To keep an engine thrumming,
to perform the perfect cleft
how much strength, how many attempts?

      Love Poem to June After Paul Monette if every window filled with light it would refract ten thousand rainbows at least twelve would hit you and if i say you are beautiful in this light you would say this is your light the only one you want to be...

Glitch

Last night
my brain dreamt
of freshly-braided hair
mine, cocoa sipped pre-bedtime
yours, morning-wet mascara…

– Aisha Odette

(un)natural

They are unfamiliar to me.
Every sand grain,
every stone,
every leaf,
every needle,
every trunk,
every path…

– Carmilla

Trick Question

It was a simple game.
One wall meant Yes. The other meant No.
The teacher would ask a question and we’d each run towards our answer.

Once, she asked “Have you ever been in love?”
At six years old, I ran with certainty towards Yes.
I reached it but found myself alone.
Surprised, I looked over at the others
crowded together on the other side.
“Don’t you love your parents?” I asked,
with all the indignance of a child
who doesn’t understand her mistake.
“Don’t you love your friends?”

Beth Davies

Ace Sex

Sex is when a train runs into a portal
Flies off to outer space
It’s when you suddenly remember the old block tellie
With no channels
That you had to switch on at the block
Sex is
I think it’s an ice cream
One of them novelty flavours like
Popping Raspberry Unicorn
It’s a weird fad but we’re pretty sure
Salted Caramel’s making a comeback

Fee Marshall

Polyamory is wrong
(Mixing Greek and Latin roots? Wrong!)

Polyamory is less orgies, or threesomes
& more Google calendar, blocking out
precious time, increments of love
portioned out as slices of 3.14159,
infinite, neverending & always fulfilling

Fiona Broadhurst

How to Love the Word “Lesbian”

We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings,
gripped on to the cowboy hat
trying to fly from your curls in July’s breeze.
In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow
companies waltzed by & we rolled
our eyes, couldn’t see past tall men,

– Lara Mae Simpson (they/she)

On nights I am

a girl again
I am unemployable as
woman don’t do the
work beg  at corner
of ends on leg
too short for the cripwalk

-Noah Jacob

dreaming of the velvet goldmines

i want to be a skinny pretty boy rockstar
without the height or the coke habit
or needing to strictly be a boy at all

-Siobhan Dunlop (they/them)

The Conversation

It’s been quite a while now and…
You know we get on like a house…
August twelfth, a year ago, can you…
I bet you thank your lucky…
Things have evolved, haven’t…
Can you believe we’re both still …

She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.

I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words

throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me

Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.

You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,

See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks