ALOCASIA

I brought a fiddle leaf fig into the apartment after the fight. It was almost too tall for the corner, leaves wide as the doors I slammed in the middle of arguments. They said nothing when I carried it in, shoulders tight with suspicion. I wanted to tell it everything—how I loved them and feared them, how the bruises had names but I could not speak them aloud.

At night, I whispered to the fig. I told it about the nights I crouched in the kitchen, counting the cracks in the floorboards, pretending I was invisible. I told it about the hands that could both hold and harm, the mouth that could both bless and curse. And the fig listened. Its leaves rustled, shadows stretching across walls, comforting in their immobility.

Eventually, I moved it closer to the light. Its growth was slow, careful. My growth was slow, careful. We were both learning to stretch toward safety, toward sunlight, away from the places where darkness lingered in corners, where thorns hid in plain sight.

Somewhere, in the folds of the leaves, the fig held my secrets. And I, for the first time in a long time, could breathe.

 

Toya L. Walker is an educator, gardener, and founder of Organically Grown Queen, where she combines gardening, storytelling, and creative expression to help people reconnect with nature and their own cultural roots. She has presented at conferences including Herbstalk and NOFA, and her work focuses on native plants, urban gardening, and using sensory observation to inspire writing and art. Through her workshops, Toya shows how even the smallest garden space can become a place for imagination, learning, and community connection.

REVERSE PROPAGATION

Last year, you taught me how to propagate succulents—cut cleanly at the node so the wound can callus over before planting or else rot will set in—while I watched you demonstrate on the jade plant your ex gave you before she left, occasionally running your thumb over the severed stem. Botanists tend to promise long life of plants even after damage. This is something you told me while trimming my hair in your bathroom—scissors so close to my ear I had to hold my breath for god knows how long—later adding I looked better shorter because long hair made it seem that I was trying too hard. You told me several other things later that week. How thorns are but modified leaves, how everyone gets close without paying for it—all while you’d report your barrel cactus and admire its three hundred sixty degree protection. Occasionally, I’d pay you small currencies. Stopped seeing Alex because you said they flirted with me, stopped wearing the kalamkari shirt my mother bought for my birthday, quit asking why you needed my phone password all of a sudden. Horticulturalists know that some plants are allelopathic. They release chemicals that prevent other plants from growing nearby. Black walnut trees kill everything beneath them. If I tell you, you’d laugh at this fact, and perhaps even say it reminded you of your mother. I almost said it reminded me of you. When you pushed me it was into the bookshelf, an accident you said, and the succulent on the top shelf survived even though it shattered, because they are resilient like that, and I replanted it while you apologized over and over, cried and rambled how you’d never forgive yourself, and how by next morning, I’ve already forgiven you. Research shows plants remember trauma. Meaning, when our mimosa plants stop closing their leaves after being dropped repeatedly, it’s only because they’ve learned that fall isn’t that fatal. I learrned to duck when you reached overhead, apologize for things I didn’t do. In another world, you’d give me roses and sunflowers. In this one, you bought me a Venus flytrap for our anniversary as it was romantic. Queer, both predator and flower. But the plant uses so much energy in the snap that each trap can only close four or five times before it dies. I grew new versions of myself every few weeks, each one smaller than the last. Scientists proved plants scream when stressed, except in frequencies beyond the human range. I wonder what frequency I was screaming at. If you heard it and thought it was growth.

 

BONSAI TECHNIQUES FOR BEGINNERS

Eating a pear, I thought of my girlfriend. How she coiled a copper wire on the table in front of us us while the instructional video froze at 4:23. The bonsai master’s hands were still suspended mid-gesture, & she said you have to know when a branch is flexible enough for it to take the shape you want it to take. If it’s too old, it’ll snap clean. I was but twenty-three, young enough, she said, to be trained. So she wrapped the wire around my left, non-tattooed wrist to demonstrate correct tension—not enough to cut off circulation but enough. Enough that I’d feel it for hours after, for my wrist to wear a red bracelet I couldn’t take off anymore. The roots have to be trimmed, she explained, sliding her manicured thumb along the root ball to break off the fine hairs, otherwise they grow too wild and reach in directions that don’t serve the tree’s beauty. I watched her cut away half the system with scissors worth more than anything I owned. The white threads  in the sink looked so much like my grandmother’s hair when she’d let it loose. Oftentimes, she’d say I never paid attention to the right things, which is to say I laughed too loud & held my fork worse than a toddler would, at her colleagues’ parties. Even my body was wrong in small yet ‘fixable’ ways if only I cared enough to fix them. I had spent years making myself legible to a world that didn’t want me—wrong gender, wrong desire, wrong country of origin—and then I fell in love with a woman who offered to finish the job. The wire is temporary, she told me. A year, two at most, & then you remove it but by then the branch has grown a skin of memories and its shape is permanent. Now I wonder if she knew what she was saying or if cruelty really shares the same tone as instruction when one does it long enough. Bonsai is from the Japanese bon (tray) & sai (planting), which explains why the whole art is about making a large something understand it was always meant to be small, & I made myself small. I slept curled on my side because my girlfriend said I took up too much space in the bed; stopped texting my female friends from high school because she’d check my phone in the shower, not out of distrust, she said, but love, means no branch of yourself should grow where her eyes won’t reach, & I believed her because what else do you believe when someone is holding wire. She bought me a book on my birthday, bonsai techniques for beginners, with a note inside that read: thought you’d find this interesting, the discipline of small things, & I did find it interesting. God, I did. The instructor’s hands so gentle they left scars in the cambium layer, the excruciating seconds after she paused the video to point out how beautiful the wound was. That night when she held my face & told me I was finally— finally!—becoming the version she’d always seen potential for, I said thank you; I’d learned that much at least, being grateful for my own trimming. Years later my roommate asks whether taking up so little space even in a bed meant for two is a habit or—

& I say muscle memory, I don’t know. Anything but the truth, which is that certain shapes don’t need the wire anymore to keep once learned.

 

Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE ART, IS&T, Marrow Magazine, Temz Review, Blue Marble Review, The Lake, South Broadway Press, and elsewhere.

lichen on a rock,
that pulsates as I breathe. 
Tiny spindles catching 
in my hair. 

He rambles on about 
moving my body,
but I wish this forest 
Would just eat me.

Envelope me in 
the moss, the ragged 
Earth. Compost my
body. 

Use it better than he 
did. I want to be part 
of the mycelium.

Instead of this 
relationship. At least 
my physical being
would be valued.

 

Sadee Bee (they/them) is a queer artist and writer inspired by magic, strange dreams, and creepy vibes. Sadee is the author of Elgin Award-Nominated Magic Lives In Girls (kith books), and My Hurt Shall Devour You (dogleech books), & Celestial Bodies / Earthbound Wounds (White Stag Publishing). Bee can be found on Twitter @SadeeBee, on Instagram @sadee__bee, and the web at sadeebee.com.

Bruising is terraforming.
Your fingerprints bloom tiger orchids across my calves. 
Flesh yields flowers, because flesh is weak and supple, 
like all good soil must be, to bear blunt force 
and bounce back blue. 
Blue was never your color,  so you find ways around it, 
fingernails perfect shovels:  they slide inwards, drawing borders, 
staking claim over free land. 

Gouge mountainpaths across metacarpals, 
deposit deltas between the sternum and muscle, 
make indents of history in the soft tissue
and the sure breaking of a rib. 
Land must be bent, must be burnt, 
must be rammed, and tamed, 
so I close my eyes,  learn every breath and gesture, 
which one is a prelude  to your bulldozer hands, 
what is the signal to the noise from above.
I must admit it’s terrifying, the variation,  
because you are often flutterwing breathing,  
running on my skin, all tender, still 
shaping, just as you are thunder.
Scars are still rivers, stark white reminders, 
as if lightning too wanted to only flow, 
not be trapped in amber. 

Sometimes I wonder, if your rage is just revving up,
if your fist will now fit my empty chest cavity.
There was once sweetgrass and wildflowers there, 
fireflies, swallows, and voles too. Before you, I was wild land,
no purpose or plan. Rain was only rain.
I leaned toward sunshine without a scheme. 
And after you, after metal claws, and poison gases 
Killing steel raking against bone, sky blooming 
death mushrooms,

I will rewild too.

 

Rukman Ragas writes about earnest contradictions and temporary obsessions. A Tamil writer of speculative fiction from Sri Lanka, Rukman’s work has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Deadlands, khoreo, the Baltimore Review, and others. They completed Clarion West 2025. When not wrangling his novel into shape, Rukman can be found consuming an unhealthy amount of historical media or playing DnD.

It’s the smallest things
capillaries carrying, noiseless
root hairs drawing water through 
a cut stem in a glass jar                        rupture.

He never hit, but his weather 
moved, shift in light
a closing of petals, filling arteries 
with pressure they weren’t grown to bear. 

I learned to read 
him as leaves do with air:
minute changes, living
turning toward or away from harm.

I’d feel them rise
veins flushing toward the surface
heat rising, capillaries swelling
                                 splitting, spilling
until the skin of things could no longer hold. 

No one misses a face that red
so I leave before the blush betrays me
or I don’t go at all.

They speak of grafting as delicate:
one body cut to take another in
held until it cannot tell which growth is its own.

I took his shape, my growth 
redirected
for symmetry.

There are violences that leave 
no break in the bark:
only
slow bruising
under surface,
phloem 
darkening

sugar turned bitter before it can reach the flower.

 

Alexia Cousineau (she/her) is a queer franco-Ontarian spoken word artist and poet from Timmins, Ontario. Alexia is the chair and founder of Anaphore Sudbury. Her written work is featured in The Literary Review of Canada, Sulphur Literary Journal, as well as many local zines in Sudbury. 

Had she known what her body meant, she would have known to walk away.

She pinched the spike between her forefinger and thumb and pulled hard. 

Sometimes, the entire pot would lift off the ledge before the thorn gave. 

Then – the tear, the clang of the metal, spattering of dust. 

The flesh would secrete a moisture. Barely. It would appear ample, nonetheless. 

She was told all her life that this was how the flowers were brought. She did not believe it. 

But what else was there to do? Would she have known, she could walk away.

The yellow flowering mammillaria doesn’t exist – yet she could smell the stickiness

in what lay pressed between the pages of the 2002 Diary. Her body would lie there too.

Meaning, she had not meant to know. For, knowing would take the walk away.

 

Rituja Patil is a queer poet from Mumbai, India. Her poetry has been published in Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc., the licktey split and LiveWire. She tries to write poems that feel like a longing gaze at the ocean at night—sometimes it’s quiet, sometimes stormy. She’s also a law student on the side with research interests in intersections of personal liberty, bodily autonomy, and health care.

lately I have been thinking about
what the mind tries to erase
after enough time has passed 

last week I read a line in 
Michelle Dowd’s memoir Forager: 
“What we bury grows.”

there was a pineapple 
plant in his living room
when I came back

I never saw it fruit, but after I left
him again I made a playlist
called pineapple plant

trying to contain the feeling 
of being in the same space as him,

trying to shrink the danger
to only the headphones 
cupped around my ears 

contain it to me and
my apartment floor and 
my dog who needs a walk,

who I have promised:
no bad people

this is about the word 
he would never admit,

back when I didn’t know lovers
could throw it at each other like
a sport they have both
forgotten they used to play

if I am compelled to bury,
let it be a seed of myself

is that not what I have 
been trying to do all along?

almost in answer,
the phrase comes to me:
severed to the bone 

I’m still trying to keep 
my promise to my dog

I still don’t know why I am
so afraid of everything

I still don’t know why
I’ve been afraid of everyone 
I have loved and why
that feels like love

 

Lex Lanza is a creative non-fiction writer, CD collector, lover of the forest floor, and sometimes visual artist. She can be found spooning her sleek black dog, Gilbert, yearning for small bodies of water, or lost in curating a playlist. Lex’s work can be found in BULLSHIT LIT, Full Grain Mag., Nightbird Zine, The Offing, Susie Magazine, and more.

Underneath the hushed leaves, 
our roots learn to speak 
a language of quiet 
exhalations and sighs.
One whispers nectar, 
the other a thin invisible salt.

We live in the same pot,
share the rain, 
and I learn to read the small betrayals—
The yellowing of a leaf, 
the way your petals close too soon, 
and how the air tastes
of someone else.

You call it care when you prune me
to fit inside your shadow. 
You say that closeness is a nutrient, 
but it can also be a poison
seeping through to the root, nipping you in the bud. 

At night I count the ways my stems have
forgotten to reach out. How my flowers fold 
into themselves like little secrets. 
I pretend this wilt is from the weather. 
More salt for the soil.
There are sprouts of springtime—
shared sun, and shoots of new leaves.
These moments make the 
cold snaps harder to name.

I plant a new seed in the soil. 
A queer little seed with wants and needs.
When you lean in close
to shade this new seed,
I answer with salt of my own—
a boundary that tastes like rain 
and blooms in its own light.

 

Winter Doe (she/her) is a queer artist whose work blends softness with scientific wonder. Raised in the sun‑bleached southwestern deserts and currently rooted in the northeastern woodlands, she writes poems that drift between data and dream, seeking the subtle sciences of the heart. She is an emerging poet exploring the delicate physics of tenderness and intimacy.

This won’t leave any marks; no one will believe you.
—Cambodian police to a torture victim

i.

once, my partner asked whether i had turned off the light above his table. the man revealed himself with a new character, though i could tell it was a tactic. i said i had not, and kept my eyes on the screen—digital craftsmanship in red curves, almost silken threads, if the eyes could hold fire and rue and distance, forming the vivid petals of a mature poinsettia.

i told myself, do not believe who you are from one who cannot make you.

i wished i could pretend that technology had taken over the role of pleasure, yet i knew something was wrong—or something wrong was yet to happen—or what was happening was already there, beneath me, a cathedral of burnt breath pulling animals from air and light.

if i did anything right, it was trusting what i remember: where plant sprouting is another life i wish i could live. that before i came here nobody else had come close to that prohibitive language of terror, his habitual decision of slashing and slashing my brain and pissing on it.

 

ii.

i made things talk to walk above time. dolls, leaves, people in photographs who forgot to tell me what made them laugh. not a simple distraction, but a form of release—fabricated so that i am in control. i became a mad act of hostility, quiet, yet fierce in defence of my body where plant sprouting is another life i wish i could live. i told myself stories i would never escape.  i always began with two people, and at least one of them would die. it hurt, but i knew nothing else.

so i was telling myself this story of two men in an adventure, thirsty and penniless. by the time they had reached a drought of no comparable heat, my partner was already shaking in my face a skin-balm jar-like container, licked empty. i have my own, love, i have my own, i said. i did not use it.

if i did anything right, it was trusting what i remember. that i should avoid conflict. no matter what do not take the bait. 

then came the shattering—mirror, woodwork, kitchenware—anything he could grasp he hurled against the wall or through the window. i did not look at his face. i was the closest planet to the sun. in my mind i was saying goodbye to everybody. farewell, farewell.  

then my partner took my hand, crying, soft. the man revealed himself with a new character, though i could tell it was a tactic. i fear you, he said.

i told myself, do not believe who you are from one who cannot make you.

 

iii. 

if i did anything right, it was trusting what i remember.

their desire was water—one tracing smoking rocks for direction, the other burning the direction in their head. the temperature and knowledge of their nowhereness were enough for the mind to swell. it was as if the wind had thrown them into fire by accident. where plant sprouting is another life i wish i could live.

who decides whose thirst is too soon, or too long ago—that it is, if not unreal, about how it was not remembered the way it was? how do you settle the tug of war between here and elsewhere without half of your body torn from its other half? one says, walk slower, move without rush in the sound of “think again,” yet the other devours the hours of a train into the far night, listening only to the sound of contact between jeopardy and cause, between you and you.

when the smudged moon began its battle between rats and insects swanning through the story i was telling myself, my partner punched the door, slapped his own face. to this guilt island you brought me, the man revealed himself with a new character, self-harming and speaking from a well of unrequited love, though i could tell it was a tactic. you manipulated all this—how i feel so evil about myself, he said, his rumbling voice spilling into the same wail he made when he first spoke of his father’s death. this is what you’ve always been—tyrant, dictator, evil. you did this, as you did to your mother. your fracture—you said “abuse” because you left no other option—it is you.

then echoes of what he said. echoes as wide as oceans. and i was small beneath them all. what i said did not matter. a raindrop in the pacific.

i told myself, do not believe who you are from one who cannot make you.

 

iv.

perhaps this torrefying nowhereness was not a desert after all; these two travellers were but fugitive sounds made when the back of the head strikes the floor in regret—so much more than when regret first became a word.

the day came to explode, and blood raced through my head. and in my head, the man revealed himself with a new character—a monk of some sort meditating in a whistling sandstorm—though i could tell it was a tactic.

i walked slowly through the days when a cut was made inside me—made permanent and would send throbbing signals to the tips of my fingers in the years to come.

there is no account of when and where i began unleashing violence—as he suggested the first one to unfurl a fist—in my calendar. i sat to learn whether it was true, even if it was not true. i spelt air again and again. told the room who i am, on loop, and how inflicting hurt of a kind is an invention my hands—my father, who farmed and drove a borrowed tricycle in rural Quezon, never trained me to do; nor my mother, who always came home with something for us after her work as a saleslady. how could i ever hurt him when i saw him more precious than me?

i told myself, do not believe who you are from one who cannot make you.

if i did anything right, it was trusting what i remember—how i sought a direction that the fire would not allow. where plant sprouting is another life i wish i could live.

perhaps it was never about thirst, when no one offered me water as i was attacked in my apartment. the matter was that i was attacked—blood gushing out of my nose like a burst can of tomatoes.

perhaps what desire means is the weight of my voice—how sufficient it is for water to mean burning.

i need water, i begged from a lumber room shut away from air and light. for long godless days.

when i said i have my own, i meant there are people back home who will grieve when i disappear.

 

“DARVO” is an acronym for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. Jennifer J. Freyd first introduced the term in 1997. In her article, Violations of Power, Adaptive Blindness and Betrayal Trauma Theory (in Feminism & Psychology Vol. 7(1): 22-32), she explained that this attack tactic, “intended to chill and terrify…will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable, with the offender rapidly creating the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, whilst the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground completely reversed. The more the offender is held accountable, the more wronged the offender claims to be. The offender accuses those who hold them accountable of perpetrating acts of defamation, false accusations, smearing, etc. The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense (italics mine, 30).” The epigraph of this poem is from a Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) Project Against Torture Report by Jason Barber, Less than Human: Torture in Cambodia (2000).

 

B.B.P. Hosmillo is a queer poet, curator, editor, and educator. Their poetry books include, Breed Me: a sentence without a subject (AJAR Press) and A Form of Torture (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House). Their writing has appeared recently in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Cream City Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. They completed their PhD in Creative Practice from the University of New England, Australia and currently live between Quezon, Philippines and the UK.

“You’ll come back not wanting me.”

We let the words hang on their meathooks as I threw the last of my shit in the Yukon. Eric’s voice was wet and hollow in my ear, his breath ragged. Desperation sharpened the soft tunnel of his throat until I swore I heard teeth clicks all the way down. I cleared my own, eyes on the gorge, skin burning. I rubbed more of Mom’s plantain poultice into the crooks of my elbows and tightened my bandages. 

“No,” I said. My voice had jumped two octaves, the way it always jumps when I lie, but I either don’t know it yet, or I do, and I wish I didn’t. I couldn’t tell in the moment which one it was, only that Eric sensed the untruth and ran with it, his French-educated Lebanese accent all spittle and hysteria as he tore me apart over the phone. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do. 

No, I was, but the thought of it, his principle or lack thereof, tried to push me over an edge I’d teetered on since the moment we met in person, so I held the thought at bay. I drowned his latest tirade out with a slow, hazy inhale, an artificial languor. Flakes of plantain dried up on my flesh in the midsummer sun and fell at my feet, fish food for the Cambrian spirits always swimming around my ankles.

Ithaca breathed with me, its summertime pollen a gauze on my already wrapped body, every seed a stitch in the wool over my eyes. Whenever Eric was finished, he’d draw himself up with a haughty breath and pooch out his full, pink lips. His thick eyelashes fanned across his high cheekbones and he’d soften, imperceptibly at first, then all at once, before he’d release a torrential downpour of platitudes and pet names. Apologies only on special occasions. And I’d hear “I love you” and say it back, my tongue held captive by the blade he’d press against his own pretty neck.

 

We’d met, as with my last partner, over Instagram. I had cheated on them with him, beaten down by the previous love’s sudden assumption of a black identity and Southern drawl after their long-awaited release from a mental institution. Where the partner I’d carried over from my teenage years had been two years my junior, Eric was two years my senior. 

You can’t understand the second without the first. Both curated their appearances based on a particular kind of Tumblr niche: that of the raceless, curly-haired androgyne, mouth always parted in expectation, light eyes blank with innocence. Both had formidable Tumblr presences, their posts’ notes in the hundreds of thousands. Both had been canceled multiple times, but maintained an aura of moral authority that rendered them untouchable, superior. 

My internet addiction was such that our matriarch sent me out into the yard often to harvest plantain. Not the kind you fry up, but plantain leaves, which you dry on racks and make into tea or, while there’s still life in them, grind with oils into a poultice. It treated skin conditions and autoimmune flares. I was sullen and ungrateful, but my eczema had teamed up with my gender dysphoria to force me indoors, where the internet was, so the task meant to treat both ills at once. 

Kneeling in the grass, my phone vibrated nonstop. Eric was angry again.

I didn’t text him back. I dug my fingers into the dirt and wondered how much tobacco or sundance it would take to make up for my lack of gratitude. For the un-sacred, yellow stain of me on this stretch of pristine green.

 

The lure of the abuser is the absolute certainty they offer. This has been my experience. In love, healthy love, there’s this risk of abject loss. Your root system intertwines with another’s. Should they leave you, you’re torn apart from the base upwards, left to fill the space with yourself. An abusive partner is a covenant. They will never leave you alone. Eric would never leave me. 

Two weeks into our online courtship, I tried to set a boundary. I said “you’re moving too fast.” It was the first of many blowouts we had. I still remember how offended and horrified he was by my concern. His response: “I don’t want to wake up in bed two years from now and have you look at me and say we moved too fast.”

 

The Great Plains didn’t have much in the way of cellular coverage back then, which was good. The Yukon was jam-packed with our luggage and stuff for giveaway, plus our matriarch, our father, and all of their adult children, myself included. I’d wrap my arms around the back of my car seat and sleep with the sun in my face as the sky spread open around us. One long road, endless flatland then mountains, the Rockies in the distance. Every day the sun glowed a rosy gold through enormous, broken clouds, and every night the road would narrow to a single pinprick illuminated by our headlights. 

We made for Browning, Montana, and the closer we drew to our destination, the more we stopped to pick woman sage. I held back. Something had happened between Eric and I in the months prior that rendered me incapable of engaging with our sacreds. Everybody knew about it. The event clung to my slender frame like mold, intelligent, hungry. Its irreversibility drove a pin through my spirit and into his. I would not be allowed to leave him, so long as this event was remembered, and he reminded me about it often. 

“If you leave me,” he said, “I’ll tell everyone what you did. You’ll be finished.”

We pulled over again. Mom handed me a pair of pruning shears and a tobacco tie. There would be no argument. I had to pray over and clip the sage. I had to make my own bundle, no matter how sick I was, no matter how evil I felt.

I did as I was told.

 

Our online relationship was entirely sex-based. I’d stay up until dawn with him on Skype, my unshaved pussy in the foreground as we jerked off together. We sexted nonstop and I preferred it that way, because any conversation beyond sex proved impossible. Our pornographic obsession with each other was exactly what I wanted, for a time, because my testosterone rendered me uncontrollably horny, but my dysphoria prevented my peers from touching me. I moved through the world covered in a prickly shell to protect my trembling, slimy core. 

I didn’t know he was a virgin. He preferred to imagine I was. Where I projected filth and experience onto him for his beauty and age, he projected purity and innocence on me. I was his “baby boy,” and he was my man.

Our first night together was incomprehensible. We smashed into each other without any penetration. We grappled, tumbled, and kissed in religious ecstasy, though my stomach knotted and darkness blossomed within my unmapped heart. I couldn’t understand how, after months of purely sexual discourse, we’d end up here, dry-humping like teenagers. When I finally got my pants off, his eyes flashed with something like hatred, and he dove for my pussy, a disgusted curl to his mouth and furrow in his brow.

We played like that for the rest of our offline relationship. I begged him to fuck me, he found new reasons not to. Eventually we landed on a compromise: I would mount his cock like a balance beam until he grew bored, then he’d jerk off and drag me by the hair to finish on my face. 

A rash began to spread everywhere his fluids touched me. Mom sent me out into the yard more and more. Sometimes she’d sit out on our covered porch and light a cigarette, her eyes set on some distant, unseeable future, her hair unbraided. Sometimes she’d just watch me from the kitchen window, hands occupied as she heated up the oil. We converted a muffin tin so the pucks could settle easier. Often she’d have to wash it twice a week.

Eric was seldom invited to our farmhouse. My parents despised him, but they loved me, and they’d rather have had me home with my abuser than out in the world, where they could not mend my flesh. He lived three hours southeast of us. I can imagine them undergoing one of their Serious Discussions about whether they’d let him in or let me out. 

On one of the rare occasions he came up to visit, we performed the compromise, me on top, as usual, him beneath me with his hands on my biceps. Lately, he’d given up any pretense of calling me a man. Early on, he’d said he would pay for my top surgery, but now he was begging me to keep my tits, to keep everything. His hands moved from my biceps to my breasts, my waist. I saw myself from outside of myself. Not a man, not a boy, but a girl, inflamed. 

Because I had to be the girl, I moaned like a girl. He pushed up, I pushed down, and in one cataclysmic second, the tip of his cock slipped into my pussy. We both froze.

“Did it…” he began, face buried in my armpit, so I couldn’t see his expression.

I tried to find my voice. It came out ragged and raspy as the panic calcified. “Yeah.”

His eyes flashed up to meet mine, then darted away. They were venomous. His face contorted in hatred and resolve as he pushed the rest of the way into me, unprotected. My heart hammered. I decided to be happy about it. After all, wasn’t this what I wanted? Hadn’t I begged for it? Begged for him? I put on a smile and let him leave his cock in me, but he wouldn’t move. I didn’t move, either. 

“Do you want me to,” I started, but he cut me off with one sudden, graceless thrust. Then another. He began a series of arrhythmic movements, but he was flaccid. He turned away and pulled out. I hovered above him, stunned. 

Hours later, I shyly tried to discuss what had happened. He pretended not to hear me, then looked out the window, over my patch of plantain. I pressed him again, avoiding the word “sex.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked primly.

“You know, earlier,” I said. “In bed, with you.”

He tilted his head, eyes wide and unblinking. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

I furrowed my brow. Dread, hard and small and frigid, pierced my heart. “The,” my voice diminished as I shrank in on myself, “we were… intimate.”

He stared at me blankly a minute longer, his perfect features placid, before a low, cruel snicker escaped his barely parted lips. It grew to a raucous hyena’s cackle as he threw his head back and pointed at me. His black ringlets bounced around his shoulders. Tears pinpricked his almond-shaped eyes and he wiped them away swiftly. The cackle subsided into a giggle, then silence.

“God,” he said, “you should see your face. You look so scared right now.”

I hugged myself. “That’s not… that’s not very nice.”

He avoided me for the rest of the day, except to smirk at my every shattered look. My father drove him to the Green Street bus stop. I stayed behind to dress my wounds. 

On the bus home, he texted me I that had taken something “very precious” from him. 

And I’d taken it by force.

I curled in the armchair overlooking the plantain. That’s how our matriarch found me, my bare arms covered in lesions, my neck a topography of pink and red, streaked with deep scratches. She asked careful questions. She did not accuse anyone of anything. I broke down and told her what Eric had told me. He’d already begun to leverage the encounter as insurance against my leaving him. Simultaneously, he clarified that under no uncertain terms would we engage in intimacy, ever again. I would be his trophy, his parasite. His pure and untouchable prize. Our matriarch bristled with barely concealed rage. Her face flushed. She spoke through gritted teeth.

“You have done,” she said, tension heavy on every syllable, “nothing wrong.”

“I have,” I whimpered, “he says I have.”

“You,” she started, then stopped. “You are in a consensual relationship. With this person.”

“These things happen in, in consensual relationships.”

“You think I don’t know that?” She hardly blinked. “Listen. Listen to me. If he hurts you…”

My next words were mere wisps. “I hurt him. He says I hurt him.”

Her nostrils flared and she stood. Despite my being a whole head taller than her, she filled the room, and I cowered. She handed me a pinch of tobacco and sent me out. 

 

You’ll come back not wanting me.

I slept in the Yukon for privacy. The rest of our sundance family peopled the new house and its backyard, sleeping bags huddled beneath the kitchen table, tents pitched around the trampoline, fenced so the rez dogs couldn’t get in. The stars glimmered across the night sky, crystalline shards of glass in sticky pitch. Inside the car, cooled by the prairie dusk, smelled of cedar, sweetgrass, woman sage, and sap. For some reason, I never held a human stench during ceremony. My sweat was the scent of loam and hyacinth, of summertime breezes and salt.

The rash went away. There, in the Yukon, I tossed from side to side. Two futures unfurled before me. In one, Eric’s dorm room became the tableau for the conception and eventual upbringing of our first and only child. I detransitioned for her sake and his. Bruises latticed my arms and legs, an escalation of what had already begun in our current dynamic, his hands on my neck or open-palmed against my arms as he’d stare at me, baffled, and ask, “Why am I hitting you?” As if I knew the answer. 

In the other future, I left him. I left him the following morning. My lovers were numerous and myriad, their faces illuminated by the molten forsythia of the onset Ithaca autumn or cast in a cold wintery glow. I’d take all genders to bed, it didn’t seem to matter who. I still detransitioned, but for myself, this time, until I changed my mind again, ran headlong into manhood. I’d walk in Mulholland Wildflower Preserve during ghost pipe season and manhandle whoever was with me, tell them ghost pipes only emerge to fuck, and wouldn’t it be lovely to join them. This future self with all his brashness, his unfettered lust, he terrified me.

The young mother scared me even more.

Eric was right. I’d gone to that sacred place, and I no longer wanted him.

When I told him, that next morning, the sound he let out was unlike anything I’d ever heard before or since. Thousands of voices overlapped in that yowl, in his repeated no, no, no, no, no and my own cold silence. There were no threats, no reminders of the pendulum he held over my head, only shrieks and plaintive, wheedling promises—we’d have sex again, for real this time, he would treat me better, he’d really prove how much he couldn’t live without me—and one long, sustained scream. After I hung up, my phone let me know it had gone on for twenty-two minutes.

I crumpled up a ball of woman sage and rubbed it furiously all over myself, letting the pieces feed the fish, before I went inside for breakfast.

 

Summer’s end, and we returned to a house bereft. Our matriarch had passed away very suddenly. She’d been the first I’d told about Eric and the breakup. I was grateful for that, for the way she wrapped me in her arms, no longer afraid for my life. 

Out in the yard, the plantain proliferated, their leaves supernaturally large. I let them be. Apparently, our mother had frozen about a hundred poultice pucks for me. They sat at the bottom of the upstairs freezer in a Ziploc gallon bag.

As the August sun cut its last orange rays through our home, I took one of her poultices out and set it on the counter to thaw.

 

Shaawan Francis Keahna (he/him) is a screenwriter for the Baltimore Cinematic Universe and lapsed poet. His work has earned him a Ruby award in literary arts from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, a handful of fellowships, and publication in Never Whistle at Night Part II: Back for Blood. He’s getting his degree in philosophy, law, and ethics, with a special focus on history. He splits his time between Baltimore, Minneapolis, Brooklyn and Seattle.