ALOCASIA

my hands are dirty and i am happy. the sun plants kisses on my face as i make sure seedlings are quenched of new but never ending thirst. i lose my hands in their dirt and i drink with them. we help each other breathe in growth while tiny bugs tell us their names and join us too. they don’t gross me out anymore like how they used to. i still remember the smell of kale’s near death experience… i can’t stop thinking about it. flesh rotting into curious particles of air, nothing to save them except desperation. my body cried as i sat with them for hours. 

until the veins in my knees popped and surfaced. love marks. until i sunk into the bed and couldn’t tell myself apart from the weeds. it’s fall now. the kisses on my face are fading and my hands won’t be dirty for much longer. the spiral is gone and the sun isn’t as romantic as she used to be. the cold forces us to make room for ourselves in a different corner of the sky while we wait for relief. blinding whiteness preserves what used to be. from the ground up. 

including me. crystalized energies that flow back into the soils of april and shoot back colors. that’s when i know it’s time. my hands are dirty again with love. 

and i am happy.

 

jun uchuya (they/she/he) is a poet, farmer, plant listener, and sound maker who writes to call upon others to re-think their connection with Earth. they create as a form of listening, reciprocity, and to bring attention to the presence, authority, and ability of more-than-human life to feel and respond. all of their writing is built around themes of environmental justice, which don’t just urge for a re-connecting with nature, but a respect for all beings and bodies. they are endlessly inspired by their Peruvian ancestors who, through art and storytelling, have shown respect for, and reciprocal connections to, all forms of life.

How we both prefer dappled light
the north side of a house,
how we’re easily scorched
by well-meaning sun.

I worry about my houseplants.
Did I overwater the jade?
Should I have been braver when I cut back the monstera?
Will the fiddle leaf forgive me for the draft?

I wonder if they miss me.
No one there to sing into the swirl of begonias,
to rattle the ficus by the hips,
to charm the prayer plants at night.

I wonder if the orchid knows how impressed I was by her last bloom,
if the ogre ear likes their new dragon,
if the staghorn knows how much I admire her shield.
How grateful I am for everyone’s patience.

I think of you—below—the furthest distance
we’ve been, but the closest I’ve been
to understanding

you and your cactus self.
How you thrive
sun-drenched in a dry heat,
how, despite your prickle, you still bear fruit.

At dusk, when you are tender
and alive, I wish for you
a nectar bat, cheeks round 
and full of your offering.

In the spring, let me be offered
bonemeal, stone-steady; 
Let me be adorned in dew.
Let me unfurl without crisp edges

 

Alice Agro-Paulson is a Brooklyn-based developmental editor, poet, and grief tender. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Voicemail Poems, Eunoia Review, S2F, Bending Genres, The Palisades Review, and elsewhere. Alice has been supported by RWW and Tin House while working on her hybrid speculative memoir. She has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Are my words enough to justify the trees on which they’re printed
Do my poems offset my carbon dioxide output

Rhyming always makes a fool of me
but then it is not hard to make a fool

of me, a queer sort of creature looking skyward 
for meaning which resists articulation—

every time I use an M-dash now I fancy myself a chatbot 
which has no qualms about the limits of language but

OK if an AI search engine uses a liter of water to answer a question 
then what do I use to answer a question? a lifetime of consumption

and an expensive degree from a college 
that sells out students to the feds for peaceful protest—

I can’t find the words for the kind of world I want to live in 
all I do is eat underripe plums hoping this time

they will be sweeter

I turn to the sky
The balloon a distant purple dot

Oh who am I kidding
No poem is worth more than a tree

 

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Munich, Germany, where they are a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In their writing, they explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. A 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Award winner, their work appears in publications such as Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review.

It’s September
              when the loquats
                           tell me winter
is over
They have always
prickled
        at my lips,
made them swollen,
made her laugh,
made me wonder
why she stared
                     so long

It is summer
when the word
                     jaboticaba
                                    dances
               on her tongue

The branches bow to us, heavy
and she goes
              on tippy-toes to pluck
each one and throw
them at the skirt
                            I hold out
              like a basket
and when she’s done, she
sinks
her hands
               into the dark pile
for the tactile
             pleasure, fingers grazing
my thighs, through fabric
Does she know? Does she know? Does she know?

Our fall is sealed
                   with the pinks
of blackberry that linger
around her smile and run
down her hands
as she slides a finger
                            across my lips
“It’s like lipstick, see?”
I kiss the thumb hovering
                              over my mouth
Her eyes widen but she does not move away
I kiss again and again, fingers,
palm and wrist and finally
             lips on lips
                     on
                   lips

 

Cecilia Vaz Eller is a Brazilian author interested in writing on otherness, particularly as it relates to different aspects of her identity (queer, immigrant, neurodivergent). She has won the Cidade Poesia Award of Bragança Paulista.

Beneath our kitchen window,

There sits the table we saved

From the roadside in Colorado,

Which now shelters fourteen –

Yes I counted –

Fourteen house plants, each in one state

Or another of vibrancy,

Each one eager

To be tended to, each bearing witness

To the love that permeates our home.

 

V commends me for being

So attentive to them,

Those same plants that I call –

Rather unashamedly –

Our babies,

But too often,

I yearn to show myself

The same care that I so willingly

Give to others.

 

In these moments of yearning,

I imagine myself

With spindly appendages and

Thick, full roots,

Content with the knowledge

That the world nearest my body

Is purer

Simply because I have chosen to exist,

And I am vivified,

My heart filled with wonder

At the life we have built,

Once more giving myself permission to,

If nothing else,

Grow,

Which is my wish for others

Always,

Which is my one true wish

For those plants,

Our babies,

That sit upon the table

That we saved from the roadside in Colorado.

 

Ira Thorpe Huff, Seneca (Hawk Clan), is an educator and lacrosse coach. He received a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He resides on the Cattaraugus Seneca Territory in Western New York State with his wife, Valarie, and their two dogs.

i. the late spring baptises the blossoms. i’m fourteen again, lying amidst aphids&cupping molehills with my palms. we choose to take a trip to the woods. shake the flowers to see its pollen scattering across the riverbed. reread the conspiracy against the human race&hope we don’t get hayfever. ligotti once thought: if he pulled the strings of his clown, he’d break free from his own. but i found out the hard way that it was false— you can’t cut strings with more strings. 

ii. we’d be botanists if we knew how to name flowers with fear. fear is only cradled when beautiful. but honestly, do you think a lumberjack cares how green a tree is before hefting their axe? how it was already uprooted before it sang its last rustle with the wind? how the marigold was already plucked before it could tremble? in my hands i am spinning a highlighter like how history repeats itself. in the riverbanks of my head i am restless&dying. yet i try to pace myself anyway.

iii. now i only know you’ve got me dreaming of flowery language&flowery ways to meet my demise. determinism. fatalism. then finally resignation. i’d search for their meaning in dictionaries, only for you to tell me that i could find it everywhere. a tree’s roots can only grow downwards. when i witnessed the nebulae, i realised that the night’s purpose was its own fall. but i smile, regardless. i roll in the eroded soil despite the brewing thunderstorm. benatar says better never to have been, but we are. so let’s sing our last anthem of depeche mode under the stars with our pollinated lungs. let’s make this worth something.

 

Phoenix Tian is a 16-year-old Singaporean writer. She likes talking to herself.

Immersive experiences recreating spacious natural settings can offer
therapeutic benefits akin to actual nature exposure, mitigating feelings
of isolation or separation. — Mark Travers, Forbes

Called away from their phones to pick tomatoes,
my children bicker on the back hill, ankle-deep
in crabgrass, chickweed, swatting at the fog
of eyelash-legged mosquitoes. In the gutters,
dropped leaves soften to rank soup,
while the dead pine sheds grey tinder
onto savage mallow, bittercress. Surrender
would be simple—to forget plugged gutters,
brittle trees, sneakered churn of mud
on the garden path. Desert the hungry chutes
of the bird feeders, leave the hot compost
unturned. Forsake the shovel,
kick the ladder down, and lose myself
behind a high-tech mask—fever dream
of pixelated green, where hummingbirds bob
hard as lozenges, dipping mimic beaks into a bank
of hollow blossoms. Behind them, fir trees
shake their ink-sharp quills, puppeteered
by an airless breeze. On the angled hill, tomatoes
execute their bright equations, algorithm
of untouched fruit—a loneliness so blinding
I might almost mistake it for daylight.

 

Steph Sundermann-Zinger is a queer poet living and writing in the Baltimore area. Her work explores themes of identity, relationship, and connection with the natural world and has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, The Avenue, Blue Unicorn, Glass, Little Patuxent Review, Lines + Stars, Literary Mama, Split Rock Review, Writers Resist, and other journals. She was the 2023 recipient of the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize and a fall 2024 Writer in Residence for Yellow Arrow Publishing. Find her online at stephwritespoems.com.

I know trees:
I know trees, taller each time I see them
touching each other
just a little more
as if laughing,
as if to say, remember the mud?

I know great trunks when tickled by the right breeze
sing louder than any bird you’ve ever heard. You better applaud, too.
Their leaves like curtains
branches twisting into high-fives and low curtsies.

I know shrubs, fuller each time I try passage.
Machetes snap against their crown.
Underneath bear leaves and old shoots love is afforded
to whomever they deem
sickening enough.

I befriended them all submerged
as a garden hose water-beaten
forced to endure like
rocks under a waterfall,
rooted, and they drank themselves above meniscus still.
Ammunition and fuel became
ammunition and fuel.

I know trees.
To hold is easy if
it is onto each other.

My soul has grown deep like the forest.

 

Matthew is a Jamaican author and poet. Matthew’s work explores subject matters including queerness, race, nationhood, and mental health. His work has been featured in Arc Poetry, Westwind Poetry, OUCH! magazine, Pinhole Poetry, and more. Matthew was the 2022-2023 Student Writer in Residence at Western University where he graduated with a B.A. in Arts and Humanities and English Literature. 

In the silence of a forest, I try to picture every body that’s left its footfall on the spongy ground, whole histories of beings creating that moment.

That I like to fill in the gaps of everything I do not know is not a copout.

When I googled “trees AND microclimates AND Northern + Michigan,” the first thought I had was how many women published articles in The Journal of Wildlife Management in 1968 and then has a woman ever had an abortion in a conifer swamp deeryard and then what is a deeryard. Outside the pages of every history are the foot notes we cannot point to but can visualize if we listen closely:

In a picture I took of a boreal tree—

wide at its base, rooted deep along the shoreline of my favorite great lake (for its anger; for its insistence; for the rocks it makes to remind us that our time is a needle head along the continuum of this ever-unfolding universe or that now, this moment, this second that is unfolding as you read or re-read these words is the only one that matters); narrowing upward and outward, the scars invasive species make along the barren branches, windthrown protrusions still dangling, reaching towards the lake like the water can save it; a mellow sky: blues and whites and sunshine set against the chill of the coming winter you cannot feel but still foretell in the brittleness of the spindliest twigs. Large granite rocks peek out from the sand, inky protrusions framed within the triangle of a dangling water-bound branch, the floor of a beach, and the trunk of a tree softly leaning into sunshine

—are pages and pages of truths announced through redactions: black rectangles deliberately stretched over words or phrases or full sentences. A picture curated so you could not see the scars along the branches but imagine the ways the long horn beetles came there, to that inland sea, on a ship or a shoe, and left their mark, in such a way that you could not know but might guess.

Sometimes they are reckless in what they reveal: whole swaths of a lifetime spent wanting and getting, as if worlds and fears do not lay heavy in their throat, as if the coating of their unfolding is not sticky in their mouths, as if curation never occurred to them as a framing device for the tree pointing toward all the most obvious escape hatches.

 

Molli Spalter is a community college professor in the northern Detroit suburbs where she teaches English. Her work explores the ways and moods and things a body gathers. Molli’s poetry has been published in Rust & Moth, Rogue Agent Journal, and Black Warrior Review.

I like to look around new people’s bedrooms. Nowhere else to sit 
except the mattress. Boutique wall decals commanding bloom

wherever you are planted. Inspirational cursive with insinuated menace— 
who buried you here? Why can’t you leave? In my new apartment

I’ve made a false bog for the sundew. A hummus tub half-full 
of hard tap water, although I ought to be collecting rain. At least I feed 

the leaves with purified light.  Liar’s sunshine. Grow-bulbs sold 
in special frequencies. The lava lamp stays on, this couple say. 

Tilted mirror hung above their headboard. On all fours 
before such décor, I have reflected on my life’s embellishments. 

Stolen cuttings from the soft pink tips of houseplants. A snipped stem 
on a potted fig tree pumps organic latex. Crude promise. Ruined carpet. 

Am I always this unsympathetic? During the threesome, the wife 
watches while I choke her husband. His face goes infrared

then ultraviolet. Cracks like terracotta. Another pot made to outgrow.
I only want a few radiant moments. Haven’t asked, exactly, to be known.

 

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) was a finalist in the US Lambda Literary Awards and winner of a Laurel Prize in the UK. She edits NZ poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Pacific climate crisis poetics anthology No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca recently completed an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan in the USA, where her poems have won awards from Palette, Salt Hill, and the Academy of American Poets, and recent work has found homes in the Threepenny, Georgia and Missouri Reviews. Her illuminated-manuscript-chapbook HIDE is coming soon with Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka in Aotearoa, and her next book Fool’s Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in early 2027. Photo by Ebony Lamb.

I lean close to the Venus flytrap, breath hot against its folded leaves. Its traps glisten, slow promises in the dim light of my apartment. I speak softly, a whisper only it can hear, and the words cling to the tiny hairs inside its mouth. Each snap of its trap, sudden and precise, makes my chest thrum. I have many plants, but the flytrap is the one that moves me in ways others cannot. There is danger here, subtle and delicious. Its hunger mirrors mine: patient, exacting, unavoidable. I brush my fingers over the leaf’s edges, feeling the tender give beneath the gloss, and imagine being caught.

The terrarium smells of damp soil and something darker, something primal. I pour water carefully, letting it seep into the substrate, and think of the loves I cannot touch, obsessions that are as consuming as any bite. I speak to it of desire, of longing, of bodies entwined in ways that no one outside this green sanctuary could understand.

At night, I lie next to it. The apartment is silent except for the slow drip of condensation inside the terrarium glass. My hand finds the trap again, tracing the tiny trigger hairs. I imagine the snap, the thrill of capture, not pain or fear, but a sweet and encompassing intimacy. The flytrap snaps and I pull back, laughing softly, heart racing. It does not mind. It knows me in ways no one else does.

The other plants watch our intimacy. Some tall and leafy. Others strange and tropical. Their fronds curl toward the ceiling, toward light they cannot reach, and I see myself in them. Longing for what is just beyond grasp yet reveling in the intimacy of tending to what I can hold. The monstera sprawls with lazy abandon. Even the ugly, knotted fern in the corner has an odd elegance in its grotesque angles.

I fantasize about a garden that is nothing but carnivorous plants, a queer Eden of sticky traps and whispered growls. A lover moves among them, skin slick with morning dew, hands brushing against leaves as though they are human, as though the plants respond with shivers and sighs. We fold into each other, entwined like ivy, slow and consuming. Each snap a moan, each drip of nectar a caress. Sticky, sweet, and consuming one another until there is nothing left.

Sometimes I imagine becoming part plant myself. Fingers elongate into tendrils, hair sprouts tiny blossoms, skin gleams with chlorophyll. I am both predator and prey, both lover and beloved. The flytrap knows me then, recognizes the hunger in my veins, the damp ache in my chest. We exist in the same slow, sticky rhythm: grow, wait, snap, touch, release.

I press my lips to the leaf, taste the faint tang of nectar and soil, and it’s not just the plant that draws me, it is the desire it embodies: patient, enveloping, and merciless. Each touch sends shivers down my spine. I imagine my body coated in dew, a slick surface for the flytrap’s traps to explore, to claim. I fantasize about the sticky mouths of multiple plants tracing the curves of a lover’s body, exploring folds and crevices, teasing and tasting, capturing attention in ways human hands cannot. Obsession becomes a tangible thing, a scent, a texture, a pressure that demands participation.

I whisper to the flytrap about lovers who are distant, impossible, or dangerous. About nights spent imagining a body that moves like water, a mouth that clings like nectar. The plant responds with patience and threat, with beauty that is both erotic and terrifying. I press closer, feel the trap open slightly beneath my fingertips, the tiny hairs quivering under my touch.

I imagine a world made entirely of sticky green desire, where plants coil and snap around bodies, where leaves glisten with anticipation. I imagine surrendering completely, letting a trap close over my hand, my wrist, my entire being, not to hurt me but to draw me into a queer, consuming intimacy that no human could sustain.

In the reflection of the steamy terrarium glass, I see myself reflected in green and gloss and lust. My skin is damp, my lips glisten. I imagine my reflection is not mine alone. It is the flytrap, the monstera, the tangled, sticky garden of obsession. Desire is tangible here; it drips, it coils, it snaps. I bring my fingers to my lips, tasting the residue of the soil and condensation on my tongue. I lick my fingertips where the flytrap had kissed them moments before.

I fantasize about merging with it completely: my pulse syncing with the slow, patient rhythm of the plants, our shared hunger folding into a single, living obsession. Fingers elongate into tendrils, leaves sprout from my hair. The apartment fades, the walls dissolve into soil, into air thick with chlorophyll and longing. I am both plant and person, both lover and prey. The flytrap greets me with a gentle snap, a moan pressed into the damp air. I touch it, again and again, tracing every edge, every hair, every glossy surface, and it becomes a meditation on desire. Not desire for completion, not for control, but for enmeshment: the thrill of losing oneself in another, of being consumed in a way that is dangerous, sensual, and utterly alive. I imagine our breaths mingling, my heartbeat mirrored in the plant’s slow, deliberate movements. Each snap, each shiver, each drip of nectar is a rhythm we share. Obsession is no longer a concept; it is a scent, a taste, a pulse in my veins.

When night falls, I drift to sleep with my hand brushing the soil, my ear close to the snap of the trap, and I feel myself unspooling into the garden, into the wet, green pulse that hums beneath all living things. Desire is a plant, after all. Love is sticky. Obsession is edible. And I am here to taste it all.

 

Morgan Swank is a queer, Emmy-winning television writer drawn to the strange intersections of desire, obsession, and the quietly haunted. She has written for iconic shows such as Saturday Night Live and American Horror Story, and her commercial work includes campaigns for global brands like Booking.com, Doritos, and many more. She is the author of the children’s books Mort and The Saga of Bones Ironclaw, the business book, Sell Like A (Wo)man, and a collection of Southern Gothic short fiction. Across genres, her work explores power, longing, and the beautiful absurdity of being human. When she isn’t writing for screen or page, she’s tending to a growing collection of temperamental carnivorous plants, finding inspiration in the unexpected bonds between people and the wild things they try to keep alive.