.  

When I walked back to our table, Becca and Maddie were pretending to be engrossed in a conversation that had nothing to do with The Poet and me. They were terrible liars, but I gave them the satisfaction of thinking they had one over me all the way until we made it back to our flat. Then, and only then, after a bottle of pinot grigio and a box of pink gin, did I tell them how dulled The Poet had made me.  

“Why didn’t he have anything to say to me? Surely, he had seen me watching him all this time. Is there just nothing to say about me?” I wailed while Becca poured the gin and Maddie patted my shoulder.  

“Forget about him.” Becca said, or I think she did.  

The spot where Maddie’s hand rested on my shoulder had numbed while the rest of me burned like hot coals. “Don’t. I’m sure he’ll come around.”  

“Really?” I looked into her eyes, glossy and pure black and hidden beneath even blacker lashes. “Why would he?”  

“Because I’m going to give you a makeover, babes.”  

…

We waited until Becca had passed out on the couch. Then, Maddie led me into her bedroom. I’d been in there before, but under my drunk stupor it felt completely unfamiliar. Clothes piled on her desk, on her chair, on her bed, on her floor, hanging out from her drawers and spilling out from her wardrobe. Lip-liners were scattered all over and tubes of mascara lay in a heap on her windowsill. Maddie was completely overrun with beauty; I don’t know how she managed it.  

“Get naked.” She said as she jumped onto the bed and made the pile of clothes go tumbling down around her. She didn’t seem to care.  

I pulled my top off and threw it into the mess of clothes, and then I unbuttoned my jeans and soon I was just in my knickers. Big polka dot granny knickers with period blood stains that never washed out.  

She leaned back, her eyes sharper and somehow darker. “Now, look in the mirror while you take them off.” – I did. The mirror was wrapped in strings and strings of fairy lights which seemed to light up my every mole, scar, pimple or roll.  

“Pick something out. Something you hate.”  

I scanned through my reflection as if it was a map I needed to follow. I was always terrible about reading maps. I didn’t expect to say my tits, but I did, and then Maddie came up behind me, so close I could feel her breath tickle the wispy hairs at the nape of my neck. She reached her arms around me and grabbed my tits in her hands. She squeezed them. She fondled them. I felt a haze wash over me. She twisted them. She kept twisting them, until they popped off. 

I think I was supposed to scream. I think it hurt. I just couldn’t stop looking in the mirror; My reflection looked so happy.  

She was still squeezing my tits in her hands as she spoke, as if they were fidget toys. “Pick something else.” 

BACK,  

BELLY,  

ARMS,  

LEGS,  

HIPS,  

LIPS,  

EYEBROWS,  

EARS, 

NOSE,  

SHOULDERS, 

BACK, 

BELLY,  

BACK, 

BELLY,  

MY LOWER BELLY, 

TOES,  

  LIPS,  

THIN LIPS,  

THIN HAIR,  

CHEEKBONES,  

TOO BIG, 

BUM, 

  BELLY,  

THE SPOTS I GET ON MY BACK, 

  LEGS,  

KNEES, 

  HOW HAIRY MY BIG LEFT TOE IS, 

 EARS, 

  BACK,  

BACK, 

BACK, 

 BACK.   

I picked from the list at random. It didn’t matter. Really, the ones I hated the most were equal to the ones I hated the least because I was with Maddie and she was so overrun with beauty, it was infectious.  

She threw my tits to the side and clawed into my lower belly with her nails. When they chipped away, she used her nail files to shovel through all of the guts, until she hit bone. She grabbed the entrails and clean bit into them, so that her mouth was coated in the warmest shade of purple-red.  

Then, she kissed me. It started out tender, and then longer, and deeper so that I could taste my guts right in the back of my throat. Once she was satisfied, she hooked her teeth around my bottom lip and ripped. She did the same with my top lip.  

When she pulled away, she asked me “what do you want?” 

I looked into her eyes, pitch black, and I saw a reflection of the most beautiful thing; happy and calm and completely inhuman.  

I wanted so desperately to be that thing. I begged. I moaned. “Please, more. I need more.”  

She plucked my ears and my nose off with ease, and like the pop of a corkscrew, blood gushed down me and made a puddle at my feet.  

She scratched my bum clean off. She pulled out my hair in one big clump, which took most of my scalp clean off too. She plucked my eyebrows away, and she crushed my hips together like an accordion until they crunched gone. She pulled my nails out with her teeth and then she just pinched my toes into nothing. 

By the time she got to my back, the rest of my skin had already been peeled off. She reached into what was left of my anus and pulled through my spine. She threw my spine onto the pile of bones as the last bits of me sagged to the floor. 

My eyeballs watched her in segments, as they floated in the puddle of blood and bowels. First, she was stood, then she was on the floor, crawling in me, then she was naked, dripping with blood, then she was up again, crawling again, reaching, grasping the lipliner, pouting her lips, pulling out my bones. 

She turned to my eyeballs. “You want him to fall in love with you? To dedicate every line to you? Well, he will.”  

My right ear had rolled under the bed, so I couldn’t catch her tone very well. Still, her eyes were sharper than ever before. Sharp enough to make me feel afraid for the first time since I’d stepped into Maddie’s room.   

Maddie began with my femurs. She cracked them like wishbones and arranged them into the shape of a square. Then, she grabbed my spine and bent it into two big lovely triangles. She placed my humerus and my radius bones on the top and she used the remains of my bowels to glue it all together.  

She broke my teeth apart and placed them into the juts of my bones, so that I appeared like a kind of geode, with the first of my crystals only just reaching the surface and bathing in the light. She scooped up my ears and folded them in with my skin. She did not give me back my eyes; there was no need.  

When, finally she was done, she pulled my skin taut and gift-wrapped me up.  

I felt all of the colours of the rainbow wash over me like a tidal wave of light, and it was glorious! And at the very same moment I felt the absence of light like an abscess at my teeth, panging with pain at every point on my body.  

I was a Prism.  

No really, I was a Prism.  

Maddie had made me into a reflective Prism so that I would always be loved by whoever I turned my attention towards. Whoever set their eyes upon me, would see the most coveted of their visions reflected back.  

When she was finished, she turned her back to me, picked up my eyes and cried. They rolled over her hands, taking in every wrinkle and crevice as her tears washed them free of the blood.  

“I’m keeping the eyes.” She choked out in between her sobs.  

…

I rolled into The Rightful Lockey that Friday night, and I listened to The Poet with an unencumbered admiration. Every line echoed inside the frame of my bones. Every word pressed against my skin and re-wrote themselves in my veins. 

Once The Poet had finished his set for the night, I rolled over to him. As I waited for him to speak, I wondered what he might be seeing? What was his most beautiful of visions? What would it inspire him to say? I was giddy with the excitement of it, that I might finally hear the poem I had been waiting for, for months!  

I felt his hand on my shoulder first. Followed by that same dull. Then, he spoke. When he spoke, he did not speak like a poet, he spoke like a man. 

I listened to him, as he rambled and stumbled, in a hurry to get it all out. From this, I inferred his most coveted of visions:  

A man in a suit, with a big kind grin, flicking through a big red book. The book is sopping wet and dripping with blood.  

To this man, The Poet told everything. Every secret, every shame.  

He told the man about the time he shat himself in the middle of class and had to sit in his soiled boxers until the end of the day, as more and more of his classmates asked about the smell.  

He told the man about the time he slapped his mum in the face, to stop her screaming.  

He told the man about the first time he slept with a woman and how she begged him to hit her.  

Soon enough, every confession blurred into the next, until I had heard his whole life in spots. They broke out on my skin. 

When the bartender kicked us out, The Poet took me back to his flat. There, he washed me in his finest liquor. He rolled me over in his hands, feeling every bump, every ridge, every tooth.  

“What are you?” he asked. It rang out like a dull thrum in my Prism.  

When I didn’t respond, he pulled me into his chest and said, “whatever you are, I think I’ll keep you.”  

And he did. The Poet – whose name is Brian by the way – he keeps me in his room, leaned against the door. I don’t get to hear him in The Rightful Lockey anymore. Instead, I hear him all the time. I hear him ramble to the man with the red book or to his reflection, or just to the stretch of skin and bones.    

When he’s gone, I try not to hear anything. Instead, I focus on watching, and I watch as Maddie cries. 

This country loves its marriages, 

Its christenings too

Bells chiming across the patchworked land

A relic of English antiquity

But I long for the lost ones of Lyonnesse

Or, at least, its destructing waves

To bury this uncomformist guilt 

This yearning for the harvest to be bountiful, not blessed

You are the byways that dissect this land, 

Lines on a map, confined enclosures

I am the sprawling roots, unconstrained by petty borders 

I am the wildness of the branches on the trees

You suppress me like the square form of lorries passing beneath

Trailing willows cut to right angles

Clearing paths of the blessed rot that feeds the forest

The crumbling wood that shelters runaways

St John’s Wort, summer’s flower, sun in the fields

All-consuming yellow, rape seed crops,

Sun on the hedgerows; poison in the fields

Like an afterimage, inescapable and half-bright

Bleeds into oil, sapling leaves, crimson pearls

Wild raspberry juice pooling on your fingertips

Pricked by the thorns, spat on by the Devil

The warmth of the sky tastes bitter on your tongue

The idea of halos comes from sunlight

From the spectrum of a prism 

Light shining through falling water

Natural desire, pollen and nectar

The chattering and the babbling of the stream

Infinitely more tongues than you can speak in 

Leave me without your misbegotten labels

Leave the water to form its own path

Through the forest

Hard to know how and where to start to write about you, where is the beginning and where I choose to draw the end. End of what of our mixed feelings for each other. Others we both became to one another through our time.Time is a delimitation translated from lights in the sky to numbers for capitalism or an indefinably long moment that gets lost in the nothing. Nothing is never the feelings that I will have for you, if I wish deeply to. To you Too. Too young. Young, we were teenagers.Teenagers who knew nothing about themselves, that they slowly discovered and knew nothing about love or sex. Sex was our first common discovery. Discovery of your skin. Skin under our fingers for hours and hours. Hours and hours to play with our bodies. Bodies that we will play with. With consent and lust, our bodies. Bodies that were not really ours before we were together. Together we were a few times. Times of repetitions. Repetitions of several breakups. Break ups that were often chosen by you, because I was lost, having too many feelings and not enough purity for you. You were committed in everything that you invested your time and energy. Energy for your metal band, your pencil drawings and love until it faded. Faded we both have in different ways and in different time lines. Lines of our sketchbooks from our art school in different cities and years. Years of teenagers time and again ten years later. Later you thought I will fall again. Again I did fall but got lost. Lost in my own narrative of you saving me when my mental health dropped, again I was lost. Lost in sex with you, until a discovery years later, that sex can be amazing with many people. People are humans who we are choosing to live with, next to who we talk to or ignore. Ignore our messages and not our games. Games where played between us often and we do not really know who started the game. Game in singular was not ours, always plurals and in repeat: games, until one day: one game. Game over, it should have been earlier, I think. Think that it was not the right time line. Line where is the right: “us” to be together. Together, we were so in love. Love, I thought it will always be with you, you kind of convinced me. Me with the years understood that monogamy was not my space to be. Be is being present in the moment. Moment of looking into your eyes and knowing I am falling for you again ten or fifteen years later. Later is too late. Late is everything. Everything is all the molecules and particles of humanity. Humanity, I will be happy to fuck you. You suggested we stopped fucking, sorry, making love. Love is falling too many times on me. Me, I am not resisting a good fuck, or the opposite if I am to uninterested I am mentally doing my shopping list. List of films and countries to watch and travel to, together. Together we were good and safe. Safe that I felt with you at the beginning. The Beginning of something new and that I experienced for the first time, my first love story. Story of princesses and princes. Princes, I am one, and also into them. Them are all the people that I fall for and want to fuck. Fuck to make babies, you plan. Plan to stop using condoms and see what God would like to. To be political and free. Free from charges and normativity. Normativity is construction. Construction are made to fall and be rearranged and creative. Creative, we were both. Both in different ways. Ways is how you express your way of being, your character. Character change during a lifetime, especially from your teenage years to your adult life. Life is a time determined on earth. Earth is soil where humans are living. Living is an action of being who is made by different people in different ways and possibilities, in different countries, in different housing situations and creating communities. Communities are a way of being together. Together we were. Were is in the past. Past is what happened before today. Today I am struggling to know how our relationship was, if it was good, bad or a multitude of layered feelings. Feelings, I always had too many. Many mixed feelings, trying to sort them out, like finding the other sock of your favourite pair in the washing machine, too many favourite patterned socks, too many. Many are too many. Many is a number which is not counted. Counted how many times we had sex, arguments, or we said I love you. You called me your blue angel. Angel as a teenager and demonic as an adult, because I am horny. Horny you were all along with me. Me and you, we were on different planets in opposite universes. Universes where both of us had a lot on our plates. Plates were made from different shapes and textures, yours were handmade and with care but was broken from the start but glued back together. Together, I was surrounded by industrial plates, counted in numbers but mine were built from a translucent fragile porcelain and were covered in bubble wrap, wrapped was my universe. Universe, universes who fell apart for both of us. Us is something that existed for me as a teenager, but you created an idea of us as an adult. Adult you waited for my christian religious awakening. Awakening, I had a few, including: a lesbian one, that I told you about almost crying at yours, after you closed your laptop quickly, a porn animation was playing, that I saw through the blink of my eyes. Eyes were brown and blue. Blue like the tattoo that I have on my right wrist. Wrist is the first body part that I got tattooed, my emotional containers are in my wrists. Wrists are part of my body that no one can touch, because of trauma. Trauma, we shared ours, deep, hard, raw, scary, in shame and in secrets. Secrets from each other we had some. Some that my best friend told me. Me, I wish you have had shared them with me. Me and you, we are both into kink but the other way around, for you at the beginning it was liberation of your own engraved storyline and in adulthood wanted to become chaste. Chaste is not what I am going into. Into bodies I wanna go. Go with the flow. Flow and stop thinking so much but just living, being, floating and live. Live without you. You are living with her. Her is the perfect girl. Girl I am not, I am just a boy. Boy, you are not gay. Gay I am. Am I happy for you and everything you built? Built, we both have. Have grown since then. Then is in the past. Past is in repeat. Repeat, we play the games many times. Times, where, often I was the leader. Leader of control not leader of my own desires, wishes or needs, was I my own leader? Leader was not my best period of life. Life is now. Now I have no regrets. Regrets are not useful to have. Have you had one or several children? Children, your children are for sure happy, because your classical dad from the 90's just left when you were a child. Child you had a lot on your plate. Plate was not empty on my side but made from porcelain. Porcelaine is a fragile material. Material is something that artists are using to create art. Art is what makes us meet again, and again almost all along, each couple of years. Years passed and the last message you sent me, I said let’s stop there. There is a time where I felt a shift and I was unfair on you, just seeing each other and fucking and being romantic, way too romantic for non lovers. Lovers, I once wanted to be with you, I suggested that we were just eating in restaurants and visiting museums and hiding away all our values. Values are in the heart of our bodies. Bodies are where souls are being kept during the time they are living on earth. Earth is the place where I create, challenge, meet others, fall in, fall off, fall for, build community, explore sexuality, kink, conversations about being, reading books, watching films and I am always hungry for new people on the way. Way off. Off you. You needed to stop, to leave me alone. Alone, I always felt better. Better I would like to be. Be was always hard for me. Me, was so fragile and then you created a net of safety. Safety is how I felt with you. You became other. Other is when someone is changing. Changing is the process where human beings go through their own life experiences, socio-political environments, climate, and choice of loved ones, through which they become others. Others, once. Once I will see you again. Again I suppose so. So you will not recognise me. Me, has me. Me as a trans masc. Masc is the hard soft bites in me that I want to show for myself so I can fall in love with me. Me is just what it is. Is, is a conjugated verb. Verb is an action. Action is something in movement. Movement is what is becoming, transformative, it is what my fingers are doing when I am writing about my memories of my first boyfriend. Boyfriend, I will have a few. Few is the sound that my body is making when I am done with romantic relationships. Relationships are between humans. Humans were just you and me. Me and you for sure learned something from each other, maybe just kindness to our bodies, to our skin and giving each other second and third chances. Chances to give me a few, where I had a crush on this guy in my class. Class where you were not in and a class where I was not seen as the boy that I am, that space which was not mine. Mine, I loved my time. Time for myself, my time. Time is something precious that you were not always keen to give me in some part of our relationship. Relationship with others, we both had. Had crushes on girls, both of us, but untold. Untold the stories of your lovers, each time that we meet up years after years, you touch my hair and caress my cheek. Cheek which is mine and is too easy to blush to. To your defence you were just insecure and wanted to play it safe. Safe, was it the word or manipulation. Manipulation is something that you learn to survive as a kid. Kid we were not but young, we were. Were we? We have faded since so long. Long is the time past since the last time I saw you, nine years. Years of mystery from your life to mine or the opposite. Opposite, I knew you got married and it felt like such a relief. Relief to know you were settled and you will not look after me, again. Again, just to be sure if I did not finally believe in God. God was so important for you. You said that faith was just a folder icon on your laptop, which had many more folders to offer. Offer me time, you thought you would connect me to faith. Faith was not one of the icons on my laptop. Laptop is not a synonym of my being. Being is the envelope of my body on earth and the organs are my values. Values cannot be superficial. Superficial values do not exist. Exist for who you are. Are you there? are you still alive? Alive I hope you are. Are you sorry about us? Us, we did not work out well, because we were too young for promises. Promises are still something that you are practising? Practicing safe sex, art practice, writing practices are precious. Precious was our first love. Love can exist in many ways, forms and layers. Layers of clothes and layers of bodies. Bodies, I hope we both love ours and become at peace with them. Them is my pronoun. Pronoun is used to talk about someone else’s and describe people’s identity. Identity can be nuanced and fluid. Fluid was our connection but you wanted more connection. Connection, connecting, connections, we had many. Many were unfair. Unfair because I settled in needs. Needs to be protected and loved. Loved we were, from each other and a few others around us. Us still happening in the twilight. Twilight, I am thinking I am too old to use this word. Word, from the Internet that I was not born with. With words on papers you wrote me many letters that I have binned since. Since when did you apologise to yourself for being real? Real and raw, we were building trust and faith in self esteem, we fought to be surviving in the world around us. Us not made for us. Us, our younger selves were too judgemental and were critics about what it is to be human, caring for each other, and for yourself. Yourself are you in peace? Peace is a hard work never solved. Solved is not happening in real life, we are just going to be in solidarity, in peer support, in acknowledgement, in conversation, in trying to understand each other. Other than you were, I thought of you when I saw mango yoghurt in Sainsburys. Sainsburys is like a shop in Switzerland: la Migros. Migros is where my mum bought us the blue Lemon ice tea packaging that we drunk in litres when we carresed our bodies, fucked, watched films and laughed, in the spare room, in the basment at my parents. Parents were complicated conversations. Conversations about the ableism of my dad, I sincerely apologise for it. It is still an issue. Issue happened often like a verb in repeat, with my parents. Parents are hard work. Work, for sure you are doing, if you are a dad. Dad is a role, a status which is not overrated. Overrated, are all my exes making babies? Babies is the subject that I do not want to talk about. About my exes I do not want to talk about, so I am writing about them. Them is a part of my story and an amount of my exes. Exes are numbers of experiences and stories to talk about.  About is one of the sections of my art website where I show my art work. Work is Art. Art is work. Work of rewriting all my memories of my exes, sex and all the in between. Between the heat on my body and the candle light, I want to smoke a cigarette. Cigarette, I just rolled one. One, just a number. Number one of all the numbers in my diary to know what to do and in order. Order and planning my diary, you hated it. It was an object because we needed to plan ahead to see each other months in advance. Advance planning is something that is happening in polyamory sometimes. Sometimes you are going with the flow. Flow is not my full time job. Job is not my life. Life is meant to be lived, but the hours are getting eaten by work. Work I wanna do for my polyamory being. Being with a cat. Cat is my companion that I am missing now and often. Often it is in repeat with Testosterone, I am often hungry and horny. Horny brain is such a teenage boy. Boy is off playing. Playing is just a game or sex. Sex is important to me and my body in pain. Pain is another companion, who tries to protect me from myself. Myself is there and would like to make peace with you. You, the teenager in you. You with me, the unfair player, with you. You broke my heart many times, players or just lover, bombing lovers. Lover you will not be anymore. Anymore you are a kid. Kid you have maybe one. One circle all around. Around the earth, we did not travel. Travel around me thinking, you become a thinker, a priest maybe, a dad for sure, a loving husband, I hope. Hope you are fulfilled, in life, so hard.

Most men she’s dated seem to want a woman around for contrast, and self-definition. Not a reflection, but a diffraction. She feels that yet again from across the table, another labored first meal, outside seating although too cold for it. The masked staff goofing with each other at their station distracts her. Their banter makes her nostalgic for the time when everyone wasn’t a stranger. He fingers the bowl of olives, a pinkie in the oil. She would never do that—will that suffice? She, in turn, would prefer to be with someone whom she could call a twin, as if misplaced to another family between hospital shifts. Once miraculously reunited, they would recognize each other from the creases on their genes. He’s moved on to the stale bread. She never eats bread—will that suffice? All she wants is true recognition. There was nothing better than a teacher seeing her hand and calling her name.

Snow had crusted on the lid of a discarded washing machine in a vacant lot up the street from the factory.  A slender boy of twelve leaned against it shuffling his feet and knitting his eyebrows.  A man with a knit cap walked up the sidewalk toward the boy.  He wore coveralls under a worn jacket and carried an empty lunch pail, just off his factory shift.  As he approached, the man recognized the boy as the one he’d seen slinking around the neighborhood.  The man stopped when he reached the boy and stared hard at him.  The boy stood up straight.  It was cold, and their breath hung in short clouds between them. The late afternoon’s gloaming had already begun; headlights on a passing car glowed dimly. 

A long moment passed before the man continued up the street and turned onto the cracked walk of a small green house.  A calico cat, feral, crouched in the shadows at a far corner of its sagging porch.  The front door groaned as the man pushed it open, and the cat jumped off the porch into the snow. 

The boy stuffed his hands into the pouch of his sweatshirt.  He looked down the hill past the factory where the river tumbled along against charcoal hills in the dwindling light, then crossed the street and headed up the sidewalk.  When he passed the man’s house, he didn’t glance over.  He was a boy who put candies into the desks of girls at school in the hopes that they would like him.  Instead, most said nothing to him about the gifts, but ridiculed him behind his back.  He continued up the street with his disheveled hair and black-framed glasses past squat houses with dead front lawns, patches of dirty snow, and warm, soft lights in many of the front windows. 

The man switched on the wall heater in the hallway and went down it to his bedroom closet.  Heel-less slippers, scuffed oxfords, and a pair of sneakers with graying laces cluttered the floor of the closet.  The man took off his work boots and slid on the slippers.  He leaned the boots against a curtain rod that had fallen down a long time before and hung his cap on a hook on the back of the closet door. 

He entered the kitchen without removing his jacket and pulled the cord of the gooseneck lamp on the table.  After putting water on the stove for tea, he took a loaf of bread and a roll of liverwurst from the refrigerator and made himself two sandwiches.  The kettle began to whistle.  He took it off the stove and poured its steaming water over the tea bag in a chipped mug.  The man took his dinner over to the table and sat down.  Through the window across from the table, he watched the calico cat slink through the bare, hanging branches of a willow tree and drop off the short back fence into the alley. 

The boy walked up the hill and around the corner clenching a small paper bag in the pouch of his sweatshirt.  He stopped in front of an Episcopal church where children’s choir practice was taking place, surveyed both directions, and then crept along the building until he could peak through one of the stained-glass windows.  Muffled in the uneven, colored glass, he could make out children on risers and the tall, thin girl among them that he was looking for, the one who had twice thanked him for the candy.  Organ music and high choral voices resounded in the big, empty church.   The boy slipped back through the bushes, crossed the street, and sat down on the curb across from the church’s doors and a few steps away from the alley.   

He waited, hunched down in the cold, regarding the street.  The lot of an auto body shop next to the church held a collection of rusted cars.  The diner beside it displayed pink neon tubes in its window that spelled: “Eat”, and a cardboard sign announcing: “Dinner Special – Chicken Kiev”.  The boy watched the lights blink off in the variety store next to the diner.  A woman in a dark overcoat left the store and locked the front doors of it from a jangle of keys.  She dropped the keys into her purse, clicked it shut, tucked her hair under a plaid woolen scarf, and walked across the street.  He watched her start down the alley in her goulashes, and then returned his focus to the church’s front doors. 

The calico cat scampered behind a garbage can as the woman’s footsteps crunched past in the gravel.  The man looked up at the same sound and stopped stirring his tea.  As he watched the woman go by in the alley, his heart, as always, lurched.  He stood up quickly and stepped over to the window where he strained to see her continue down the alley. 

“Hello,” he said quietly, something he could never bring himself to say to her directly.  “Hello, you.  Hello, there.” 

He watched her walk briskly into the thin fog drifting up the alley from the river until she disappeared into it towards the factory and the soot-stained apartment buildings nearby.  The stink of the factory hung in the air, and he could just make out the last of the nightshift workers entering through its entrance in the cyclone fencing.  The man sat back down to his dinner slowly, but didn’t resume eating. 

The cat crawled up the alley and around the corner where it brushed against the boy’s leg.  The boy stroked its matted fur.  He took a butterscotch-flavored candy from his bag, unwrapped it, and held it out on his open palm.  The cat licked at the candy, then turned away and slithered across the street into the lot of the auto body shop.  A streetlamp blinked on in front of the shop throwing tepid, creamy light, and the smell of burning fireplaces wafted on the small, chill breeze along with the factory’s stink.  

Suddenly, children burst through the doors of the church.  The boy stood up and let the butterscotch candy fall into the gutter’s slush.  He saw the girl clamber down the church steps with a friend and cross the street towards the alley.  He lifted the bag in their direction, but the girls hurried past him without noticing and headed into the alley.  The boy stood on the curb looking after them with a stricken face, the bag dangling from his fingertips.  He watched the girl turn in through a gate across from the man’s back fence as her friend continued on.  He stood looking until her friend had disappeared at the end of the alley into the low fog, his heart hammering away.   

The boy walked slowly down the alley to the girl’s gate.  It was bordered on one side by a juniper bush gone brown, a dusting of snow at its base.  He knelt in the alley against the bush in the twilight and wrote a message with a pencil stub on the paper bag, folded it carefully, and set it on the gatepost. 

The man watched him from his kitchen table, then stood up and went to the back door.  The boy heard the latch click open and turned wide-eyed.   

“Hey, you,” the man barked.  “Clear out of here.” 

The boy stood frozen in the alley. 

The man scowled, “What you got there?” 

He stepped out onto his back porch, and the boy ran off down the alley.  The man walked out in his slippers and jacket through his back gate into the alley.  He could not see the boy through the fog, but he could hear the footsteps die away in the gravel.  He picked up the small bag and read what the boy had written, then held its sweet-smelling contents up to his nose and felt an ache spread through him.  Before returning to his house, the man swallowed once hard and replaced the bag on the post. 

The woman from the variety store stood at the tiny kitchen stove in her upstairs apartment and stirred pea soup heating in a small pot.  The television was on faintly behind her in the living room for the noise it provided.  When the soup became hot, she carried it in the pot over to the tray table in front of the couch that she’d already set with a napkin, spoon, and short glass of rye whiskey.  There were doilies that her mother had crocheted on the arms of the couch, and the stand-up lamp next to where she sat had a brown-paper shade with a picture of Venice on it, a place they’d both dreamed of someday going.  From her window, she could see smoke lifting from the factory’s dual chimneys and, in the distance, lights from cars on Route 20.  Her eyes held for a moment on the easy chair where her mother used to sit, her last crocheting project still in its satchel against the back cushion.  Alone in that little room, it was close and warm.  She forced herself to look at the television, sipped from her glass, and considered how she might fill the time before bed. 

In the girl’s kitchen, a blue vase of artificial flowers sat on a red oilskin tablecloth: white carnations with a backing of ferns.  The girl was setting the table for dinner as her mother gave her spelling words from her school list while peeling rinsed carrots at the sink, spotting wet the list on the countertop.  The girl’s father hadn’t come home again yet from wherever he went after his factory shift, but neither of them spoke of that. 

The ancient refrigerator in the boy’s kitchen made its regular hum, and damp towels hung hissing on a drooping cord over the radiator next to it.  His parents hadn’t been home when he arrived but had left him a pot pie in its foil container on the stovetop that was still lukewarm.  The boy hadn’t stopped to eat; instead, he’d gone directly into his bedroom where he lay on the bed with his face buried in the pillows and the blinds drawn.  In the gathering darkness, he was surrounded by his models and books and the boxes of old toys that he’d packed away the year before in the closet. 

The man had his forehead down on the back of his hands at his kitchen table.  His tea had grown cold.  The cat crawled by silently in the coating of snow on the windowsill and stopped to look in at him.  The cat licked its chest, then dropped onto the back step. 

A long whistle blared at the factory into the cold evening: shift change.  Most people in that town were aware of it but caught up as they were in their own affairs, very few actually listened.

my dopey seed fisherman

his pea rockeries

his devonian ballcock

muddy centrifuge

industry boyfriend’s carving

groundsheet idioms

every chopin cannon

with poet fingernails

the authentic iron flowers

skyrack bow void

idiocy pears

mischievous traipsing cowboys

flesh mirror lagoon

above ninety nine sick drugs

a grass gazebo villain

a villain who dongs the overhang

his real half pound

my foam love