Day Drinking with Sappho II 

Over few hours
the atmosphere extinguishes
into dry ash.

They whisper along together
about a wedding or a gig
all level with the others

My hearing, like my sight,
has puddled, swaying
with my head’s movements.

‘I don’t mean to get personal,
but were you a lesbian?
I talk to someone, maybe it's Sappho

‘Yes, I come from there’
Someone replies back
in front or behind.

It's all lost knowledge now.

Maybe I laugh, maybe I weep
I am certainly making a fool of myself

then all is blank, then I live in sleep
I will certainly make a fool of myself

Day Drinking with Sappho III

I am lying in a bathtub,
outside sits Sappho.

Purple curtains cease
any body to eye contact.

‘This is just like highschool’
I think, holding back sick.

‘So did you get exiled?’
not knowing what to say
I say

‘Oh’ her voice fades
like silk on the wind
‘That’

She might or might not
be telling me something 
There is some sound
the fan whirling along.

‘I think you seem cool’
Some words ramble out
fluidly.

Silence stales the room;
if she has something to say
or not, I will never know.

My stomach tightens,
my mouth salivates,

we both sit there
until I throw up.

Day Drinking with Sappho IV

My eyes tire
as they push
themselves awake.

My torso wrapped up, toasted
My legs abandoned, freezing

‘Was there something
or someone’
I attempt to piece words
together
‘who sang me to sleep?’

What a silly question
and too early to question;

with effort and after
declining counting
I shiver away the duvet.

my bladder grips, holding drips
I make my way to the bathroom

In the mirror I see a zit.
A fallen lime lying
at the foot of the basket
that is my nose

Chickpeaed skin
displayed on an ageing
forehead.

Rubbing my face
pseudo clean
a dampness becomes
apparent.

What nectar is this?
Should I bother to answer?

Yet as I dress
It then occurs

‘Sappho!’

I rush to the door
trousers loose at the hips
t-shirt flapping along the waist

A note
is in the key bowl

‘Typical’ I read
‘It’s in fragments’

D.F Weston is a 22 year old UK based writer. Core ideals they hold are to treat everyone humanly and with empathy, while opposing power structures. They post poems on Instagram under ‘oxfordesstentialriderequipment’ and spoken word on music sites under ‘D.F Weston’. You may find them dreading a wasteful life and idolising love.

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graphic made by @emmmileo

sometimes you’re back in the church again, your body being prodded by the same hands that preached about love, and no one ever asks what omnipotence looks like when it has fingernails, when every finger is crooked, pressing into your belly and something alive might pucker if they push hard enough, and your stomach lurches with the boy you want to kiss, the girl you want tattooed across your back, the person you’d breathe cigarette smoke back into, like mouth-to-mouth communion, and the town watches, hawkeyed, they smell your sweat before you do, you can feel God nesting behind their eyes, and one day your mother tells you there’s a sickness in town, and she won’t look at you when she says you’re afflicted, someone has to bury it, and by supper she has already decided, and you sit there in stone silence watching the priest preach about love, but what is love if it doesn’t guarantee all and makes an exemption for privilege, and they gather around you with their hands, they know how to bless things before they kill them, praying over your body, they’re waiting again for that insectile need inside of you to crawl out, wanting to sanctify its thorax, pin its wings, bury it, and what is that something but the unbearable fullness of loving, of spurring your entire body to its entire span to protect someone, and that night the goats won’t stop bleating, something scratches beneath the floorboards, your mother cries in the next room, mourning has arrived before death, and you pray for a God to save you, but the only thing waiting for you is the person you love, and even they have become a monster because everyone keeps saying monsters always look like love, and where do you run when every doorway opens into another church, when every shadow reaches out with your mother’s voice, when your own body begins to feel borrowed, and one day you’re still in that small town, flies filling your mouth, your body swollen beneath the heat, the whole town waiting for you to heal, and still, beneath all the rot, you are still loving the monster, and this is leviticus, and it is surely not the end.

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1. Nobody will get it, not for a long time.

Soon the effort will dissipate from your muscles and you’ll struggle to find a reason to continue on at all, as though their lack of understanding reflects back on your inability to be understood. But the most complex languages are often the most beautiful, and you speak so divinely when there’s nobody around to correct you. Let the bend of your chin perch up high, so they can see the lives flashing in your eyes. Keep your back straight, or they might mistake your slouching for obedience. Strip down to your bare bones and pour boiling color into every crevice until they’re forced to ask what happened. Make sure not to give them an answer.

2. Sometimes it’ll feel really shitty

and you’ll want to bind your breasts to your chest with duct tape and snip away at your life with pink barbie scissors and the monsters in the closet will seem so very real, but it’ll pass. It’ll all pass. The rushing wave of heat will burn your body, but the upcoming tide will be a bitter chill. Your arms will twist into tentacles and your legs into sharp talons, your flesh flaking away to scales. You’ll mutate into a vicious creature of the sea, like the ones in your father’s old storybooks, spinning from ocean to ocean until you finally forget how to swim. You’re too young to ask when it ends, too small to wonder when the world will get bigger, too happy to be vomiting in a washroom at 2 am. The pretty girl with water in her lungs just drowned herself in the passing storm - please, don’t minimize yourself within a petty statistic. You’re worth so much more than the world is able to admit.

3. Your grandmother’s house will never feel the same again.

No more shopping for shiny shoes with tall heels, or searching through the spice cabinets with your little cousin at your heels, or decoding your mother’s scrawling handwriting because she didn’t live long enough to teach you how to read it. They’ll slowly drain the rosy color from your cheeks, because only girls have pinkish-tinged smiles and princess hair. But you’ll get used to the paint dripping down your brow and the wind brushing against your neck. Sifting paratas from pan to pan with smoldering fingers, biting down samosas and realizing you can no longer taste the sting of fresh-running blood beneath the sauce, sitting down at the table and having the conversation quiet, you’ll get used to it. Soon it’ll start again, little by little, a heartbeat revived through locks of ivy and vine. They’ll pass you the sharbat when asked, and hand over a small tasbih with a grimace. But you’ll have to watch your aunt and cousins flipping roti in the kitchen, laughs clashing, while you sit locked away at the darkened table.

4. You’ll still be pretty. Just a different kind.

A harsher, sharper, more breathable kind. The moss spread along a lake shore, or the barnacles stuck to an abandoned shipwreck deep below the feet you’d dangle from the pier during summer. Striking like the first time you witnessed New York graffiti, and it was a myriad of rainbow colors decimated with black paint and a collection of hasility written slurs. Handsome like shoes ruined the day you bought them, dust smeared along their white laces, or the cracked gravestone about a hundred years from your sleeping body. Captivating like when you stopped having extra hair ties slung around your wrist, or the lipstick

you’ll soon scrawl upon your face because if they give a shit either way it truly doesn’t matter what you wear. It doesn’t. Every suit jacket is an act of rebellion, and every plaid skirt is an act of war.

5. You’ll find people. Not on purpose, but you will.

Hidden in the margins of textbooks or under benches or perhaps just conveniently dropped at your feet. You’ll find hands limber enough to hold, bodies strong enough to hug, mouths fluid enough to switch with your changing dialects. Their bones won’t crack with the force of your gaze - and if they do, they were never strong enough to handle you in the first place. You might break a few shoulders, but you’ll piece them back together with duct tape and a grin. The fluorescent lights will flood their faces, kaleidoscopic smiles shimmering like a multicolored tattoo. You’ll want to paint their names in lights and keep them packaged away, unable to run. You’ll release your grip eventually, when markings start tracing along their skin, and you’ll be surprised how many run only to hug you back. Say thank you to them sometimes. God knows they deserve it.

6. Take a break from bending down until your knees get bloody

and slipping prayers into your socks, because the beginning was never the beginning and the world will never care enough. You can’t peel away the river’s wrath from under your skin or pick apart the color ensued into your hair, and if you try, you’d only end up with marks on your fingers and ash on your teeth. Don’t light anything just yet, though. Worship works in diverse ways. You’ll find a newer, brighter force to believe in, a myriad of flashing lights and painted faces and bare chests, and learn to lie until it burns. The rush of hellfire will be entertaining. You might leave with the devil tucked under your hood, but you’ll be laughing all the while. The world will soon find that it cannot shove you into a box and cram lies down your throat - it can only prolong the inevitable. An invisible force isn’t worth a physical one. And you, my dear, are the only changing tide you’ll ever truly need.

7. Whatever they say will cease to matter.

Any slurs they toss will be ingested into your system by midday, spreading a virus of sorts to your hands and feet until the skins crumble off in chunks. With every insult they hurl, you take them to heart and shape your body around their words. Every punch permeates your body and shifts your organs to their melody, twisting farther and farther. They’ll try to undo the knot, but it’ll tighten with every movement. You’ll become a symbol for everything they seek to destroy, a martyr for the other side, painted in vibrant colors and sparkles along your eyes and scars dug into your chest. Your queerness is beautiful, honey. Their apprehension only sharpens your tongue. Their hatred only decorates your fruitful language, until apples grow gold from your branches. Don’t be held down by people who can’t even comprehend your greatness. After all, there’s no point in existing if people don’t realize you’re there. So exist. Scream so loudly they’ve forced to look at you. Turn heads so violently they snap.

8. Don’t live off of spite. It’ll kill you.

Live in rebellion instead. Take up the space they’ve spent centuries guarding. Throw stones at closed doors until they scrub away the paint, and then leave them with an echoing reminder of the sparks you will soon light, the world you will soon break down, the people you will soon become. If you never become those people, don’t fret, because they’re in your bones and your mind and every word you’ve ever written. Don’t let anything but your own torch burn your skin. Don’t take anything to heart but your

own mind - it’ll be your last comfort until the day you die. Write until you can’t anymore, until they’ve heard exactly what you have to say. Step further into your body every year - become so unrecognizable the face in the mirror feels like home. Smile. Laugh. Be the human being they’ve always doubted you could be. Love the way you were always too scared to. Holler up to the sky that you survive even more with every second.

9. They want to destroy you.

So disturb them. Confuse them. Be incomprehensible. You were given this life for a reason, after all. Your identity is both a blessing and a curse, but you can form it into something else entirely. If you go, they win. And remember: above all, never let them fucking win.

Ari Kanji is a fifteen year old transmasc writer from Toronto, Canada who’s been published in over twenty five different literary magazines. He’s been a short story writer for as long as he can remember, but has found a love for poetry during this last year. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing the violin, and working on multiple unfinished novel drafts. His gender trouble used to be driven by a need to belong somewhere, but he’s since realized that being unable to conform can be a powerful tool. He enjoys writing hybrid and experimental pieces that mix and mold different styles, and especially in regards to ‘taboo’ topics.

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being a transmasc lesbian is not being a trans men—
trans men are he and him and son and boyfriend
but you’re just you. and trans men don’t look at 
their cis male friends and thank god
that at least they don’t have that person’s gender. 
you’re trans but not a man. maybe you’re just you.
 
being a transmasc lesbian is not being a butch girl—
butch girls don’t look at their transfeminine friends
and wish they could be that beautiful and riotous in a dress 
(if only you had a body that could transgress—)
butch girls don’t want to be masculine in a feminine way 
or mix black skinny jeans with rhinestone melodrama—
you’re butch but not a girl. maybe you’re just you.
 
being a transmasc lesbian is not being nonbinary 
because that admits that there was a binary to begin with 
because who even believes that other than cis people? 
you’re not cis. maybe you’re just you.
 
being a transmasc lesbian is obsessing over stone butch blues 
and confusing cis people because it’s funny
and being a living contradiction wrapped in theory and social awkwardness: 
and what is gender and you don’t even have a gender:
 
and what is transmasc but a performance that’s also real and fake and everything: 
you are a critique of lesbianism
and an implosion of transness 
or maybe you’re just you.
 
being a transmasc lesbian is when being called a boy 
is like being told you’re punk
if all you’ve done is maybe listened to paramore once 
if someone’s an idiot, they might think it’s true
but you don’t, mostly because it’s wrong 
and you’re gay. maybe you’re just you.
 
being a transmasc lesbian is when being called a girl 
is like being told you’re punk
if actually, you only listen to bro-country.
because in this hypothetical, you have bad taste in music 
and sometimes everyone is an idiot
you sure feel like an idiot. maybe you’re just you.
 
 
being a transmasc lesbian is when the core of your being is 
Masc but not Boy
and Butch but not Girl and Lesbian but not TERF
and Queer so not Governed
and Butch and Dyke and Femboy
 and Riot Grrl and Anarchafeminist and Independent Woman 
and because you’re you,
sometimes just a negation of gender.

mk zariel (it/they) is a transmasculine lesbian anarchist. influenced by the Queers Bash Back tendency, it hosts the podcast THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES (about being in high school and organizing), writes for the Anarchist Review of Books, and writes the blog DEBATE ME BRO (a y2k style advice column about anarchy-101 stuff). its poetry is published (or forthcoming) in Unfuturing, Free Verse Revolution, What We Think About When We Think About Love, Not Your Poster Child, Chasing The Storm, A Rose By Any Other Name, Suburban Witchcraft, and MyrtleHaus; its photography is soon to be featured in Coin Operated Press’s queer photography zine. it also organizes trans liberationist spaces across the great lakes region, performs poetry and theater, does graphic design for social movements, and vibes to classic queercore. find out more about its organizing and art here: https://linktr.ee/mkzariel

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Dear Joanne 
you build your own echo chamber 
from the tears & cries of our sisters 
you pull the blinds on empathy 
& enlightenment 
you don’t wanna have a conversation 
because you are afraid. 

What are you afraid of, Joanne
being undermined?
as you undermine our sisters, our daughters
who told you 
that trans pride & power 
cannot coexist with feminism?
who told you that these women are not women?

When will we learn 
if we do not humble ourselves & listen 
the future will not stop for you, Joanne
we will not stop rising up to you, Joanne
this generation who knows the strength 
of individuality 
who learnt from you, ironically 

We feel betrayed by your bigotry 
I stand with the world of wizardry 
where unity wins 
against those who say 
that those who are different are lesser 
I stand with the love you gave us, Joanne 
but I cannot stand with you. 

Devon Webb (she/her) is a Gen Z writer & editor based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her award-winning work has been published extensively worldwide & revolves around themes of femininity, vulnerability, anti-capitalism & neurodivergence. She is an in-house writer for Erato Magazine, an editor for Prismatica Press, & a founding member of The Circus (@circuslit), a collective prioritising radical inclusivity within the indie lit scene. She can be found on social media at @devonwebbnz.

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Silence cracked from the chuckle
Of my throat...

The windshield busy pushing
The wet rain away...

By my side,
I have a chance to divulge
Into a secret consumption
Of gay lust,
Fucking the shyness away

But that will fuck
My heart away in guilt,
Because I am already married,

Though I am a survivor
Of domestic violence.

Holding that hand of my lover
Tightly,

I left the car,
Letting the rain sweat on me,

I rushed home,
Gulped alcohol,
Thrown my husband in bed,
Roughly indulging
Into sexual activity

Leaving him to wonder
How I cracked his cherry
All night long…

Alshaad Kara is a Mauritian poet who writes from his heart. He won first place for the Boney Cultural Center Valentine’s Day Poetry Competition 2024 and was also a winner of the Flapper Press Poetry Café Valentine’s 2024 Juliet Poetry Contest. His latest poems were published in “Elsker Publishing House”, “Inner Child Press” and “Missives”. Instagram: @alshaadkara1

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The satellite radio station or web broadcast or app or maybe a mix, he never was quite certain, blasted songs that gushed growl and cacophony and crash. The men—the gods in training—grunted and heaved and sweat. They leaned over one another as they exchanged “spotting” favors and words of encouragement, bulge above face, within reach of iron and finger. The plates clattered against each other when restacked, supplementing the din. Some wiped down the benches, but the smells of their collective efforts lingered in the air for decades, a potency impossible to eradicate. Their chests had no need to burst forth from impossible tank tops; they simply flowered beneath. Undaunted, the “skinny” calves would not be denied, insisting, too, upon admiration. Here was fruit to be measured, weighed, and appraised before the hard-to-please mirrors. Here, then, a cornucopia for all of the senses. Before the booths of the (meat) market square, this garden.

Only here he was. He, of all people! In this way station? What a struggle it had been to step over the threshold. He remembers that first time. Thinking:

Everyone’s staring

everyone’s gesturing

everyone’s hissing

everyone is laughing

everyone everyone everyone

Only there was no “everyone.” Just an occasional inscrutable glance. And then later, smiles from the regulars. Once even, a wink from a god. The slip of a boy who had once sat in the front, completed homework worthy of gold star, stayed late in the hopes of avoiding the jeers and the punches in the shadows of corridors, the schoolyard, and streets, and who now hoped to avoid new jeers and punches with his updated figure, was being rewarded for his effort, for his persistence. He was, wasn’t he?

Only when he was back home beneath a god who had somehow not looked away, who had said “I like your orange glasses” as he walked with him from the garden into the inner and outer sanctums of ecstasy, when he was reveling in this mass that undulated over and into him, he detected a faint sound. A rustling, it was. In the corner? No, beyond. In the bedroom closet? Further still. In (or near) the proverbial closet? A cream muslin frock was whispering in the wind. He could hear the breeze separating its folds. There was a red-and-white gingham picnic blanket beneath, which only heightened the plain resplendence of its skirts. And there was a stroll between birches, and he could see the frock gleaming between the whites of the trunks, and he could hear the frock murmuring, calling, insisting to him.

Only the frock’s lilt never did leave him. Rather, its notes escorted him as he returned to the dungeon, to the comrades-in-lifting, where the conductor of that earlier ecstasy was no longer to be found. Notes of what-might-have-been. Trills, thrills of what might yet be. Where would the frock apparition lead him? Could he follow it to its exquisite, terrifying confusion … I mean, conclusion? As he made his way through the clang of iron and later into to the baths of anti-purification, he felt the frock’s fabric caress the (hard-earned!) swell of his ass, then flutter off beyond his reach, beyond the bodies flashing in locker room gloaming.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (56) is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. He is the author of two books of fiction and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems. His recent translations from the Yiddish include Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze and Blessed Hands: Stories by Frume Halpern. Please visit his website at https://yataubdotnet.wordpress.com. Taub lives in Washington, D.C.

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REASONS TO GO TO UNIVERSITY:

[] New city / queer city and a new world / meeting people with the same flair / be able to finally have a tattoo of rainbow on my forearm / new friends, maybe try bootycall / reinvention or what Mama Ru call drag / not having to pinch myself anymore for the flick of my wrists / dorm houses / the campus life / en suite bathroom (but really who am I fooling?) / and glitter, more glitter, against the gray /

Other reasons to go:

[] BREAK THE OLD SHELL

Before the era of the noughties — the 2000s Y2K, Miu Miu skirts, tie-dye shirts, Paris Hilton pink — I am born / The year is 1999 and Momma says the world is burning, / churning Cheetos red, lemon-boil yellow, angry orange, seismic blues, aquamarine scales / The millennium hatches its revolution and televisions hiss static of convicts, collapsing headlines, the slow theater of disaster / Momma holds me like pills she was warned against mixing with wine / Her body is a warm nest / and outside, the gravel is thick like foundation / planes fold into ocean like metal prayers / and clocks melt soft as candy against walls / The reporter calls it / the world catching Dali /

Meanwhile / my father watches the emancipation of culture through a sports-colored haze / He says he is not ready for a son / At year’s end, tobacco blunts an obsidian scar on the carpet / A duffel bag waits / Leather straps pulled tight like his swagger for young life enamored / My Momma screams and the world splinters / Her rage burns my father’s skin, claws at his face with desperation /

I was just born / my back carries a home / I am a snail tucked into its own spiral / learning to weigh my weather / weather my weight / and my backbone thickens under my mother’s careful hands / a slow mineral kindness turning into structure / and a snail cannot outpace its house / it drags its shelter through every surface it survives / it folds inward, always penitent / a body made into enclosure /

ANOTHER REASON:

[] Dance for my life

Growth is a ruse / that the body takes for granted / My man-heels spanned into wings / and what do a normal boy want if not for normalcy? / Not ballet? / Does the world teach early on that there is a certain blindness that man has to achieve to walk straight? / What if a body is congruent / Has a dereliction that mothers can only write through rhyme scheme / AABB / ABBA / ABAB / Every wrist flicker / Hips zip / She saw a boy in tutu / toes pointed Polaris at every angle / and I was just the only boy in a ballet class / a blue bubblegum / with the four walls of the rehearsal room ready to stomp /

NOW:

[] ACTUALLY, LIVING THE LIFE

The campus is greener than pastures / the lessons / the libraries / coffee shops with their eccentric charms / clubs and their electric, sexy songs / vintage classrooms and book-sage scents / students primed with ambitious strides and stars pined for that spotlight / punks, rebels, grueling achievers / queen bees, social media stars, It girls in pastel clothes / mini shops of cutesy trinkets / thrift stores holding all the magic for repersonalization / the sparkle and charm of grubby canals / everything shimmering in stardust before it gradually chips like paint flakes off a mural / beautiful, fleeting, already becoming something else in my hands /

The Freshmen’s Fair at the covered court, its great awning like a whale’s mouth, smells of BO and wanting / The rugby boys in sportswear wave their flyers, urging Spartans toward the coming sports combat / I roll my eyes at the heat, listen to the intellectuals dissect poetry at the Literature Club / Indie boys, all pretenses and philosophies, smile at me, and offers a nouveau nicheness flirt / I am looking and looking for a place / but all I see are Econ majors, numbers flying with precision; Bio people in their megafantastic green; Psychology beaus with their piercing gaze / I buy an Audrey Hepburn poster from the Art Club and stick it to my bedroom wall that night / The stars turn into Marilyn’s diamonds, and I dance to Madonna’s Vogue /

My clothes are neatly lined / rolled socks and folded Calvin Klein underwear my Momma bought from her favorite online shop / my wide-leg pants stacked like the Eiffel Tower on my cabinet / and floating on the metal rack like Aphrodite’s soul / are shimmering tops, rainbow coats, fur-trimmed dresses, extravagant ensembles / Below, platform boots lifted from my Aunt’s house, red heels bought from cashier’s tips, a pair of thigh-highs for my awakening / Beyoncé’s vocals fracture me into chandelier glow and I arabesque to the floor /

Pink / I go to the LGBTQ+ Society / I wear my skin / Everyone introduces their names and they roll off my tongue like cinnamon and peppermint / some sweet, some sharp / The circle gives their pronouns / He / Him / She / Her / They / Them / and I know / I understand these people / just them / people like me / I say my name / and one boy with a pierced nose says he is a trans man / his name is Jacob / and he says he would prefer a life where he was born a boy / maybe it would be different / less spectacle / less people congratulating him / because what is brave in being your true self / it only gets brave when there’s a certain axis of privilege to becoming one / and all butterflies have cocoons they can call home / does that mean we don’t have our own? / and something in all of us is honest below the fluorescent lights / a rustle of the gold foil sheets through awkwardly and recognition blinks off from its sheen / outside the room, posters of queer youth assemblies and campus pride strikes flicker on the bulletin board / inked fists, lipstick slogans, calls to march through Manila heat / we talk about drag / some call it a hyperinflatable costume / some say it is weather / something you step into / something to make the survival visible / some afternoons, we rehearse walks in borrowed heels / laughing when the floor goes on acid / someone says the city is also learning to us / some men have vaginas /some women have penises / some queers don’t / some fiddle with a cross on their neck despite Him turning his back more than one time and again / some paint themselves green / and some are just here to exist / and it’s not big of a deal /

When I see the poster in Drama Class / I know I have to be inside / Drag It Up Society / the Vogue-esque blocky font snags my sequined heart / There is a room number I copy onto my wrist / destiny etched into the pillars of heaven / and I dash in with my worn-out shoes / The door is cluttered with design posters and fashion paraphernalia / I knock and a dozen pairs of eyes merge into this humongous supernova presence / They smile with overlined lips / honey-thick, hive-warm wigs towering / and their queen says / Welcome home /

I had seen musicals as a child / watched them with such fervor beside my mother / called her once Broadway / in adolescence, it belted into Mama Ru on screen / and in Social Science, our teacher tells us that DRAG is never just one word / Dress Resembling A Girl / something more, always more / like CUNT when RuPaul says it / Charisma Uniqueness Nerve Talent / In the Shakespearean era, DRAG existed differently / male performers in feminine costume playing women on stage / and the audience applauded without hesitation / Queerness, then, was spectacle and celebration /

Everyone sits on the floor like glamorous felines / Everyone is made of yarned warmth / Across the circle, a boy with curly hair lifts a hand toward me / Someone begins her speech /

I am Venus Galactica in drag, but you can call me Aria out of drag / Pronouns they/them, and make sure to spell Venus with a capital V / First of all, drag is not just for queer people / it’s for everyone / they continue / And we’re all here not only because we are queer but because we are here to be a berserk reminder that we really do exist /

They smile red lips stretched like Hollywood / Their eyes sizzle with fire, thorned by spiky eyeliner; monochrome blue lids like a resurrected 90s / Under the mahogany foundation and sunset blush, a faint stubble surfaces, a trace of something outside the makeshift world / They/Them. / Their outfit reads Mugler corset in leather / Bad-ass. / Their wig an explosion of blond, dripping sun around their shoulders /

They ask everyone’s drag name / I answer, honestly: I don’t know yet. / Names feel temporary / Fluidly tailored, like identity itself. / How do you strip your name and become you? / RuPaul, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga /names edited, sharpened, placed onto stage / The spotlight does not burn them; it shines back their sheen. / Perhaps a name is just a name /

The president asks again why we are here / Everyone already seems to know / Born to perform / I cave inward, rummaging through the ache in my chest, until something gasps / I am here to belong, isn’t everyone else? / And everyone smiles / No one judges /

I am queer / I am a boy who does ballet / I love men / What else?

College is a beginning, a shedding / Old skin peeled into new / I come from the poems I write, the boy-crush doodles tucked inside spring notebooks / I am still the blush of a thirteen-year-old when someone asks why I dance ballet / Shame blooming hot beneath skin / I am still that boy and still the flower wreaths I made to become that boy / I am nineteen and still made of my mother’s folktales, my grandmother’s recipes, the mythologies from class / I am queer, the riots, the rebellion, the hip-hop playing too loud in my chest. / I am still the rap bars, still the body that is wrapped in tutu / I am me / He/Him / Now, I just have to figure out the name.

I’m very interested in Feng Shui, and I want the chi to flow freely in my apartment, so I order a homophobic man hologram from Ikea to place in the corner of my room. It’s only a hologram, but it’s lifelike enough. He even holds a cardboard sign with an irritated face that reads, “Jesus hates homosexuals” – it goes perfectly with the orange curtain.

I try to make him as angry as possible because he only looks good when the veins on his neck bulge and his eyes glow red. I keep showing him gay porn all day long, and he shakes the sign furiously when men make out on the TV screen. However, he seems completely calm when two girls are involved – he only has a problem with guys having sex with each other, which isn’t what I ordered.

“No, we can’t replace it,” says the IKEA man on the phone. “Actually, all our male homophobic models are like this, and we only produce male holograms.”

“But this won’t do!” I object. “According to Feng Shui, the chi, the positive energy, runs away too quickly if I have a hypocritical homophobe at home, which makes me nervous and tense.”

“Er… Well, maybe I can recommend someone instead. But he’s not a hologram.”

That afternoon, there’s a knock on the door. When I open it, a young, seemingly homosexual guy is on the doorstep.

“Are you the new homophobe?” I ask suspiciously. The twink sighs heavily and pulls down his pants. I almost think he wants something from me, but instead of a penis, a tiny homophobic man emerges from his tight jeans. He’s about seven inches tall, clutching a small sign that reads: “Sodomy is a crime!”

“It’s a birth defect. My father was a hypocritical gay, and my mother was a self-loathing lesbian,” the guy shrugs. I finally decide he’ll look great in my living room.

“And you’re sure he hates everyone?” I ask hopefully.

“This little bastard? Oh, he hates absolutely everyone,” growls the boy. To justify his words, the tiny man spits at me. Apparently, he’s pretty pissed about being stuck with a gay guy for his whole life.

So, I set the twink up in the corner opposite the hologram with his pants down. I eagerly anticipate how enraged the hologram will be at the sight of the gay guy, which of course should start the flow of chi. The hologram raises the sign with “Jesus hates homosexuals,” but then he sees the tiny homophobe screaming between the guy’s legs and his mouth falls open. The little homophobe fidgeting between the gay guy’s legs also stops and stretches his neck towards the other homophobe with interest. Dear God, they sympathize with each other. I can already feel the chi draining. I go to sleep, hoping the situation will improve by morning.

But it only gets worse: even the gay guy now finds the homophobic hologram cute.

“Oh, fuck you both!” I scream and run out into the park to cry. When I return, all hell has broken loose in the living room: the homophobe is standing there with his pants down, and the gay guy is trying to force the little homophobe up his ass. The tiny guy disappears headfirst into the hologram’s asshole. Clutched in his hand, the “Sodomy is a sin!” sign scratches a small wound on the edge of his partner’s anus – hologram blood drips onto the carpet – then it disappears too. The moaning twink soon warms up: the tiny hologram guy slides in and out of the dark cave, spitting hologram blood and feces all over the room while shouting that all gays are going to hell.

I realize the chi in my home has never been this low. The dripping hologram blood and sperm create negative energy throughout the apartment, attracting worn, broken, and damaged energy, making me unbalanced and unhappy. So, I turn to my Feng Shui book to see what to do in such a case. Following its advice, I cut the gas pipe in the kitchen and light a match.

Zoltán Komor was born in June 14, 1986. He lives in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. He writes surreal short stories and published in several literary magazines (Horror, Sleaze and Trash; Drabblecast; The Phantom Drift; Gone Lawn; Bizarro Central; Bizarrocast; Thrice Fiction Magazine; The Missing Slate; The Gap-Toothed Madness; Wilderness House Literary Review; Kafka Review, etc.) His first English book, titled Flamingos in the Ashtray: 25 Bizarro Short Stories, was released by Burning Bulb Publishing in 2014, his second English book, titled Tumour-djinn was released by MorbidbookS in the same year, and his third collection, Turd Mummy was released by StrangeHouse Books in 2016. His latest novel, The Radiator Boy and The Holly Country was published by Potter’s Grove Press in 2021.

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The moment I was chucked out of my mother’s womb, she knew I would grow up to be a monster.

She always made it her mission to point out to her friends that I basically clawed out her tunnels, leaving scarred crescent marks on the inner linings of her vagina. She likes to punctuate on the story that for a small body like mine, I sreamed colossaly at the doctors who held me up to the light and the first thing she did was ask for earplugs from father.

To pile more on this monstrous genesis, she likes to put an emphatic disdain to the mythology that I was born with strong hands because for three minutes straight, I didn’t let go of my umbilical cord while I ravaged through my amniotic-filled lungs.

Father found it all charming. These foreshadowing physiologies of infant me growing up one day to be a strong, brute man like him, who would hold heirloom pistols in his hand, wear high-grade tailored military uniform, saluting his kind with humble gratitude, saying yes, sir! yes, sir! like a pupper under a fascist regime.

This would all curdle into disappointment one afternoon after he finds me joining my mother in the doorway of their bedroom, his perfect son mutating, berserkly screaming at the world about how unfair it is, flailing on the floor with the straps of mother’s brassiere snapped on my collarbones, the panty fabric still wedged between my legs like a menstrual streak.

I had always had an inkling that Mother began to hate me the moment Father showered me more attention than her, and her love conditionally started after he took strides away from me, his faggot son.

The day I was born was also the day a mirror was held up to her inner wounds.

A child is always the byproduct of compounded generational damage, born out of the spindle of two ruined people hoping that their splinters, webcracks, and suppurations would finally find their easy fix through a child. They think an embryo is the solution to all problems in this world, like epoxy caulked through a cleaving, but time wears everything, and eventually, the filler hardens into stone. Knock on it and only the padded sound of solid emptiness rattles your knuckles.

Motherhood looks beautiful on you, Father would say lovingly in a prescriptive tone, and there’s insidiousness in the subtext, that Mother is not to take any other ugly roles other than this beautiful lifetime opportunity.

I always noticed the way she smiled at him tightly. She never wore Botox but during those tense moments, her face had the quality of cosmetic smizing. It seemed like it would rip apart the gloss she had freshly applied on her face.

All the while, all their friends in the living room. Bland rich people wearing Bardot hairstyles like Halloween costumes in eerily precise imitation, poofy floral dresses tailored slightly off their actual body sizes so you could see them the whole afternoon not really eating the casserole they brought, and husbands who look like founding fathers of the American dream: receding hairlines, staunched bodies, and near-jaundice pale skin.

Despite that, Mother loved something in Father that I couldn’t fathom to love.

I once asked her why she always had bruises on her arms, and why they were colored like that. Eggplant chrome. She just smiled at me and rubbed my hair, looking into the large glass walls of the living room that spanned into a spectacular garden view outside, until her fingers started to pull harder on the strands of my hair.

“Mother, it hurts!” I said.

She would stop, and her smile was still intact. “Just some accidents, dear,” she would assure.

But I never believed her, so I would prod further. “I saw Father hit you yesterday after the party, Ma. He hit you like this.”

I mimicked the stance Father took in his usual spot at the kitchen, raising my arms like I am hitting a home run with a baseball bat, and striking Mother’s body like it’s the ball. The moment my arms moved to her direction, she flinched.

“Oh, it’s nothing dear. Father and I just like to tease each other. We like to have our fun sometimes. Role-play that kind of stuff.” I glared at her. I learned at school that honesty was the best policy and here was an adult proving irony to that proverbial scorn.

After class that day, I asked a classmate to hit me in the arms. He was strange about this request, saying no, that he couldn’t hit animals and people, but I said I wanted to play with him, to tease with him, so hit me. He looked like he wanted to cry so I goaded him into doing it, stepping on his new rubber shoes and insisting harder to hit me. His hands slapped my arms and I slapped him back harder. Hit me harder, I said. I don’t want to! Please don’t make me, he was crying at this point. Hit me, I said again. And he did, his fists landing on my arms repeatedly, screaming and screaming that this is bad, his snots tearing at his nostrils, his tears scattering around in beads as his fists excavated bruises on my skin.

Thank you! I said after. I hugged him to my chest. He was still bawling from what he did, but we were just teasing each other! You’re my friend now! I smiled at him and played with his hair like Mama did and pulled his strands harder until he yelped. Oh, I am sorry, dear, but he just buried his crying face back into my chest.

Back home, I strutted confidently to Mama and showed her the bruises on my arms. With great shock, she was frozen on the sofa. Father gritted his teeth and asked what happened. I didn’t look at him, I stared at Mama like she always did when she complimented her friends for their new hair or new clothes but really not meaning it, and said, I was teasing with him like what Father always do to you, Ma. And there, on a peaceful night, behind perfectly manicured lawns, behind the newly wiped French doors, Mother finally cracked like a porcelain vase, water splurging out of its shards, bleeding onto the living room floor like she has just watched a monster salivate over its own flesh.

That would be our relationship throughout the years. There’s an inherent scorn always projected by mothers to their child, a futile concern whether that child will grow up one day proving to be their inner rot, their bad seed, their mutilated side. It’s a great fear to learn that the replication of your inner structure is as bad as your moral breeding. Mother always held herself to a higher standard, and thus, when I started climbing down the ladder of this moral ground, hers started to shake.

It’s a mother-child changeling. Something expertly monstrous that on a random reflection in a Thursday afternoon in the mirror, her, putting earrings, me asking if I could wear her heels to look taller, to probably look more beautiful, and her saying that no boy should ask that kind of thing. Her, praying in her bed, and I, listening to her pathetic whimpers begging God to not let her husband cheat again and kicking her shin, saying, He could always cheat, Mother. It’s a choice, reiterating what my teacher said. Even my friend told me that her mother was a whore and that’s why she cheated, so father is a whore too, and she would slap the rosary on my face, and instead of crying, the sensation of beads nipping on my skin tickles, and I would be laughing so hard that the entire night, Mother wears this expression on her face I would soon be familiar with. A slight downward tilt on the side of her lips, eyes wide, thin brows pinched into a V. Her, doing her makeup in an early morning before a meeting, dabbing foundation on her blemishes, puckering her lips to a gloss, and I, asking her if she really loves Father. Her answer, she does, and I, cocking my head back, retorting, Even when he calls you a slut with that lipstick? Later that day, she would drive the two of us to the meeting, and I see in the rearview reflection she’s wearing a coral shade compared to the hibiscus red gloss. Her, buying new sexy underwear at VS, and I, flicking through the glossy pages of the magazine, thinking that Mother is a beautiful woman but beauty doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good man and security. Beauty doesn’t guarantee any self-confidence as she makes fun of a female celebrity before-and-after videos of plastic surgery, saying that she has gained a pillow face squished to a metal mattress because what face is that, and I would ask, Are you happy, Mother, that she is ugly now? and she would look at me with the same scrofulous expression, wondering if she thinks I am ugly. She shakes her head, No, unconvincingly, and shoos me away in the living room.

If anything Mother taught me was inconsequential, there was one thing I avoided more. I didn’t want to grow up like her.

The old couple asked me yesterday if I’d already met the new tenant, right after helping them set up the cameras in their room for their latest “exclusive content.” OnlyFans, apparently, has become a thriving side hustle, in addition to their capitalistic enterprise of renting out the building above their pastry-slash-bookstore business.

I haven’t exactly seen a booming market for geriatric erotica, or what they simply call old people sexing in camera, but maybe that’s the point. Statistics would probably say it’s an upfront taboo for their demographic. But in porn, they could be niche. A frontier. A brave, wrinkled middle finger to a culture of propaganda insisting that aging smells like liniment oil, chewable vitamins, and early cancer screenings. Meanwhile, Septimus and Cunegonde here are adjusting ring lights and whispering intimately about camera angles like auteurs of late-life desire.

It was one afternoon I knocked on their door and chirpily offered my camerawoman services and surgery skills as a wannabe social media manager or content moderator for their refurbished OnlyFans account, a cumshot away from the traditional Pornhub setting, and I blurted out all the news to them haphazardly in their dim-lit kitchen.

Cunegonde almost choked on her pancakes, and Septimus, the ever-loving white-haired husband, slapped her on the back as she spat a yellow, chunky drizzle on the table.

“So, you all up for it?” I cocked my head to the side, and the next thing I knew, I, Pixi, had become the director of a trashy porn picture, crouching beside their bed, fiddling with wires while Cunegonde asked if the softbox made her “look dewy,” and Septimus kept requesting “a more cinematic angle,” which, to him, meant the aesthetic should feel like it’s still the economic downtrail of World War grayscapes, and I pointed the camera slightly upward like he was about to deliver a monologue about the faces of death.

I am doing the same thing again as they tell me more about the new tenant.

I didn’t know there was another room besides mine. I also didn’t know there was already a new renter.

I try to feign nonchalance, shrug it off like it is nothing. Truthfully, though, I am throbbing with curiosity. I want to put a face to this abstract idea of a companion, a presence breathing just beyond my walls.

“He’s a handsome boy. I think you would like him, Pixi,” the old lady said, cheerful as ever, pressing a tin of cookies into my hands.

I peeled back the plastic inside and bit into the soft, sugary mound. The old man beamed in agreement, the same stretched smile, the same receding gums flailing, and added, “He’s a photographer. Always has that big camera hanging from his neck. Quite serious about it. Very… artistic.”

Put them together and they blur into a graying organism brimming with sexual anticipation for the future, smiling too much like it’s a full-time overcompensation for whatever perversion they’re trying to hide and secretly shame. Cunegonde in her floral dress, Septimus in a Ralph Lauren polo tucked into khakis, the portrait of a retirement brochure, the picture of a typical white couple spined with white privilege of health insurance. The kind of couple that looks laminated. You would never guess they film sensual, erotic, deeply committed amateur porn as their civic duty to a loyal fanbase of 500 avid watchers

“So, he’s an artsy guy?” I angle the main camera toward the bed, all red silk and lace, curated to the point of Lynchian effect. It looks less like a place people fucked and more like a dollhouse fever dream. The imagery it’s fronting is someone gently undressing beside a collection of porcelain Victorian dolls.

They nod in perfect sync. It is eerie, honestly. So mechanical. Like someone had installed the same chip in both their skulls in an alternative sci-fi world.

“Oh yes,” Cunegonde chirps. “He’s also very tall. Unsettlingly tall. Like that. What’s that film, Septimus? The thin one?”

“Slender Man,” Septimus supplies.

“Yes, that one! He’s not frightening. Well… only a little frightening. But he’s cute.”

“He’s terribly shy,” Septimus adds. “Apologizes for everything. Once bought coffee from that café down the road. What’s it called—”

“The one with the haggard barista?” Cunegonde asks.

“Yes, that one. Anyway, he saw us there and apologized. Profusely. For buying their coffee instead of ours, I think.”

“Kept bowing,” Cunegonde adds, frantically nodding to mimic what the new tenant did. “We hadn’t even spoken to him.”

“He nearly dropped the coffee,” Septimus continued. “Said sorry to the cup.”

“And to the barista,” Cunegonde added.

“And to the floor,” Septimus said.

“He does that,” she nodded. “Apologizes to surfaces.”

I laugh at them. “Just click the record button here and you’re ready to go.” I point to the large, clunky button at the top of the camera and give them a teasing smile. “You know the drill.”

They flush, synchronized again, what a carnival of a well-rehearsed act. I turn and strut out, leaving them in their fantasy.

The couple locks the door, and I go to play with their cat, Martha. A hairless thing with an ugly, chiseled face and bugged-out green eyes that seem permanently offended by my existence.

She’s glaring at me again, or maybe that’s just her RBF, as I squeeze in beside her on the sofa.

The hyperperformative moans drill through the walls, and she yelps at the rhythm of very horny thuds escalating by the second. I leave Martha in that steamy hell, figuring the couple’s relentless content creation has probably fermented her into that level of hatred. I would wither too if my life were scored by an endless loop of a badly edited soundtrack.

I close the main door behind me and walk toward my room. Before I can enter, the door at the end of the hallway opens, and a tall shadow spills out, slinking across the floor, dragging itself toward me until it looms overhead like I’ve wandered into the wrong genre entirely. Some kind of gothic horror.

The platform boots I’m wearing don’t give me enough height to meet it halfway. When I look up, I see a tall, lanky body with sunburnt skin and a camera slung over his chest like some cyborg heart, jutting out of a ribcage. The new renter, probably. I step back just enough to see his face properly.

And there it is, the artsy tenant. He’s looking at the floor, fingers scratching the nape of his neck like men do always when they’re uncomfortable.

“So, you’re the new tenant, huh?” I say, stepping forward this time. A faint sourness lifts off his skin, strangely pheromonic.

He tries to stand straighter, says something, then slouches again. Only tall guys can afford that kind of movement, their spines more decorative rather than load-bearing, and all that height with no intention of using it properly to burden their gigantism. He clears his throat and still doesn’t return my eye contact.

“Uh, y-yes. I brought something. Like, a gift. A housewarming sort of. Just to introduce myself, you know.”

He unloads the sentence in one breath, syllables bumping into each other, a clunky art of liaison.

I wait for his gift, and he’s still standing in front of me, awkwardly fidgeting with the buttons on his camera, plastic clattering against pale fingernails. His feet shift from point A to point B, then back again. He’s buffering. His spine bends into an S, then straightens, then does that one more time.

“Where is it?” I say with a tight-lipped smile.

“Oh. I am sorry. I left it in my room.” He smiles and frantically runs back to his room.

When he returns, he presents a potted plant in his upturned, eager hands. A cactus with a single, newly blossomed flower perched on top of its pointy little body. What a cactus. I dare him to look at me, but he’s persistent in his lackluster social skills. I notice the redness creeping up on his cheeks, and I giggle. I wonder if he’s thinking about the cactus the same size as his dick.

“Thank you.” I intentionally skitter my fingers over his palms as I take the pot from him, catching the slight dampness of his skin on my pinky. He shudders at the touch, and I start to wonder if I’m that repulsive, or if he’s just a virgin who can’t tolerate even a single brush from a girl. Or am I too clockable for him? A Frankenstein fetish of a trans girl stitched from mutilated parts? Did he notice the chin hairs I haven’t shaved yet?

All of these thoughts whirl, pathetic and immediate, every time I interact with a boy. It shouldn’t be the default hypothesis. I shouldn’t be appeasing, dissecting, laying my exterior on the slab just to check if I pass for a man’s gaze. And still, I angle my face against the light, hiding the unshaven mustache, stealing a glance at my reflection in the hallway mirror, calculating the right angle to present, something softer, something passable.

He pockets his hands, opens his mouth, then closes it again. This isn’t adorable. He looks like a gulping fish. What is his problem?

I start to back away, easing out of the moment, retreating toward my room, when he suddenly says, looking straight into my eyes with those piercing gray pupils, like they want to claw into my soil-colored ones, feral, searching—

“I just want to say you’re very pretty. You probably get that a lot, but you’re… intimidatingly pretty. I don’t know how to explain it. I just want to take a photo of you and keep it under my pillow. Probably look at it every night before I sleep.”

He rambles it out too fast, scratching his neck, fiddling with the buttons on his camera, teetering on his feet. I’ve never seen this kind of agitation in a person before. This one is brimming with it.

I stutter for the first time at what he said. “Wow, thank you?” I turn it over in my head, tracing his choice of words, the creep of that last line, and in that glob of slimy mess I find nothing but a viscid confirmation of my desirability. There’s something charming about it, the way he couldn’t look me in the eye. It’s the kind of attraction you get for a handsome serial killer. You know there’s something boiling beneath the façade, some ingrown turmoil you can’t sift out, some stench you can catch but can’t quite place under the skin. It’s dangerously unknown, but sexual, inherently animal, so ancient the only thing you can do is reach out and caress it, not knowing if you’re touching a snout or a sharp stone.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be creepy.” His face looks like a tomato under the fluorescent lights. “I just really wanted to say you’re pretty. Excuse what I said after that.” He smiles.

I try to catch his eyes again, but all I see is the curve of his skull beneath the buzz cut, his jaw pulled tight, his eyes squeezed shut. “I’m really sorry. Please don’t think I’m a creep. We’re neighbors.” His fingers trace the sharp curve of his head, then scratch at his chin. I want to slap those busy hands, make him look at me. See me again. Just fucking look at me. And say it again, those pretty words. I want to scream at him. He still won’t look at me.

So instead, I say, teasing, “God, you must be so lonely.”

tell me what hit — hip dip—-drift pity—-pit you live in —-is it —- mine.

Jist is Zionism—-eats its own Judaist—-without time—and fire—pyre—gire—vire—cyre—crossfire—-higher—-cry and lunges at the wire—-

with wirey desire to kill for you—-hymns sing to him —- will dim the

candle— light — plight of now —-hitey —- astro— aphrodite — faint at the smell of him

indeed he has a scent of red rose and lavender essentials

sea shell — oyster bay__ zary-mary__dainty-tainty tea tree planter—only me drinking tea slip-drip-to him–

being alone—-his tainted frothy cedar odor-—

the path I choose to take is treacherous — dangerous — calamitous

do I get ravenous — eats me alive

Heil I am getting —

Malaria — –lying sweat-drenched divan —

on ocean seas — crashing towards my careering body — in flight:

calvaria.

check.

it’s gone askew like or similar to last time

skull drilled open by a loose hand without experience

professional’s guide besides the hands of death — into an open jar

hatchet — axe — ratchet —-latchet I loosened it

now I am

frail pale male and a buster hustler duster rustler custler pistler cruster Miastaone

one to want to take home with you

She looks fantastic and writes with the velocity of Bukowski.

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I’d wake up and the city was always hungry. Night or day, you could hear it bellowing from some charred, infernal pit. Cars screaming, clubs leaking slutty music into the streets, traffic hazing the most bored citizens into their daily quota of minor atrocities. Also layer the hemorrhage of ambulances, sirens stitching the smorgasbord back together for it to repeat itself again like a dream in a dream. A skunk chasing the high of its own intergenerational trauma.

The first time I came into the city, I had a thousand pesos in my wallet. I spent most of it on a rhinestoned jacket from a flea market in the Divisoria, thinking I could hustle bourgeois idiots online, flip it as “haute couture-adjacent,” double the price. Everything was marketing. The world ran on commodity, and even you were a concept, maxed out for advertisement.

I burned the rest on a taxi to the apartment I’d found online. The photos showed a garish wound of a unit above a bakery welded to a bookstore, owned by the same renters. The double capitalism was enough to gag me, but I needed a place to live where I could cozy up half of my luggage’s content. Inside, the room was the color of my asshole, with try-hard gold curtains failing to elevate the situation. It clashed. Hideous, cheap, perfect, the bourgeois taste.

When I messaged the renters, their Renaissance-ass vocabulary should’ve warned me. Their profile was pure boomer aesthetic: a calligraphic quote about toxic positivity slapped onto a high-contrast rose that had nothing to do with anything, least of all the quote’s accidental devotion to utilitarian suffering. Life's how you make of it. They wrote like they were leasing out a castle: tenement, chamber, suite, lodgings, baroque to the point of self-parody. I laughed at the aristocratic-word-vomit. They didn’t.

I sent the payment online. It took me days to teach them how to receive it on PayPal. They trusted me instantly. Absurdly. I could’ve scammed them if I’d known from the get-go.

It was early evening in the summer when I arrived at the doorstep. The city had spat me out plainly, tagging me as one of its ordinary people.

I thought I was already transgressive, a hot fucking shit in my short skirts and punk-encrusted top, slits stylishly scarred across my chest and held together by safety pins, platform heels boosting me into a counterfeit ass. But I wasn’t. I was just another aesthetic among the carcasses of girls far more peculiar, more eccentric, more real. All-star divas in various stages of decay and perfection.

The impostor syndrome it took to look like an effortless slut was grounded into finer dust when no one even bothered to look at me. The worst thing a girl could be was unnoticeable after a fuckton of effort to look like she didn’t care.

The owners greeted me with overpolite smiles. The old man, I forgot his name, but it was something ancestral you could find at the tip of a genealogy chart. It sounded like piercing.

Right, Septimus. His eyes dragged over my legs as I sashayed into the bakery, empty save for the smell of sugar and something faintly burnt. His nose wrinkled when my neon thong peeked above my waistband. Attention was still attention.

The old woman’s name sounded like gonorrhea: Cunegonde. She smiled harder as she took my bag. Too hard. I half-expected the corners of her mouth to tear open, her teeth and the wet insides of her throat splitting through her face to swallow me whole.

I didn’t speak much. She filled the silence for me.

“Oh, it’s nice meeting you. You’re such a beautiful girl. So extra.” She eyed me from head to toe, and I didn’t know she could smile harder as her gums flailed. “The city… you’re going to love it. I can already see it now!”

Her eyes doubled over my body, saying everything she wouldn’t: that they regretted renting to a degenerate who looked like a prostitute. Septimus carried my single pink suitcase, its stickers peeling like dead skin. His silence felt masculine, performative. They were both committed to the bit: Old Couple, Vintage Edition.

They gave me a quick tour of the room. I beamed back, returning their all-teeth smiles, so fraudulent. When I flipped on the lights, it was brighter than expected, and suddenly I saw it: my future, waiting for my youth to malfunction. Sagging jowls. Wrinkled skin. Folding flesh. Sun-spritzed constellations of age spots. Receding gums.

Horrid. Sensual. The body collapsing in slow devotion to time.

“Welcome to the rest of your life!” Cunegonde shrieked, kissing my cheeks, her face still puffed from too much smiling. Didn’t it hurt?

The old man grunted, handed me my keys, and tossed my luggage beside the bed with unnecessary force.

“Are you an influencer, by any chance?”

His voice startled me. It was so frail, like a thin string waiting to snap, almost shy. It didn’t match the bulk of him at all.

I nodded. Said nothing. I didn’t want them to hear my voice, the baritone caw of it. The giveaway.

“Are you like one of those OnlyFans models?” the old woman asked, tilting her head.

I choked. The dryness in my throat did nothing to stop the giggle clawing its way out.

“Oh, sorry,” the old man said quickly. “It’s just, my wife and I sometimes have sex and post it on Pornhub. But one of our fans said we should try OnlyFans. Apparently that’s where the money is.”

Oh. I must’ve looked horrified, or impressed, or a mangled mix of both, because they glanced at each other and cleared their throats in sync. The room went thunderously silent.

The old woman busied herself fluffing my pillows, babbling about how the city view looked “Instagrammable.” The old man inspected the walls, the ceiling, anything but me, wishing he’d never retched those sentences.

“Anyhoo, we won’t bother you anymore.”

The old woman looked at me again, studying me with such clinical objectivity it almost made me fluster. I traced the safety pin on my top and stared at the floor.

“Have fun, darling!” she chirped.

Their faces, twinning tomatoes, bobbed out of my room. Just before the door shut, I called out, “I can help you two sometime with your OnlyFans account.”

The couple, staunched with shame seconds ago, suddenly went slack with excitement. They turned back to me, smiling eerily in sync.

“That’s if you still need help.” I shrugged.

“Oh my God, dear. You’re a blessing!”

The old man just winked.

Once they were gone, I dropped to my knees, exhausted, and let out a wicked laugh. What the fuck. I crawled and flopped onto my bed, typed Pornhub into the search bar, and went at it like I was digging through academic databases: grandma and grandpa amateur sex, grandpa creampies grandma, old husband fucks old wife, grandma–grandpa homemade sex tape. A full literature review.

Nothing quite matched the secret life of those two until I found a stray video under old people sexing that almost resembled them. They were wearing enormous lace masks, like they were reliving the glory days of their high school masquerade prom. I pressed play. They fumbled over each other’s wrinkling bodies, awkward at first, then slipping into ferality as the two got in-sync with their creaking bodies. The old man found a rhythm, lifting her onto the table, his thighs quivering and flapping as he pushed her legs up, both of them moaning like strangled cats flirting at midnight. That was enough.

I shut my phone. Opened it again. Tried to finish the video. Shut it off.

I skimmed their other uploads. There were more, of course. One even had a seasonal theme. Christmas, maybe. Or Halloween. Hard to tell. The aesthetic was frizzled, like it needed Botox and a ring light.

Still, the commitment was almost admirable.

I lay there, staring at the ceiling.

The city was an alien place full of alien people with alien needs, and it was a fucking beautiful alien world I refused to be alienated from.

That night, I took down the golden curtains and shoved them into the cabinet. Upcycling project, eventually. The room breathed with me as the window swallowed the space whole, its starkness pinning me to the fact that I had finally escaped.

My wings were still tucked, stoned, wounded then, but it fluttered against the city lights. My vision went Vaseline-smeared. I opened the window and the wind immediately wanted a taste of me, nipping at my arms with polluted clumsiness.

The city bellows again below. Its stomach still the same familiar grumble that greeted me the first time I stepped foot into its dirty gums. The noise—belches, cries, something newborn and starving—settles in comfortably, like I’m a lactating mother ready to feed this ravenous infant. Now it’s draped everywhere, on my bed, my still-chipping pink walls, the posters tacked like open wounds. The air bites my skin with the necessary familiarity of a hated friend: cold, slack, mouth open, waiting to be fed poison.

When I angle myself just right at the window, throwing my face out like a portrait for the hungry street, hands gripping the jamb recklessly, I look like a budget Juliet waiting for some rugby-sniffing creep to catcall her from the alley.

The nearby clubs and stores flash kaleidoscopic light across my face, softening me just enough to blur the roughness on my chin. This city has a habit of capturing you in your grit, then selling you back a softened version of that truth. I exhale the sentimentality and collapse onto my bed. How many months has it been? Nearly a year. Time has catapulted forward, and I’ve been dragged with it.

I’ve become less skin, more flesh. The jacket I wore that first night now has a fur collar, rhinestoned to perfection so it can wink under nightclub lights. I barely remember what it looked like before.

I barely know what I looked like before.

It is the beginning of summer, and everyone is sweaty. Against the sweltering heat, puberty makes every body’s puddle noticeable: clammy palms, the pool of sweat in the armpits, the jealous bead of perspiration just above the cupid’s bow, and the continent-shaped sudor on a school uniform’s back panel. But there’s an anomaly. Someone out there, in the midst of high schooler monsters, is a boy more concerned about the bulge print on his crotch, afraid he might be folded into the blurring faces of his peers with so-called small penises.

This boy, the cutest in class, circa 2010, is walking down the hallway of a rural public high school. He doesn’t know it yet, but four of us—two girls, one openly gay boy, and me, the awkward budding queer teen in collar and slacks—are appraising him. Take away the lens from his chiseled face and lower the angle to the inseam of his pants. Lower, and there you go, his groin. This is what we called, in the blunt poetry of Filipino schoolyard slang, malaki (big) or maliit (small)? Later on, stylized in the Filipino hokage humor of 2019, 1daks (slang for big, usually referring to penis size) or juts (slang for small). And now, it has hiked into the TikTok algorithm, flailing into a new name: catching print.

My anecdote and the newly lubricated trend belong to different decades of experience, but climb the same oil-ringed ladder of truth: a man’s size. Specifically, I, or more like, we were trying to determine, from the outline beneath his pants, whether he was juts (small) or daks (large). Sixteen is the purgatory of teenagehood, and we were bored, but, admittedly, we were also doing something sick, perverted, something that would earn us a slap of a hanger from our parents if they knew. For a better articulation now: a cruel and liberatory act of objectification, and in its own grubby way, a redistribution of power. Or maybe, if someone wants to argue, just us being perverted, but where is even the nuance in that?

I have been thinking about this memory for weeks now. Ever since the term catching print has garnered its own language in a TikTok trend super-viralized by the queer dating coach Anwar White, I have begun to obsess over its lexicon of assessment (every euphemism, the grading system: Type A, Type B, Type D), and found myself in pig-snort laughter reading comment sections erupting in appraisal, as a nostalgic memory of high school surfaced in my own catching print experience. And on the front page of that discourse, a radical understanding of this phenomenon juts out from many years of too much playing nice, ready to snarl and unleash berserk.

This is not a newly invented term. In my experience, we had been doing it fifteen years ago under a mango tree in PE class. The girls were doing it in the bathrooms, their fingers cupped along their mouths to whisper something salacious under the gymnasium bleachers. The gays, or the faggots, were doing it as well, with the trans girls, with the precision of ornithologists: logging data, cross-referencing against other data points, constructing a private taxonomy of the men around us who would never even know we existed in the way we imagined them.

And before us, long before the algorithm hammered a knife into its sedimented pipe, bursting out a new name, a sound effect, and a comment section full of crying-laughing emojis, people were already doing it, across every register of history official record preferred not to acknowledge. We have gay men in the Weimar Republic’s underground bars, in the seedy, half-lit taverns of pre-Stonewall New York, in the bathhouses of ancient Rome, in provincial suburbs filled with discreet men; it had an entire visual language for appraising one another. Coded glances, deliberate postures, the thrust of a hip, a whole semiotics of the body (2Beachy, Gay Berlin, 2014), conducted beneath the nose of a world that would have sniffed them dead for it. This cruising gaze, which gay men developed into something approaching high art, was never innocent either. Desire plus survival plus community-building, and with it, the deduction of risk, all tangled together into the summation of queer experience (3Chauncey, Gay New York, 1994). As Chauncey argues, such practices were elicited within a broader system necessitated by criminalization and social stigma.

Women, too, even the respectable ones, or those who were supposed to have no appetite, had their own history of looking into the male crotch. I have seen this in my titas’ discreet glance down at a man’s trousers in a crowded market, often at uniformed men; in the whispered assessments between my mother’s kumares in domestic spaces, chuckling at their husband’s grower and natural sizes that historical record would never iterate accurately; in the bawdy songs of medieval Europe categorizing women’s desire with a frankness later centuries would scrub out (4Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 2005). This visual economy of desire can be traced even further back. In studies of sexuality in antiquity, including Roman bathhouse culture, historians such as Thomas K. Hubbard remark that public bathing spaces facilitated forms of erotic observation and comparison, where the male body, often unclothed or minimally clothed, was subject to both aesthetic and sexual evaluation (5Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, 2003).

The look existed long before “catching print.” What changes now is its political valence in the present moment; why it suddenly scratches at the surface of respectability, blindly unleashing in dating spaces while also being used to demean and punish.

Let me confess the full embarrassment of my catching print experience. The afternoon my friends discovered I had a crush on the cutest boy in class. Him afforded with the sharp jaw of early puberty and the unconscious cruelty that adolescent boys wear like a natural cologne, the response to the crush was not, as expected, a form of pity or sympathy for the queer kid. Rather, it was a kind of giddy cannibalism in which a secret was dished out onto a platter, ready to be feasted on for entertainment, as the social metabolism of high school immaturity relies on dirty secrets processed into meaty jokes. What followed was the question: Have you calculated his size yet? Malaki o maliit [Big or small]?

I didn’t understand the question then. I giggled because it was easier than answering. My gay friend, already declaratively out, bumped my shoulder and repeated what they were suggesting. You could tell it by the print, you know. The outline, bakla. Do the math. This was the initiation into the practice. A practice with a long social history, predating TikTok by centuries, with its own philosophical scaffolding, doing cultural work far beyond the specific embarrassment of a queer kid in pleated school trousers. I had the moral high ground to neigh it was filthy. Was it filthy? Maybe? I am not sure now, but it was also many other things.

The gay version of catching print has its own clause, and it operates in an entirely different pressure system. When my gay friend and I sat in the gymnasium, cataloguing the boys in their PE shorts, we were doing what the other girls were doing, but our lens of desire or curiosity was heavily oil-tarred with the implication that it was stranger, more desperate, borderline predatory. Because ultimately, the subject of the gaze determines who’s allowed to see them, and oftentimes the subject is a straight man with a strong, phallic homophobia. We were looking at men who did not know we were looking at them in that way, men who would have been disgusted if made aware, men who in many cases had already rejected the faggots, and we were taking something from them without their knowledge.

The queer tradition of this is long, and it can be traced, somehow, to the novelist 6Alan Hollinghurst. He wrote about gay men in Thatcher’s England and filled his pages with the specific erotic charge of the covert look. The covert look is the assessment conducted in public, the desire that has no sanctioned outlet, and, going underground, it becomes expert, hyper-attuned to signals and surfaces. 7John Rechy, in City of Night, describes the cruising streets of 1960s America as a landscape of reading. Everyone is reading everyone else: their body, their face, but most importantly, their size. Everyone is performing and observing. Desire is a form of literacy developed through a gaze under duress.

The gay gaze that catches print is historically a gaze born of prohibition. You look this hard because looking is all you are allowed, and doing more is persecution. 8Laura Mulvey, writing in 1975 about cinema, also gave us another language: the male gaze. The male gaze is inherently a pig. This is visual pleasure in culture structured around the masculine eye that peers and peers. A feminine body is that which is looked at, both subject and object, the appraising and the appraised, or the one available for appraisal.

This male gaze is the water everyone swam in high school, the very logic of hallway violence lived inside every day. Boys snapping bras and calculating cup sizes by chancing their hands into a girl’s chest. Boys constructing code words for what color of underwear you were wearing when your skirt flew up. Boys who would press themselves between a girl’s legs in the guise of a joke and call it scoring. The school was an economy of looks, the male gaze the capital, and the currency flowed in that one-way direction. Catching print was, among other things, a hostile takeover of that economy. When the male gaze is flipped over by one of its voyeuristic children, what happens is an illegitimate son fighting for his place against his tyrant of a father. This didn’t end well in Greek mythology, but the brunt of its chaos is enjoyed even more today, and it is satisfyingly relieving.

Back then, the boys in our school did not know they were squirming. But they were. They could pretend they were not, but they were. The self-consciousness that descended on them in PE when they had to wear shorts: subtly tugging down the hem, adjusting the waistband so it sat loose around the groin. Some thrust their hips forward, the ones who’d heard through the grapevine that they were considered “big” that the girls had been talking, and for whom this was the most intoxicating news of objectification in their adolescent lives. Others were suffering now the small thousand cuts they had given to girls when they peered through their cleavages, dirtily cataloguing exposed legs and panty color coordination. It was, in its own way, an anointing as a queer kid who went quiet and small in the same way when a boy sneered at me in the hallway for wearing a pink bracelet. Everyone is under the male gaze, and in its mutation, no one is safe from its notorious virality.

9bell hooks can flesh this out further in her discussion of the oppressed gaze as an act of resistance. In Black Looks, she describes how Black Americans practice the oppositional gaze, a way of looking back, of staring more sharply into the terms of power. I see you seeing me, and I am looking at you in return, and this looking is not going to back down, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Compared to the male gaze, which is voyeuristic, porn-saturated, and strips the body of its depth, 2D-printing everyone into flat entities, the gaze of the oppressed is confrontationally stubborn and resistant.

I am not comparing this gaze to catching print, or embedding its oppositional radicality into the idea of the trend, because doing so would be obscenely reductive of the racial resistance that hooks was writing from. But its structure can be borrowed, in the same way that catching print is also systematically resisting by using the tools handed down within patriarchy. The girls in my high school who were properly doing catching print sessions (the ones most enthusiastic, most ruthless in their assessments) were doing it out in the same hallways where their bodies had also been scored, judged, and narrated in the same way, without their permission, for years. They did it with a wink or a satisfied smirk, and for some of them, inflicting it intentionally on the same boys who had done it to them, throwing the punchline: What does it feel like now to be the one under the microscope?

10Michel Foucault would be cackling at catching print, but also fascinated. It is, after all, a near-perfect exemplification of his insistence that power does not operate in a linear fashion. No one owns it singularly, not a class, not a gender, only to wield it top-down. It is cyclical, circular, jutted, exercised, resisted, and re-exercised, sometimes within the same gesture. The girls looking at the boys were reversing the male gaze and delivering a kind of justice to it, borrowing its logic: objectification, the reduction to a body part, the quantification of desire. While it is not innocent, it is complicated.

There is a scene I return to often. PE class. All of us in high school were required, in a policy so strange it has fermented into obvious horror, to dance in our undergarments. The boys in their boxers. The girls in their sports bras. The teacher who mandated this, I am told, has, in later years, accumulated an archive of complaints and allegations over predatory behavior, which is unsurprising. The policy existed. We performed inside it, and within that sphere, catching print reached its most intense and ambiguous register. Because the thing about the gymnasium is that everyone is susceptible to the gaze, and where the girls knew how to catch print, the boys being looked at were also children. All of us, sixteen, seventeen, with all the raw terror of being a body in public. And the boys, they were now in their boxers, the girls whispering, and I was also, if I am honest, catching print. Though my looking had a desperation to it, mangled with fear of being caught, because in looking, it would locate me, tell me what I was, give my desire a shape in C-boner style.

This is, in my opinion, where catching print gets genuinely murky and queer, because I noticed something that no one else seemed to notice, or at least no one mentioned before. The boys who showed nothing, the ones who appeared to be Ken-dolls, tucked and suspiciously flat, were also the ones subjected to the politics of speculation over whether they were gay or not. My gaydar, primitive and probably unreliable, always knew that there was an unspoken rule of queers only knowing how to tuck. The trans girls knew. I knew. I experimented with it in solitary evenings in the bathroom mirror, trying on a different body. The flatness was, in my teenage reading, a kind of queer signal. A queer materiality, signifier of otherness, a language so subtle only those who belong in the mouth of queerness could understand the taste. I was looking for myself in the bodies around me, catching print, catching queer, trying to find a print-shaped queerness that mirrors would never articulate.

11Judith Butler would remind us that all of this: the bra-snapping, the panty-code whispers, the catching print, the tucking, the hip-thrusting are part of a performance. Gender is endlessly, anxiously, a response to a norm that requires re-citation. The boys who thrust their hips forward when they learned they were Type D were performing masculinity at the exact moment it was being confirmed and mocked. The girls smirking behind their cupped fingers were performing a transgressive femininity: sexual, predatory, and not supposed to be what they were doing. All of these performances were vulnerable to policing from all directions. The boys feared being judged because small penis size has been conscripted into the performance of masculinity so completely that to fall short of it is to fail at being a man. The girls feared being caught catching print because desire in girls was supposed to be passive, modest, and not this scheming, predatory thing. Being caught meant being othered. All were imprisoned in the same architecture.

The contemporary catching print discourse now, particularly explosive in TikTok, comment sections, and think pieces, whether feminist or anti-feminist, tends to flatten all of its nuanced ambiguity into an easier argument. Either it is reclamation: women taking back the gaze, clawing at the confining idea of a passive object, asserting their own sexuality with agency and humor; or simply more objectification: reducing a human being to a body part, now aimed in a different direction, still pointing the gun the other way. Both arguments could be true, but neither is sufficient. It has context. Catching print happens within specific social worlds, in the relationships between the people doing it and the people being looked at, in the violence that preceded it and the violence it carries forward.

12Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality cements the specificity of this context. A straight woman catching print of a man who has been harassing her is doing something different from a group of boys catching print of a random stranger on a bus. A queer teenager catching print of the cute boy he has a crush on and fears that he’s straight is doing something different from a straight man grading women’s bodies on social media and nicknaming them with ridiculous monikers. The act is the same, but the power geometry is lopsided.

13Martha Nussbaum’s account of objectification identifies seven features: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Catching print doesn’t hit all seven because the boys retain their subjectivity, their agency, and their ability to choose. But it certainly hits a few: instrumentality (their body exists to produce information for our amusement), fungibility (any body with the relevant anatomy can be a target), and violability (their physical privacy is treated as available). This is objectification. It is also, sometimes, justice-adjacent. These two things coexist. They must be.

Catching print now parts ways from watching print in 2010 under a mango tree somewhere in the Philippines, but only in degree. The current trend, migrating from comment sections to dedicated TikTok accounts with crowdsourced appraisal committees, has the same political DNA as what we were doing in 2010, in gymnasium, in school hallways, and in the streets. The target has expanded and, in some configurations, become so specific that it sharpens its political edge. There is a particular mocking vein of catching print now that cannons itself at MAGA men, at right-wing politicians and manosphere influencers, at the hyper-performative hypermasculinity of the culture war’s foot soldiers, and there is something wickedly funny about it, something I will admit to having cackled at dawn during a doomscroll that started with the news and ended in a comment section full of women forensically assessing whether a particular congressman was Type A, Type B, or Type D based on a C-SPAN screenshot. These are men who have built entire political platforms on the politicization of other people’s bodies. Men who have legislated against trans people’s right to exist in bathrooms, who have voted to restrict what women can do with their own reproductive organs. Men who are doing so much with their rigid masculinity that they already look stoically vicious. The catching print that has found these men as a target is intentional. A vulgar and gleeful form of accountability. You made our bodies the subject of legislation, jokes, locker room talk, executive orders. Now we are making your body the subject of ours. The power is inequivalent. They have the votes, the guns, the courts, but the laugh is emanating now from the walls, and that is worth something.

There is something genuinely satisfying about watching men finally squirm. This is applicable now in my 2010 pre-catching print experience.The same boys in my high school who moved through the world like they owned the air in it, who called people faggot without remorse, who pulled girls’ hair and thought it was flirting, who sat with their legs spread wide across two chairs. Watching them become self-conscious, watching them wonder how they could be categorized, watching, for once, a power shift in a space they owned with comfort, was everything. Catching print back then was not correct. But who cares about innocence anyway when you have all been downtrodden for years, bleeding across the gravel, carcass being tossed and laughed at by the same predators being preyed upon now. It is delicious.

Perhaps it’s what 14Angela Davis wrote about the oppressed finding ways to survive that the powerful world would call moral failures: ways of taking back, of stealing time, of laughing at the expense of the ones who laugh at you, of using the master’s tools not to necessarily dismantle the master’s house but at least to get warm for one night before drilling holes into its walls.

I am not sure catching print is going to do anything revolutionary, but it is making us feel, briefly, that the world is not entirely for men. That fighting fire with fire is conflagrationally satisfying. It is ultimately fire, and might as well, everyone gets consumed in its diabolical flames. Girls have been taught that their body is currency, that the gaze needs to be fulfilled, albeit violently, and that they must perform adequately to be picked. And now they are learning how to spin the pieces of the puzzle, learning how to use the culture they were resisting, which means that even in the use of the same culture that had inflicted pain on them, there is a win, a reproduction of its logic on their own understanding, their own terms.

15Audre Lorde prophesied the antithesis of this: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” I am arguing with it now, because sometimes, when the master’s house is open, you sneak in, wondering what’s special inside, because you are still sixteen and cold and you need shelter even if the shelter is wrong. And you realize, with anger, that every guy has been living like this for so long, and you look around you with embittered sourness, and you start biting through the wood, clawing at the walls, raging and raging and raging until you find the master’s house key. You know now that you have access to it as well and might as well use it for the worst. But as a trans girl, I also know that those of us who grew up inside this master’s house knew something about the house that the girls maybe didn’t. I knew the house from the inside, moved through it and found that even with its large rooms, with its deluxe spaces, I was not welcome.

And yet, yet, there is something that catching print theory cannot fully account for. When you’re the one doing the looking, the searching, the assessing, there is a loosening of shame. Silvia Federici wrote about this. The women’s bodies are bodies under capitalist and patriarchal control, and she argues that the reclamation of bodily pleasure and bodily humor is materially significant, because laughing at the body, including the bodies of those who have policed yours, is bouncing against the gravity that oppression needs in slamming down its boots on your neck. Oppression needs you to take it seriously. It needs you to sign the contract and be bound. The catching print laugh, the snort behind the hand, is parodying that seriousness. It won’t change the law, it won’t restore anything that has been taken, but in its ridiculous way, it hands you your own volition, your own power, and right in the palm of your hand, a phallus-shaped joke is ready to be squeezed. And instead of squirming, flailing it against the wall out of fear, you bare your teeth, cheshire-style, determine its size, and laugh at the fucking ridiculousness of all of this.

CONTENT WARNING: Explicit sexual content, fetish dynamics (domination/humiliation), graphic bodily descriptions, and gender dysphoria

There’s a special place in hell reserved only for men. Complete with lactating leather seats that will cup their low-sagging balls and smelly, hair-frothing assholes.

I favor this mantra whenever a man cruxes, again, the pinnacle of disappointment. I am waiting for the hundred dollars to cash in. My PayPal keeps blinking the obsolete horror-image of a screaming mouth on my screen: 0. I frantically reload the app, my fingers trudging up and down, deluding myself that my desirability has finally been commodified into success. I am the star of my own porno, and I am just a showgirl dying for these men’s randomized dicks.

After gyrating my hips on silken pillows, defaulting into a hyperinflated porn actress, moaning every fantasy I could thrust into a man’s lust-saturated mind, and making another boy come into his anime boxers, all I get is a flying kiss and a wink on the webcam? I am still waiting for the promise of a hundred dollars because sex is a currency, me being a fetish is a cinema that needs ticket entrance, and if I am slutting myself for free, might as well sashay into the streets hooting up a roster of men for my harem. I should be buying myself some sexy lingerie now. Cue the eye roll. I don’t have patience for waiting and men need to be better trained.

I’m about to spontaneously combust. That imaginary money, I really could use for a deficit retail therapy: platform heels, boots, something obscene enough to prop up the next performance. It would totally amp the dominatrix gear for the next one who wants to role-play being a dog slaving over me: a Mommy goddess, a Godzilla queen, an Amazonian whatever-the-fuck fantasy-injected character they want to kneel to, as long as they can pretend they paid for it. Paying for their dog desires makes them feel like they are owed no side-eye or judgment, I observed. Dignity has a price for the obtusely hungry.

It’s all fun costuming myself into the woman they want me to be. Perhaps it’s unfeminist, unprincipled; perhaps I am regressing the movement by pulling back the curtains again just so I can hog the male gaze, performing desire, sex, and fetish in one neat package of consummability on camera. All the while, my pretend fake moans are not pretentious at all; I am enjoying the online sensation of being ravaged, of being glossed over as they lubricate their weird-shaped penises, of being seen as a higher being than my usual flaccid self while they stretch out their minute orgasm.

My phone rings. A hundred dollars has already been deposited. When I check Snapchat, the guy sends a pic of his dick again. I reply that it looks soft and I hate it. Truly, I do. Hard dicks are pure blind arrogance, the mutiny of adolescence passing through. Soft dicks, on the other hand, are newborn babies waiting to flail out: wrinkly, aged, a mirror to the future. I don’t know which is worse in the scale, but the binary belongs in one truth: obnoxious.

I type that he should send more snaps of him peeing while being hard. I am testing if he is really a good bitch after all. A chain of commands tests their dexterity for malleability. When they follow a simple command, one with the subtext of a perverse intention to see if they can be folded into a sexual origami, take note: they are more prone to the ecstasy of humiliation. A lack of free will to refuse means they are simply waiting to be lorded over.

He hearts my message. A minute later, he follows up with a video of himself peeing. His dick pulsing and throbbing hard, veins poking out along its oddly proud side, as a drizzle of golden liquid fragments like a Pollock painting on the bowl. The sheen-white cleanness of the bathroom becomes a manifesto of his animal self. There is a stack of protein tubs behind him, positioned in the sink like it’s an altar to his Alpha God. Who even sticks a motivational poster peeling off the bathroom wall that says NO PAIN NO GAIN in Comic Sans? Isn’t the sticky tape more prone to molding? There’s also a toothbrush in a mug labeled “World’s Best Son” with visible mildew at the rim; his phone propped against a bottle as I can see in the reflection, and as he pees, his legs tremble slightly.

“Oh, Pixi. I have made such a mess,” he groans, like the tip of his dick has already inched itself into my hole. He angles the camera too close, then too far, so self-conscious. As he shakes his penis to ward off the residual liquid, he lets out a small, wounded gasp that makes me feel like I am a reckless driver about to plummet into a deer-eyed stray in the middle of the road. I roll my eyes.

I reply, You’re such a good boy. Next time, make it messier.

I close my phone and throw it on top of my bed. Performance is not the exhaustive aspect of my identity. Contrary to that, it’s the modulation. It’s the rehearsal before the actual performance. Who is paying? Who is seeing me? Who is voyeuristic enough to gaze at the performer me? In those liminal spaces, I toggle between god and girl, between hyperreal and unfinished, between a son and a daughter. If I am desired, I exist. If I am paid, I am real. If I am neither, I am unsellable, not even pitied. This is somehow a becoming. A body longing for a gaze, a body wanting to be seen correctly but not quite getting to its altitude.

I look around. Everything is clean. Windows shuttered. The walls are labia-pink. I am inside a womb. It makes me long for a mother.

In the full-length mirror beside the door, my ribcage bones jut out like teeth trying to bite their way through skin. My fingers trace their bulky shape and I can’t help but think it’s still too thick, too big, and maybe, given the chance to sand it off, I would, just to thin the silhouette of my waist.

The lacy bra on my chest sits like a plain valley, neon-green fabric steeping around my cage of chest, wishing the color alone could argue me into form. I still look like a prepubescent boy, and it’s so dilapidatingly unfair.

A quick fix, I think, is to hammer my flesh, fist it in, or stuff it with more estrogen until it swells into big boobs, a round ass, and a detachable pussy I could snap over my unsexed, abominating genitalia. Something of an accessory, a feature update, me finally getting the body to load properly.

My eyes have learned a reflexive action for years now: flitting away from the bulge beneath my legs. The thing in there is not a liminal space, not a chasm, not a middle entrance for possibilities. It’s a compost.

It reeks of shame, and once, in my teenage years, when I became aware of it, of its hardness when I thought of boys, its precum when I rubbed against my pillow pretending to be a woman riding her blue-collared husband, and its punishing size that always pivoted me back to the truth that God was a merciless cunt who assigned genitalia at random, swapping them for sadistic reasons, hypothesizing a new creature, and then, when our margins didn’t work, just shrugged and went, Oops. That’s how I imagine it.

When Mother started to strut around the house, wearing nothing but her sheer robe and the lacy underwear she reserved for special days or nights she wanted Father’s attractive attention, I knew I had to try them. I stole a pair once they were out of the house, thinking maybe I was my mother’s daughter, and there was only one way to prove it. I stripped naked in my attic room, tossed the stupid boy uniforms into the hamper, and slid carefully into the scarlet brassier against my skin. I did the same with the panty. The netted floral design grazing my legs like tender kisses, and when it settled on my crotch like a diaper, I wanted nothing more than to chop off my dick.

Between my thighs, the garter of the panty couldn’t stay intact on my hips, always dragged down by the fucking weight of my penis and balls, tucked in like a grown-up mole. Clipping it off would mean damage, a bloody fest. And it was a sore sight, ruining the imagehood of what I could be in my mind, eclipsing the girl I was meant to be.

The thick bulge, solitary, cleaved with the fruits of testicles; so fucking ugly, like a downturned nose winking at me obtusely in the reflection. I screamed at it, screaming and screaming, my voice throating into hoarseness at the unfairness of it all, the glitch in the algorithm of my creation, the anatomical impossibility of being crotchless.

I rip apart the brassiere and see it too: the angular line of my chest, no flesh of mounds ready to be groped by boys in high school. And it’s so ugly, this body of mine. I wish it were just borrowable, that I could hand it back to whoever it belongs to, truthfully, and maybe then I could search for what’s truly mine.

When Mother found me in my room, still wearing her underwear, convulsing, crying, praying to whoever out there to make me crotchless, she just screamed with me and told me I was sick in the head.

The screen mutinously blinks an Eiffel Tower–shaped dick.

I imagine one of those BBC wildlife documentary voices explaining that the appendage is attached to a naked guy with an abnormal phallic gun slung over his toned chest. He’s enjoying the moment with a sly smirk that almost looks punchable in its comic cringeness.

He’s one of those guys peacocking his way through a performative violent archetype in his mid-20s existential crisis. Apparently the world is burning and the women with ovaries are the ones to blame for it, particularly the Stacys. What the fuck is that categorical moniker?

There’s something damaging in my psyche to think that I am faintly attracted to this kind. Someone whose manliness is attributed to being a cardboard clone of Andrew Tate aggression. The brutal image of his big, meaty hands, albeit inexperienced, manhandling my flesh, squeezing my skin, tossing me like a wrapper on the awning of my soft bed—fuck a girl with violent desires.

His eyes flit over me and, for a nanosecond, my breath hitches, half-expecting he would clock the stubborn residue of my boyness against the cakey Republican-like foundation. I’m relieved when he doesn’t and simply recalibrates himself to the fantasy of me.

He thinks every girl owes him something. His first message was a lazy amalgamation of letters: sup wyd. It is a damning evidence of today’s lack of literacy. The missing question mark is aggravating. Good thing he hasn’t escalated his testosteronal image yet by spewing the usual garbage tirade about how women should serve him and whatever.

He’s pumping his dick, thick at the girth, swooping upward like the peak of Mount Everest so that it almost forms an isosceles triangle. Meanwhile, my own tucked-in penis is incapable, and I’m thinking about having a detachable vagina instead. Maybe my desirability would spike like a price hike. I would suddenly become so consumable.

According to Genesis or the Bible or whatever, God’s greatest creation is mankind, but this one might be an expiration. Possibly an anomaly, judging from that penis alone. I fake-moan his screen name and almost choke: Sigma_Celibate_Overlord.

I am like a corpse in the tiny box of myself blinking on my laptop screen. A small square overlaid against the Spartan-chiseled body of whoever this man is I fished from the Internet. My eyes are getting glazy. They do that droopy thing when I know I’m boredly waiting for the other party to cum.

When is he gonna cum?

My thighs are chafed from five minutes straight of rubbing against my pillow like I’m his bad cowgirl, his sexy manic pixie dream girl permanently ovulating for his kind.

He’s doing the hip thrust now, in the air, sultrily whispering, “Cum for me, my good slut.” He probably thinks he’s some Glenn Powell rom-com lead with that velvety baritone, and for a second he almost is, but then you see the beady eyes and suddenly you’re orbited by the fact that this is a fucking psychopath. A sexy guy nonetheless, but still a predator who wants to sleaze his cum over his well-beloved baby. His fucking shotgun.

There’s a tingling vibration in my legs, an onslaught of taboo like I want to piss on my own bed as a grown adult. It’s so shameful, so dirty, so chokefully wrong, but you’d rather relish the fact that you’re wanted than moralize the implications of feeding the horny, lonely male gaze.

So I jiggle my fake breasts at the screen, squish them against the tiny laptop lens, and moan advertisingly that I am his dream girl.

Please fuck me, daddy. Make me your good slut. Please. I wanna slave over you.

I professionally inject the persona into my voice.

And by the time he reaches his climax, I click screen record. Fuck consent, he’s not even a good guy.

I number the seconds as his chest pumps up. His evil face lapses into a deceitful angelic euphoria: that concave O of his lips, eyes closed (never open them again), chin tipped upward like it’s reaching for heaven. You know that’s the only moment of goodness you’re gonna get from them. Almost a minute. 54 seconds.

His hips jerk upward, sideward, downward. His penis troubleshoots for a moment—no cum—but he insists, pumps again, and suddenly a fountain of white shoots up his abs, his chest, his neck, and most importantly his shotgun.

He groans my name like a bellow from hell.

“Pixi, you’re such a dream girl.”

I end the screen recording and slap a kiss at the camera.

I frantically key the end button before he can, because there’s no pride in being the one left with a blank screen. It’s ungraceful to slobber at the post-nut clarity of a man, to skitter back through the messages that led it all to sexing on camera, to watch his face turn from deliriously horny to suddenly, remorselessly unwanting of the body he just used.

I have been in that tango. When you’ve done it repeatedly enough, you start to detect the micro-expressions through the camera.

There are blank stares, eerily lobotomized, like they’re looking past you, through you. You’re already a ghost. It just means you’ll be blocked after.

There’s also the hike at the corners of their lips, almost like a smile but probably condescension. They don’t know they’re doing it, but its equivalence is that they’re still salivating at your body while also thinking they finally scored, but could probably do better next time.

There’s the squint too, and trust me, every incel looks like a mouse when they do that. Not those rat-handsome boys on TikTok. Just a nuisance rat. It means you’ve become a rite of passage for their inflated self-concept: proof that you were sub-human enough to touch.

But my favorite one is always the blink-delay. These men look reptilian when they do that, and in the vicinity of an HD laptop screen it exacerbates the expression into looking like they came out of one of those YouTube videos about body-snatching conspiracies. The glitch of a weird lag when their eyes close a second too long, then open again, the pupils shifting so fast against the wheeling eyeballs, forming that weird slit before morphing back into its circular geometry.

It’s really weird, and also rare to catch. It means their brains have unplugged themselves from the fulfilled fantasy and they want to avert processing you as a person.

There are others. I also like the nostril flare. They think they’re triumphant, and in fact they are, but they also look like a bull ready to charge. Sometimes their tongue swipes their lips, again, reptilian. Occasionally there’s the jaw set, their arms flexing their biceps as they drape them over their head. Heroic pose, I call it. So masculine but also so, so constipated in its tableau.

Every time a guy messages on Snap, there’s a hundred-percent chance he’s an incel looking for a discreet way to marinate his Frankenfreak trans-fetish desires. Or maybe worse. Some could be fucking animals, you know. Wherever there’s a hole, if a man needs to fuck, it’s suddenly a goal.

Men are so inherently conquestive like that. Always going to war, stockpiling canned goods, preparing basement rooms like a world-war apocalypse is coming soon, always anticipating battle even when it’s unnecessarily cruel. A very proverbial example of this are always the fathers.

Mine epitomized this philosophy in all aspects of his life: making me his trophy kid whenever his friends visited the house to watch some brain-fart football game; parading his newly bought motorcycles across the pastel-silent neighborhood without consideration of others’ contempt for their monstrous noise; and loving my mother the only way he knew. Owning her.

He would cycle through passive-aggressive states to counterattack other men who merely talked to Mother. He called it the sneaky nature of men trying to get into her pants: fauxing normal conversation while already scouting their points of invasion.

Because men are inherently unsatisfied, my boy, he told me once while I was playing with my dinosaurs, pretending they were supervillains ravaging the earth for food.

Men always need to win, he continued, as my soldier toys fake-shot my dinosaurs. Then, in a cartoonish monstrous voice, he grabbed the ringleader soldier and ventriloquized:

It all boils down to winning!

I was distraught for weeks.

It came to a point where his warcraft logic became fisted violence. Mother had to explain that the man she was talking to was a college friend. So gay he even lent me his pair of drag heels. They didn’t fit. But Father wasn’t wavered at all.

Father needs to be right. That way he wins.

So Mother let him punch her.

Or so the tale goes.

But he was right about something. Men always need to win. It’s like they’re bottle-fed with that sickness. Boys are born out of the vaginal canal so motherly, so cute, so angelic, except for their monstrous belches and cries, but once they reach a certain age, like wet cement ready for denting, the fathers arrive to stamp the semantics of manhood into them.

One of those meanings is always to win.

And semantics eventually become pragmatics.

Boys grow up believing it’s practical to take and take because they need to win. They harden. Like bricks. Some into metal. Some into glass packaged with styrofoam. Different structures, different hardness, but no malleability.

But I can’t always let them win.

My counterattack is ending the call before they can, make them think you’re in a rush to wash off the pleasure of watching them come undone. It claws at their psyche. Makes them wonder if they don’t fit the voyeur, the watchable, the desirable. It dilapidates their desirability by their own doing.

Or whatever the fuck it is.

Pixi obviously has a disease. Her hobbies include an unhealthy amount of self-afflicted dissection on everything she believes is wrong with her body, lining herself up against conventionally pretty trans girls and cataloguing every place she falls short, and gnawing on the fact that she wasn’t born lacquered in effortless femininity. If she’s not enthroned in these rituals, she’s online, using her sharp tongue to seduce incels into auditioning for the role of perfect boyfriend.

When a meet-cute curdles into a meet-wreck and leaves her branded with the ugly accusation of being a catfish, an awkward photographer offers grace in the form of a photograph. Her attention is swiftly fixated on his laughable compulsion to apologize. At his confession that he wants to serve her in the most strangely earnest, ridiculous way, it triggers a self-hungering tailspin of desire she has always repressed. Her gaping need to be seen is finally ready to clomp on something—and this boy might be the thorax for an insatiable, perverse appetite she has yet to explore.

01: LIFE OF A SCREEN GIRL

02: CROTCHLESS

03: THE CITY AS A SEX DREAM

04: NEW TENANT

05: BAD TREE, BAD APPLE

Note: This piece captures the tumultuous and brutal years of President Rodrigo Duterte’s term in the Philippines, when the so-called “war on drugs” unleashed rampant killings across the country. Thousands were slain in police operations and vigilante-style executions, many under the justification of nanlaban (“fought back”), notoriously trickling grieving families and communities in its aftermath, wallowed by fear, injustice, and impunity.

July 2017, Philippines

By the time the sun rises, the city has already decided who deserved to die. Mama always warned me that no one could play God, but Papa, unshaven and tired, would always retort: men could. That line has sticked with me, returning every time the city howls with another bullet. Another fleshy scrape on the road. Another dull thud.

It’s 8 a.m. now. As with every morning, the alley behind the bakery smells fake. Pandesal wafts over the bleach and blood trapped in the cement. This is the fourth time I’ve seen kids scrubbing the same square of pavement. Usually, they’re behind the glass pastry cases, chitchatting with mothers, old men, and early hustlers on their way to pinch bread into their coffee. Today, they’re down on their knees, arms trembling, their grandmother watching. Their fingers play with mortality instead of marbles or plastic cars.

I can almost feel my own skin being rubbed raw as the concrete crackles under their sponges. The radio from the window snags my blazer with the morning news: another nanlaban (“fought back”), another salvaged (extrajudicial killing), another cleaning operation. I realize the only human thing about the scene is there’s no tableau of a dead body.

Already, there’s a call. My editor has gotten wind of the news. With my hair still damp, lipstick uneven, my name still misshapen in her mouth, I already know what she’s going to say: Write.

I linger by the nearby sari-sari store. Sachets of junk food and plastic-wrapped shampoos glitter in their maximalism. A candle burns beside a chipped Santo Niño, its melted wax pooling on the concrete.

An old woman watches the kids washing the blood away. She says, “Kawawa naman ang mga batang ’yan. Nakakita ng kamatayan nang ganyan. Ngayon, sila pa ang naglilinis ng kalat ni Satanas.” (“Those poor children. To see death like that. And now they’re the ones cleaning up Satan’s mess.”) A smoker buys a Marlboro pack, his knees jittering as he combs through his greasy hair. He tells the old woman that the dead man today is Boyet. I write it into my memory. Yesterday, it was Jun. Last week, it was Marcelino. Tomorrow, it will be someone else, another nickname journalists can use in headlines, wordplaying violence into the victim’s name.

More people flock to the store as they buy morning staples: daing (dried fish), kamatis (tomatoes), bagoong (fermented shrimp paste), cooking oil. They trade whispers with their change, stories about Boyet slipping into the transactions.

I listen. Boyet was found face-down. His arms bent behind him. A reversed prayer, God vindicating him instead. His slippers are still on. One already snapped, probably from running. One missing. A cardboard sign hangs from his neck, its message a condemnation: PUSHER AKO, HUWAG TULARAN (“I am a pusher, do not imitate”). The handwriting is careful, almost printed. Someone took their time. Someone crouched long enough to spell it right.

One detail sticks out, though: his manhood was mutilated.

There’s a lurching in my stomach. I walk away from the herd. I feel like cattle on the block chain. I look around me. The neighbors behind jalousie windows and lace curtains have seen too much death for this to be new. Someone whispers, “Buti nga.” (“Serves him right.”) Someone else whispers, “Sayang.” (“What a waste.”) Both statements float in the air. I want to ask which one weighs more. I don’t.

I know Boyet. Not intimately. I know his demographics. I know him the way I know every dead person I’ve transcribed, laser-focused on, and written stories about these past few months. I know him now as I listen to his grandmother sob, clutching my trousers as she cries about how he was just a boy who loved applying eyeliner like a punk star. I have seen him many times whenever I bought pandesal on my way to work. He always called me ate (older sister). I know he danced with his siblings when he played old Rey Valera songs on the radio. He danced like a skeleton, but he didn’t mind.

By seven a.m., someone hoses down the alley. The kids splash around giddily in the sudden torrent, a waterfall, back to being kids again. The water runs brown. Another erasing.

At the office, the newsroom is choked with burnt coffee, printer heat, and deadlines. TVs mounted on the walls replay last night’s bodies on a loop, always pixelated, distant, palatable. My editor asks me to provide detailed coverage this afternoon. “Kailangan kumpleto,” she says (“It needs to be complete.”). I am tired of soliloquizing with grief, with violence, with blood, but I don’t have a choice.

When I return to the bakery, the mother is hysterical. Boyet’s grandmother has gone catatonic. The kids are gone. The mother keeps asking who will bring Boyet home, screaming that the body is innocent, that her son only wanted to be a rock star. “Gusto lang niyang tumugtog.” (“He just wanted to play music.”) He was not a drug addict.

The father refuses to be interviewed. A policeman tells me gently that Boyet fought back. His voice lacks nuance, but it knows exactly what it needs to say.

Someone lights another candle. Someone starts a prayer. The kids return this time, pinching one another as the girl with pigtails screams, “Hindi adik si Kuya Boyet!” (“Kuya [older brother] Boyet isn’t a drug addict!”)

At home, my boyfriend waits with reheated adobo (soy-braised meat). He touches my shoulders, knocks lightly on my sternum, an inside joke. “Hello, hon. Nandito ka pa?” (“Are you still here?”)

On the TV, the president’s voice booms. He’s so paternal, my sister once said. He’s the daddy I never had, or so she wants to cling onto. I wanted to vomit. He’s going to save the country, my father added in support, just as the president jokes about rape, about killing, consequence-free. My mother laughs.

My boyfriend eats the pastries I bought. He notices my silence but doesn’t ask.

Later, in bed, he traces the scar on my knee, a childhood souvenir from learning how to run too fast. “Sa tingin mo ba,” he asks (“Do you think”), “susunod tayo?” (“we’re next?”). The question sits between us, more naked than our bodies tangled together. I answer honestly. “Araw-araw.” (“Every day.”)

My fingers map constellations on his shoulders. I have nothing else left to hold but him.

There was one night he dreamt of himself being castrated like Boyet. A cardboard sign hung from his neck as he was crucified on a wrought-iron gate: ADIK (“Addict”). SALOT (“Pest”). BAKLA (“Faggot/Gay”). WALANG SILBI (“Useless”). I palm his chest as he sobs into my neck. I whisper to him about a future where I don’t have to turn dead bodies into statistics anymore.

The next morning, the bakery smells the same. The concrete is clean. No trace of death. The kids step over where Boyet lay. They chase each other with sticks shaped like guns, laughing, shouting pew pew, reenacting their on-screen idols barreling through force and hate. I want to tell them to stop, to press bread into their hands instead. I want to tell them the future is watching. But I don’t. I walk. My heels click.

The dead are not quiet. They will remind them enough.

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2028

PEOPLE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT LOVE. Life is said to be a bounty of it. Writers suffer a tender affliction for love; poets, worse, keep hunting the stylistic formula to trap it in prose. Cinematographers are forever inventing excuses to frame love in Vaseline-pink shots. Those who know how to pray kneel for love, mistaking it for retribution. And sometimes, even dog-hungry monsters learn how to trace love’s lexicon through the imprint of their own ribcage bones.

Love has been figured out for centuries, I guess. This rotting thing, spark-flying, diamond-shiny, Shakespearean myth, so ubiquitous, so vast, so metamorphic, so catalytic, evolving, dynamic, immortal: is that really love?

When everything we know about love has always been about life—its etherealness, its enormity, its force—does it even have a place in death? Does the filthy body, fed to decay, roaches, worms, and the sulfur of belching air, still know how to love?

Or can it exist in the liminal beat of a Polaroid, just before the click, just after the searing flash bathes the skin?

Believing in love now seems so trivial as a 55-year-old gay man, nerfed by decades of delights, despotism, and the threat of dissolution.

Alzheimer’s is what the fancy doctor calls it. The handsome one has a dimple in his cheeks whenever he asks about my day in this prison wallpapered with tacky color and plastic flowers. He reminds me of someone.

Dead.

Ha-ha.

Where was I again? Oh, love. Well, the doctor surely makes me feel youthful again, but he has that annoying habit of shimmying his shoulders while screaming rock n roll! I surely know rock, and that… is not the move. He likes to talk about his kids. With his husband! Pearl-clutch!

He wheels me out on sunny afternoons in the garden as he blabbers about his kids (strong-headed twins) and shows me TikTok clips of them tranmissioning? transitioning to some EDM-remixes of 2000s songs, giggling into the camera, squishing their faces to the screen.

During those moments where he talks about his husband, how they met in university, all the eye-rolling rom-com moments, there it was: the sheen in his eyes, the glint of something, almost like glitter flakes stuck against the ether, and I had that look once, and it was love.

Sometimes, he anecdotes too long and is such a bore, but I can’t say it to him because that face is a glimpse of sunlight against all the drab.

One night, I woke up and didn’t know my name anymore. I tried piecing my brain, scalloping through its pleated flesh, but even the thing I rightfully owned was so carelessly snatched away. I screamed all night until they had to sedate me.

The handsome doctor gave me a journal then, with my name written on the cover, saying it would be good for me to write my memories while they are still working. Working?! Like my humanity was an engine he could just lobotomize with a gear.

I tossed away the journal and asked him to bling it up! It looked so plain! He just laughed, and there was the dimple again. And I was crying once more despite the sun yolked in the sky like a smile, because he reminds me too much of him. And there goes another sedation session.

It’s been ten years. Or maybe more. Who cares?

It has been a decade, boy. I still can’t say your name. Every time I try believing in the concept of you, my throat becomes raw; the tears I couldn’t elope for years lodged there for always denying them exit.

So here I am again, outside, with the handsome doctor, smiling at me with your stupid dimple in his cheeks, writing about stupid memories, rolling my eyes at his boring talks, and still knowing that it’s love that we are holding onto. Can you stare too long at love and not feel your palms sweating?

I don’t know, but this is how I knew love…

Beginning. How we met? The drive-thru of 2000s.

EVERYONE THEN WAS SCREAMING THAT THE WORLD WAS GONNA END while I was enjoying my summer frothing at ice creams.

There were the magazines, the Y2K bra straps, the denim craze, the overconsumption, and god, all the fangirls wanting to be a dreamgirl as Meteor Garden aired on ABS-CBN.

Meanwhile, I was flipping my hair. I did splits, shook my skinny body on stage, and lipsynced to “Spaghetti pababa, pababa nang pababa.”1 Powered by SMS, we were planning again for People Power. I mass-texted my groupmates like a chain letter: “Go 2 EDSA. Wear black,” as I splattered on my lip gloss.

We marched down the streets, elbows greased together, my black crop top exposing my belly button for Malacañang to see. And there, I would first see him.

Against the candles, rosaries, boomers crying, and my fellow students still in uniform, he was smiling with his dimpled cheek. I held a cardboard sign that said OUST in red marker. My crop top rode up over my chest. He trudged toward the stampede of screaming people—ERAP RESIGN NOW!—knocking past others to get in front of me.

“Mukha kang tanga [You look stupid]. Kitang-kita na ‘yang nipples mo, o! [Your nipples are totally visible!]”

I raised my brow. “Excuse me, who are you?” I bumped my shoulders against his bouldered ones and pulled down my shirt, trying to hide the redness creeping up my cheeks.

He laughed. “Concerned citizen lang po. [Just a concerned citizen]”

“Well, kapal ng mukha mo [You’ve got some nerve]. Baka gusto mo lang makita suso ko! [Maybe you just want to see my boobs!]” I screamed, raising my placard to the tidings of other protesters.

“Sige nga, patingin! [Alright then, let me see!]”

I looked at him like he had just grown another head.

“De joke lang! [Just kidding!]”

“Manyak! [Pervert!]”

I stepped on his shoes, knocked him sideways, slapping the placard on his face as I scoffed.

“Wow ha! Sakit nun! [Wow! That hurt!]”

“Pake ko! [I don’t care!]”

“Jamil nga pala! [By the way, I’m Jamil!]” he pointed to himself. I looked back, and there it was. The canine smile, so boy-next-door that my resting bitch face melted instantly. I cleared my throat.

“Ano bang pinunta mo rito? Pacute o protesta? [Why are you here? To act cute or to protest?]”

He laughed harder. “Nice meeting you din!”

Even then, he always knew the punchline. He beat me to it.

We would see each other again outside campus. His uniform unbuttoned, recklessly ruffled by the wind. Strands of purple hair fell across his face, backpack slung on his dominant shoulder, smirk plastered, brows glinting with piercings.

I didn’t want the world to spin 360, slow and romantic like in a Sarah Geronimo ballad, but there I was, fishball sauce dripping sweetly on my fingers, nga-nga2.

“Hey. We met again. Buti hindi na kita suso mo! [Good thing I can’t see your boobs anymore!]” I turned my back and ran as fast as I could in my low kitten heels. I wouldn’t let him see me without lip gloss, noh! Never. Ang pogi pa naman niya! [He’s so handsome!]

AND I NEVER BELIEVED IN FATE. Like, never ever. Mama was always superstitious, lighting candles here and there in the province, tossing salt on doorways and windows to ward off bad spirits, like, hello?! Exclusive much? Even Grandma appointed herself ringleader, layering her favorite lace mat on the living room table to bring out rice cakes with eggs poking out in the middle, tobacco, cigarettes, Max candies, Pepsi, and beer.

Once, I asked if I could eat the Fita biscuit, and they just pinched my cheeks, hollering that it would disfigure my pretty face. That’s why I avoided the offerings after that.

But Jamil—he was something I couldn’t avoid. I was tethered. We were unsevered.

The third time we met, the world was louder. Near a pansiteria in Cubao, wedged between the alleys of Mercury Drug Store, there was a hidden door on one of the bricked walls, spray-painted with graffiti. You would knock, and an unnoticeable slit would slide open, asking for a password. It was always random: Mang Inasal #1, always answered by the bouncer Extra atchara. My favorite was Spaghetti pababa—the bouncer dancing when people uttered the password.

In that basement, Cubao finally smelled like beer, sweat, and the musk of lost millennials. A girl was kissing another girl with a tongue piercing under a tarp that said NO FUTURE, MAY TOMORROW PA! [There’s still tomorrow!] A boy wore a skirt and fishnet stockings. Someone’s head was shaved fully. Someone’s skin was fully tattooed. Someone’s sclera was black. Someone’s lips was pierced. Everyone was beautiful in glaring ways that the outside world would have deemed alien, but there, they were not. I was wearing my boots, eyeliner smudged too much, and a shirt that read ANAK NG AKTIBISTA [Child of an activist], even though my mother always berated me for joining rallies.

And then, of course, there he was. The one screaming on stage. The microphone kept dying as he sang. His notes were furious, acid but neon-powerful. His shock of purple hair curtained his forehead mattily. A safety pin was holding his shirt together as it rode up when he leaned far from the microphone to hit the last note, scribbling on the metallic strings of his electric guitar, eggplant chrome like his hair. The exposed skin just above his low-ridden pants was a sculpted V-line teasingly winking, and I fidgeted my gaze away.

He saw me and waved.

Everyone clapped after his performance. He smiled as he jogged over.

“Hoy!” he screamed. “May dala ka bang placard ngayon? [Do you have a placard with you today?]”

“Wala [None],” I screamed back, rolling my eyes. “May dala ka bang manners? [Do you have manners with you?]”

“Wala rin! [None either!]”

I sputtered a laugh. The next band started their song. Everyone rioted with joy again and shoved us closer together. Suddenly, he was shouting over the bodies thundering on the dancefloor, his lips near mine, noses almost touching, his breath fanning menthol mixed with Red Horse on my face.

“Tatakbo ka na naman ba ulit palayo? [Are you going to run away again?]” he asked jokingly.

“Siguro if manyak ka pa rin [Maybe if you’re still a pervert],” I answered

“At least, give me a chance.” He winked

The lights died. The music blared faster, tinkering with the pulsing rhythm in my chest. The crowd screamed. In the dark, his hand found my waist. My breath hitched, and he jumped into the song, rowdily shaking his purple hair, sweat bulleting across everyone. In that suspended moment, my body was swaying to the song, my mouth screaming with everyone. When the lights came back, we were still holding on to each other.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“After the set,” I answered.

While the music cackled around us, his eyes drilled themselves into mine. Against the flashing lights, they were colored like the earth.

Almost everyone had become a grain and it was just the two of us, defying time again, believing for once in the aptitude of fate, in destiny, in our skins tainting each other in a distant past life, his fingers twining into mine, chronicling stories we have already endured, telling the same syllables with every pitter-patter of his thumbs onto my waist, a tattoo of a song I have heard but can’t quite piece together but it’s there, under our skins, wanting to inch out ceremoniously, to cry a melody it never had the chance to accost through.

And if fate was true, and it was thorough in its rule, maybe the Greeks were onto something with their disposition on love: that humans were once round double beings. Chaka! Four arms, four legs, two faces? Kara Mia? But Zeus split them in half because love was powerful, I guess. And through years, these split halves would always find each other. Was that the case for us?

IF ANYONE ASKS ME IF I HAVE TRULY LIVED A LIFE, I’D ROLL MY EYES AGAIN. These letters and paraphernalias are proof of my kabogerang love life! Besides, I am too exhausted to write anymore. I am too old for this! My fingers are nimble. All I want to do now is just rest and complain about my life!. Charot.

LETTER #1. Written after one of his performances.

Hoy,
Ba’t palaging namamatay ang mikropono mo? Sinasabotahe ka yata ng mga ibang banda. Anyway, just want to say that even if the microphone robs you off your voice, everyone can still hear you screaming. I like it. But Jamil ha, you always smell like Red Horse. Magpabango ka minsan!
—A.

[Hey,
Why does your microphone always die? Maybe the other bands are sabotaging you. Anyway, I just want to say that even if the microphone robs you of your voice, everyone can still hear you screaming. I like it. But Jamil, you always smell like Red Horse. Try wearing some cologne sometimes!
—A.]

When he read it, he just kissed my cheeks. Slipped it into his pocket as the crowd surged. After all these years, whenever I’d surreptitiously sneak into his wallet to steal a fifty-peso bill to buy some junk food, the letter would still be there, tucked into one of its pockets, carefully wedged between credit cards. The corners chipping away, fossilized.

At our next rallies, we didn’t talk. Words were pesos we couldn’t earn to discard. Our currencies were passed to each other on placards.

JUNK TERROR LAW (Feb 12, Quiapo Bridge)

On the back, in his handwriting, all caps: COFFEE AFTER. NO RUNNING.

I crossed out coffee, wrote beer, and handed it back during a police kettle. Love had a place in dissent.

I didn’t even know why he liked me. I was too much for him in many ways. He was so gentle, always using his hulking tallness to shield me from harm.

One time, I knocked on his chest and joked that it sounded too fleshy, unhollowed, and probably he stored all his screams there so he had something to be ferocious for when he sang underground. At the stage, he bared his teeth, bit into his lyrics, and spit out revolution fisted in his guitar strings. But around me, he fiddled with his hands, smiled too much, and looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was real.

We knew our bodies were not properly ours back then. Homosexuals were still bible-thumped, screamed at, spat on by angry people. And despite all that, our fingers mapped each other’s moles, birthmarks, random hair strands on skin—scars, scabs—tracing them into constellations. Polaris. A direction to territories we hadn’t yet reclaimed. We knew each other’s bodies like countries, and we waded to their sovereignties. Always diplomatic when we negotiated our rights to explore each other’s tripartite areas: land, water, air. Him and mine, what a democracy lived by mutual concession.

We wrote to each other behind flyers and posters, cutting out words from magazines to construct his mid-verses, doodles of molotovs turning into hearts, slogans misspelled because the photocopier ate the vowels. Between my dorm and his dorm and borrowed rooms and streets, we stapled our feelings until his handwriting became a mouth I could easily feed myself into.

LETTER #7

Anak ng aktibista [Child of activist],
You hound prayers to snarl back at revolution.
When you find yourself mourning, who do you even pray for?
When you’re afraid, and you think tenderness is a trap,
Use me as your mat. Kneel to my skin, claw at my flesh, and pray.
Hound me like an answer, not a snare.
—J

I underlined tenderness and wrote ulol [idiot] beside it. I kissed him after, my body praying to his. Dates were scribbled behind placards like secret anniversaries: IBASURA ANG SISTEMA [TRASH THE SYSTEM] (Mar 8 + you held my hand first), DEPENSAHAN ANG PERA NG BAYAN [DEFEND THE PUBLIC’S MONEY] (Apr 1 + you cried, liar), etc.

We kissed behind tarps, under slogans that promised nothing and everything all at once. Sometimes we fought. Who gets to be afraid? Is love bourgeois?

Once, I asked him what his love feels like. He said, “Like a rally. I show up.” And he was right. On a night thick with beer and tear gas residue, he handed me his placard at our first Pride march: MAHALIN ANG ISA’T ISA, MGA GAGO [LOVE EACH OTHER, YOU FOOLS]

I laughed. Then I cried with him against the smoke and flashing lights.

AND THEN THE PARTY WAS OVER. Or maybe it never ended.

Just lumped into adulthood, migrated into our growing limbs. The mid-20s fattening, sticking to our clothes.

My feet never screamed back then when I wore high heels. I was always cute, but adulthood came, and they became a medieval torture device.

Jamil, towering, features sharpened, work-ridden wrinkles, still handsome, but this time no purple hair. The world was becoming unbearable. Millennials were being outsized by a new generation. He was sweating, Jamil. His face tacked with glitter I scraped away with my nails. He hoisted me onto his back like I was just a bag of groceries.

“Thank you,” I whispered, the night sweltering, the city still bickering.

He smiled. His platform boots clomped over the cracked pavement, and the streets watched in embarrassment. I was a kid again.

“They hate me. These heels.” I groaned. “No one told me adulthood was gonna come with weakened bones.”

He laughed. It rumbled in my chest, liquid and terrible and perfect, like all the bad karaoke sessions we ever survived together. The same laugh he let out when a kid puppy-eyed his way into stealing his wallet, smiling as I hysterically screamed at the kid to give it back. Meanwhile, he slouched against the graffitied bakery wall, smiling, shaking his head. Never mind. He probably needs the money. Always so generous.

I clung to his neck, heels dangling uselessly behind me, and suddenly I was pretending to live young again but dauntlessly suffering with rent, taxes, and actual adult problems. Somehow, that made it even better.

How many times has he carried me? A night out, I’ve drunk too much, my feet rebelled, and he swept me up in the elevator lobby, stepping carefully in his platform boots, carrying me to bed, tracing lyrics on my back to help me vomit. A failed protest anniversary party, everyone hungover, I limped dramatically down EDSA in stilettos, and he hoisted me over potholes. A movie night, I tripped on the carpet (because yes, carpet exists, somehow), and he scooped me up, muttering about “How the hell do you survive in heels, anak ng aktibista.”

Every time, I would look at him, and ask, “Why would you choose this life?” And he would shake his head and flick my forehead. “Sabi ko naman, ’di ba, ang pagmamahal ko ay isang protesta na iinda sa maraming kalsadang tatahakin. Maglalakad man nang may sapatos o nakapaa, lagi’t laging nakasulong ang mga kamay, sumisigaw, lumalaban, tumataimtim para sa mas magandang pampang.” [Like I said, my love is a protest that will ache through the many roads we’ll take. Whether walking with shoes or barefoot, the hands always move forward, shouting, resisting, praying for a better shore.]

And always, he delivered that answer in those ridiculous boots that made him taller than the world, taller than everything else.

BUT LOVE HAS A WAY OF BEING DECEITFUL.

Love knows the game. Love knows when you’re skirting around its rules, gambling for a cracked code. Sometimes, you bargain. Sometimes, you try and try to pay your debt but it’s an industrial complex never going to give you mercy. Sometimes, it just peters out like a fad. It ends.

But love, I would like to believe, that the love I had with Jamil was something unconquered by time. Love with him was brushing glitter over his eyelids. That night, we were laughing at how ridiculous he looked with the glittery makeup, almost draggy. We were catching up with old friends, photos snapping from an old Polaroid, our laughter spilling over the apartment walls like spilled wine.

“Hold still,” I said. “You’re going to look like a girl!”

He tilted his head, smirked, and let me dab pink on his cheeks. “If I look too good, you’re taking me onstage next,” he teased. I paused, brushing the last streak of glitter over his eyelid, and something in his face flickered.

“You okay?” I asked, half-joking.

He laughed. “I’m fine. Just that we’re getting old, maybe. Would you be okay if ever, you know, one day, I am gone?”

I rolled my eyes, but my fingers lingered on his skin, memorizing the warmth, the small tremble in his hand as he reached for mine. I was familiar with the groove of his question. No taunting of fate this time. I have seen it. The tremors. The bruises that were shaped like question marks, unfounded always where they came from. The thinning follicles. The splotchy skin. Sometimes, gray, sometimes, gold. Flickering, glitching, between life and death.

“Promise me,” my voice broke, though I didn’t know what I was bargaining for. “Promise me you won’t disappear before we have one more ridiculous Polaroid.”

He grinned, glitter catching the light. “I’ll try,” he said. But I could see it then. the honesty behind the joke, the truth we were both too scared to name.

And so I kept brushing, and he kept smiling, and the camera clicked again, capturing a moment of light, of laughter, of us, right before the world started asking for its due.

And endings are not always sunsets. Sometimes, they are the hatching of twilight. You sit in a sterile room and watch the clock watch over you—ticking, numbering, categorizing your life like an Excel sheet—and you squirm, trying to make the slow descent of darkness more anesthetic. You wish you could sweep a rug over your eyes, make it quicker, not see the tendrils creeping in. And when it does happen, the total consumption, the waiting is not even rewarding.

You sit there blank, like a dented canvas, the exhaustion of that laborious waiting splattered all over you, nursing what’s left to be cleaned. And is that even it?

When you’ve been promised a soap-opera culmination of grief at the end of things, and what arrives instead is a small stone lodged between your ribcage pipes, you think it’s harmless. For years, you think nothing of it, it’s just a pebble. Then one day, you’re sitting again, no longer on a plastic chair but on the sofa you once shared in the apartment, and the pebble has grown into a stone. You hear it then—the crack, the rickety creak of old bones—and suddenly the stone becomes a boulder, shrapneling into tears.

And for the first time, after years of waiting for the soap opera you were owed, it finally happens like in the movies. And you don’t want it anymore, this grand gesture of love.

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The writer is a lover. A humble lover of life and the world.

– Gemino H. Abad, from Poems and Parables

We are lovers by our passions. I imagine:
I’d narrate our fanfiction in chat,
and when we’d meet, you’d pin me to the bed
like a butterfly, fragile wings strapped.
I’d talk you out of it but you don’t listen.
Please let me go, Daddy. You’d laugh
if you were a psychology student,
but you followed Darwin. You’d eat my brains
if you wanted to. You’d bite my lip
to silence me, put your thumb in my mouth.
(Rule of thumb: when a lover puts a finger in one’s mouth,
it’s all over.) The heart would beat like a crazed ape
stuck in a poacher’s trap. This poet
could do nothing but write fantasies in his head,
feel your penis, your arms, partly lost in reflection
—as my PSYCH 101 professor discussed, “objective introspection.”
Your mouth might taste like coffee, keeping you roused
maybe for all those lab reports
or because you also found that video
that said coffee before sex made things wilder
like hikes up mountains to waterfalls
or nearly drowning at a beach
in search for specimens. You wouldn’t need to look far
to find me. Instagram followers would be enough
as a specimen directory for extracurricular activity.
There’d be no risk in diving between thighs,
in inserting instruments into parts that softly bit back.
And we’d share the epiphany, the clarity,
the wisdom like the juice of Eden’s bitter fruit.
To you, this would all be fieldwork, all to come
back to when you need more material for study.
I had more to feel, more to give.
This was what researchers like you would do:
take, experience for study, know what was true,
what was real. But all I knew about reality
was from Lacan: nothing was real,
the more one signified, the less it was “true.”

L.C. Suelan, 23, is a queer writer from the Philippines. He mainly writes fiction in English, but he usually uses poetry when writing about more emotional things. A fresh graduate of his university's Literature program, he is rediscovering his love for painting, cooking, and reading for leisure.

We don’t have a Stripe account yet, but if you’d like to support our publication, here’s our Ko-Fi alternative! Every little tip goes straight to uplifting queer artists, queer stories, and queer dreams. Thank you for keeping our tiny, loud, glittery corner of the world alive.

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