Temporary All Accounts and Mixture Pause

October 7, 2023

Unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to run our annual All Accounts & Mixture contest this year, but we will do our best to kickstart it again with next year's editorial team. For anyone who submitted to last year's contest, please reach out to us via email (editor.cutbank@gmail.com) to get a fee waiver for any of this year's CutBank general submissions and/or our annual Big Sky, Small Prose contest.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Note to Self" by Olivia Treynor

December 10, 2021

Note to Self

By Olivia Treynor

It is noon

and the squirrels are stealing newly hatched birds

from the trees.

I don’t stop them ––

It sounds so beautiful.

I wonder what we owe each other

if not kindness.

The cats are grooming themselves again

their bodies, a perpetual project.

The noose rings on the coffee table

like so many eclipses.

My mother’s spittle

is pure every time.

I cried with her today.

She touched my back.

When I have a child

she will be born covered in blood

and I’ll think of Carrie.

Her buried magic.

The woman with wide palms

who told me not to drink seltzer

might be in the heat tonight.

She might want to cure me again

with her ceramic disks,

the cupping bruises on my back

o o o

My jewelry held

in a glass dish. My skin unperfumed.

I cried with her, too. There’s so much mess

I can’t make clean.

Also: the bird pressed against the window.

First popsicle.

Linen wrung, wringing, still wet.

Hear it?

Anyway all the lightning

looks like cobwebs.

I buy myself bread

because I am a person.

I’m allowed to drive again

but still when the plane hits turbulence

I don’t pray to anyone.

Don’t forget: Jane with the tattoo

of cow tools. Love that makes your bones black.

Don’t forget: the head of Lenin

smothered in white, facing

a land that has abolished him.

The flying objects in the sky

are still there, still flying.

So much wind from nowhere.

Don’t forget: the angel wings

obscuring death.

Olivia: Green is your color.

About the Author

Olivia Treynor is a Barnard College student from the upper half of California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Yemassee, phoebe journal, and elsewhere. She loves lakes but is scared of the ocean.

A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists

Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”

All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.

About the Photographer

Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "I ask Abuelita to tell me a story about hands" by Mercedes Lucero

December 3, 2021

I ask Abuelita to tell me a story about hands

By Mercedes Lucero

and she tells me the story of how she almost drowned. How on an early winter morning in Colorado, she missed the bus for school. Had to hop in the passenger seat of the Ford, the one her two older brothers took. Books in her lap. The eldest brother driving and another behind her in the back seat. The drive to the school is not very far, but the windshield, no matter how often they try to wipe it from the inside with the palms of their hands, becomes harder and harder to see through. Beside them, snow rests in white piles along a black road. Through the frosted windshield, Abuelita sees not the car moving along the road, but the road, moving farther and farther away. She wants to mention this to her brother, but before she can, the car, with the three of them inside, goes over the bridge and into the freezing canal below. One can almost drown like that, with rushing water moving like ice into every fissure, touching the skin like cold linen. She will wake up on wet pavement, lying on her back with her brothers beside her, the back of the car jutting up from dark water. Everyone will remark how the windows were rolled up. How the doors were sealed shut. Everyone will tell a different story about how they made it out, but the true story, she says, is the one her mother told her: The hands of angels pulled you out.

About the Author

Mercedes Lucero (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer and the author of Stereometry (Another New Calligraphy 2018). They are the winner of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Their work has been featured on The Project on the History of Black Writing and published widely including in New Orleans Review, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, Paper Darts, The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, The Pinch, and Heavy Feather Review among others. See more of her work at www.mercedeslucero.com.

About the Photographer

Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "A Little Flesh, A Little History" by Jennifer Perrine

November 26, 2021

A Little Flesh, A Little History

By Jennifer Perrine

on my first visit with my partner’s family

one uncle offers an offhand comment

noting with a wink how many girls he met

on business trips to thailand every massage

ending with a little extra for those who could pay

i can’t tell if this nostalgia

nags at him or if he’s mentioned this purely

to put me in my place i keep forgetting

i have a race but of course i learned early

on the street at the mall once in the library i

got asked while holding my white father’s hand

where we met if i was a mail order

honey a pretty young thing

brought back from the war in those small

towns where i grew into a teen i needed to do

nothing to be seen as every man’s

imported dream a spray of orchids in my hair

trill of a bamboo flute for them to follow

no matter where i went the image the soundtrack

played over me as if i were a

body in an anatomy text transparent

acetate printed tinted each layer

a gateway to shape the barest bones

into a woman’s form

nude or naked depending on who was doing the looking

all those inquisitors

got it wrong i was never anyone’s mistress or bride

if i knelt if i took the deep bow

kowtow once meant respect

if i knock my head to the ground perhaps this is reverence

or rage if i was always wise

beyond my years looked grown for my age

keep guessing my price the cost

of a country a whole continent owned and lost

About the Author

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent poems, stories, and essays appear in New Letters, The Seventh Wave Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they co-host the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach creative writing to youth and adults, and serve as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) consultant. To learn more, visit www.jenniferperrine.org.

A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists

Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”

All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Rods & Cones" by R.J. Lambert

November 19, 2021

Rods & Cones

By R.J. Lambert

Given horses, I learn to ride
from my mistakes, men spreading

in the kicks of dirt. To mount
before the others, early sun grasping

over hills. Light like a wrist, light like a rib,
light like the fresh green fingers of sod.

To shade the shed with my run,
sight blurring its all-too-quick, too-big.

To ride past those who can’t say “no”
when “yes” suffices. To find “yes”

feels quite right & lie awake inside
the dream. To think, I thought

the earth had almost broke apart.
To trust the ground is sometimes held

together by a single root of grass.

About the Author:

R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) is a queer writer, scholar, and teacher based in South Carolina. His debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He received the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and was a published finalist for competitions from Crab Creek Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Individual poems are soon to appear in New Letters, peculiar, The Worcester Review, and the anthology Without a Doubt (New York Quarterly Books). R.J. teaches science writing and health communication at the Medical University of South Carolina. Find him online at rj-lambert.com.

A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists

Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Harbingers" by CJ Scruton

November 12, 2021

Harbingers

By CJ Scruton

Once on mushrooms, I convinced everyone tripping around me
to close their eyes, for hours. As our neurons
populated the dark, I took everyone’s hands,
took the spectra of transformed light
as heralding our future, some truth
I don’t remember. This became a big joke later,
at parties, that I of all people would ensnare
those close to me, bare my horns,
my poison skin for them.

He was more bothered though,
and drove me to the river to tell me
if I ever came to lead a cult, a real one,
he’d do everything in his power to stop me. He said this
in the same voice he said he planned
to pull the pews up from the floors of every chapel in the world
by their old steelwire nails, one by one, to refashion them
into bookshelves and sell short stories and bread
from the gutted choir.

The same voice too he said
the boy he first had sex with came back
to his home years later, having lost his family,
his whole family in a car wreck, told him god had come
to show them, what they never should have done.

When I think of him now
I think of his head lowered, speaking quiet from a corner.
I think of him climbing over the boulders
on the shore, down where the breakers could touch him.

I think of the sea legends
that come to land each solstice, a prophecy, calling
that one more must go with them to their watery hell,
to return balance to the earth and waves.
I reach for their webbed hands,
so soft green and porous.

About the Author

CJ Scruton is a trans, non-binary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley. They currently live on the Great Lakes, where they teach English and research ghost stories. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, New South, The Journal, Puerto del Sol, Juked, and other publications.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Whiffs" by Michael Colbert

November 5, 2021

Whiffs

By Michael Colbert

Henry got Whiffs the summer Bacchus came to town. We were meeting for brunch to discuss our upcoming trip to Fire Island, and Whiffs made him late. Caden and Chase went looking while I held down the table. They came back with Henry, his palms to nose, and Chase ran to his tote bag to dig for Purell because don’t touch your hands like that, city germs. They found him standing outside a bakery, nostrils to the air vent, huffing bread fumes.

You must have Whiffs, I said.

It had been going around, men contracting it left and right. By the solstice, every gay club had become some olfactory orgy. It reminded Chase of his olfactophilic ex-boyfriend. Gay men sniffing–whiffing–each other with abandon.

You got it like this. During sex, if you huffed in your partner’s musk too much, then you got Whiffs. It only really worked if he didn’t wear deodorant or if you’d just had sweaty sex. Something carried in the sweat glands made you love everything you smelled from then on. Chase and Caden were serial monogamists, religious shower-takers. Henry and I were cousins. Our aunts and uncles used to laugh–what are the odds, two gay grandsons. I hadn’t been with anyone since Jared, before Whiffs opened our noses to New York in June. Jared had cried in bed when he ended things. Jared had said he needed to focus on himself, his career. I was supposed to be finding myself again, but Henry was getting around. In an MDMA haze of glitter and foam, he’d met Bacchus at the club.

It happened so fast, Henry said. He swatted away Chase’s Purell and melted into the patina of his palm. He perked up when our perfumed waitress came to talk specials.

It was heady, Henry said. Bacchus was so musky that when we got back to his place it happened almost instantly. It was the best sex I’ve ever had.

Henry said Bacchus turned everyone he slept with to the other side. Henry said Bacchus was from the 80s and loved how Whiffs augmented pleasure.

You guys have to get it, Henry said.

It became his refrain. I’d find him in our bathroom, uncapping deodorants and my forgotten date night cologne. He would bring to our apartment men from the park and fuck them in the close chamber of his closet bedroom. When I went in to ask if he wanted takeout for dinner, I nearly fainted from the smell. He stroked his sticky chest with a stoner’s satisfaction.

Henry quit his job and started working at a candle shop. He’d stand in the back, unboxing their stock. He got a raise when his manager saw how intimately he understood smellscapes. He uncapped all our spices. I thought he might snort them. Henry planted on our couch with his laptop, searching for cheap flights to smell Venice in July. He talked about how aromatic the world was and wasn’t I missing out? This was condition without consequence, the pinnacle of pleasure. I told Henry I didn’t want it. I saw how obsessed he was. Henry couldn’t watch TV without blindly rubbing Tiger Balm into the canoe of his philtrum.

Jared went to all the same clubs we did. When we used to go out together, he would spritz Bay Rum behind his ears, and I’d chomp his earlobe before we were out the door. Now, Jared would be finding himself out there, Whiffs and Bay Rum too perfectly paired. Now in the clubs, Henry catalogued every cologne–he had it in for Abercrombie. Each time Henry opened his bedroom door, I’d stagger through the haze and wonder what would happen if I stepped in.

Each time Henry left, I’d stand in the kitchen, replacing the cap on the vanilla extract, huffing to see if I could find this euphoria too.

···

Henry skipped our trip. He found a flight to Venice he couldn't pass up. Think of the airport, the airplane air. Think of the caffè, the pizzerias, the green canals. I sat in the backseat of Caden’s rented Prius when we drove out. On the ferry, gay nostrils flared. They winked at us, all buttoned up and shampooed, like we didn’t know where we were going.

We did what we’d been planning to do: cooked dinners in the rental’s modern kitchen, ate shellfish by the ocean, swam naked in the Pines. We went to the beach bar, slithering through ripe bodies, and men dragged their noses up our necks and wrapped hands over our bare stomachs. Caden and Chase found the other monogamists and that was when I found Jared, shirtless with a younger guy. He caught me looking and ran my way. His black hair held more oil, more curl. He smelled of Old Spice, clasped my hips in his hands, Hey, you.

Weeks ago, he’d gotten drunk, met Bacchus playing pool, and had been whiffing the city ever since. It put things in perspective, he said.

Our aunts and uncles used to say that, having two gay grandsons, beating the odds, beaten down by some odds, put something in perspective. They found middle-aged gay hairdressers and clothing salesmen to give us pre-approved, vanilla advice on how to be good gays.

Henry huffed our vanilla extract. Henry didn’t call home to tell about Whiffs. Henry and Jared and everyone here had something right, so maybe I should take vanilla advice and put it in a new perspective.

Everyone said Bacchus had gone to Cherry Grove for some fun with the lesbians. Everyone said I should hurry up, hurry back, get it over with already.

He was easy to find, naked, hairy, in the dunes, twinks suckling noses into each crease of his body, clawing over each other, panting saliva-stained mouths to the moon.

Henry and I would host East Village olfactory bacchanals. We’d share the scene with nobody to answer to. We’d watch our aunts and uncles furrow their brows when we nearly orgasmed on Thanksgiving, inhaling every dish at once. We’d run back out after dinner. We wouldn’t have to stay long.

About the Author

Michael Colbert is an MFA student at UNC Wilmington, where he’s working on a novel-in-stories about bisexual love, loss, and hauntings. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among others.

About the Photographer

Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "intimate abstract bound in bedsprings" and "action is everything that questions seek" by Glenn Ingersoll

November 24, 2020

intimate abstract bound in bedsprings

by Glenn Ingersoll

A few birthdays ago, the absence was complete.
The years crept in, gravid.
When you are done winding it in, wind rattles the skin.
I pulled from a purse the pearl-handled shadow.

I need the lipstick, my lips so loose.
You can slip this face off under stars.
The lemon scent of the war paint, the honeysuckle.
My flowers’ blades cut fragrant curves.

No water, please.
Ten thousand scales today, gone again.
They weigh heavy on my blue coals.
What drags me under cool lamps?

action is everything that questions seek

Let’s make something of your disease!
The chains taste sweet, like toasted apple.
I smell regrets the wind will never stir.
Jail is a perfectly natural automatic clock.

The east used to be to the left.
Find it at the end of the passage to the left.
One door remained in an extra orientation.
Ridges are to be expected, gathered as clouds.

The rope bridge groans under eight elephants.
Rain trails the mountain’s sheerer face.
The latter number was a younger number.
A dramatic entrance was omitted, then moved further in.

About the Author:

Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California where, until the Covid-19 shutdown, he hosted Clearly Meant, a reading & interview series. His first book, the multi-volume prose poem epic Thousand (Mel C Thompson Publishing), came out in 2019. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Recent work has appeared in The Collidescope, Sheila-Na-Gig, and bottle rockets.

About All Accounts:

All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Last Calls" by Flint

November 19, 2020

Last Calls

by Flint

*In order to maintain formatting integrity, this piece is best read on computer, tablet or with your phone turned to widescreen.

Last Call: I

I was in a bathroom stall in another bar, all fingers and tongues and parted lips when the first
bullet flew from the mouth of the gun, just another high, hot note in the mix the DJ was spinning.

I wasn’t there for one more drink, one more dance, one last chance to grind, all hips and ass
and heat and Everybody put your hands in the air and say HEY! I wasn’t one more body in the
sweat and throb and now-or-never-ness of last call at 2am, when shots still meant 2oz of
something sweet and sticky in a little plastic cup.

Your bodies broke open in blood
and screams, and we
came, and went,
without exchanging numbers
or names.

6.12.16
2:02 – 5:14
603 (911 calls)
204 (rounds of ammo)
49 slaughtered on the dance floor, in bathroom stalls

6.13.16
1:13
1 more death
1 less vote for Trump

23 (hours), 11 (minutes)

Care & Taking

I don’t understand how we got here.

You who married my mother, beautiful broken bird,
your graceless body rising over her in your marriage
bed like you were mantling over a kill.

You who rose again in Jesus Christ, faith-fired and reeking of brimstone.

You who struck my queer cheek before I could turn, the other, that little asshole.

You who found my wife’s name, all three syllables, impossible
to pronounce, and rendered my marriage unspeakable.

You, who have fallen again, again.
To your knees.
Elbow to credenza.
Hip to cold tile floor.
Forehead to the ground,
Qibla-ward, like a Muslim
in prayer.

You with the breathing treatments and knobby spine, your
waterlogged legs leaking and scaling salt, your testicles swollen
to the size of a blue-ribbon steer, your penis slack in the mouth of a plastic urinal
filling with piss dark and thick as local honey, and the hand sanitizer you never remember
to use.

You: Mr. Life Insurance; Mr. Financial Planner; Mr. Million Dollar Roundtable.

You spent my mother’s inheritance, and my sister’s, and mine, you
asshole, you let your life insurance lapse and plan to death-lift up, up,
up and leave your wife of thirty-three years your Social Security benefit
breadcrumbs, a reverse mortgage you’ve sucked bone dry, $33,000 in debt
you’ve wracked up by opening credit cards in her name, and a plastic pot to piss in, your bread-
winning masculinity the shell game I’ve suspected all along.

I don’t understand why I’m taking care of you.

I’d kill you with a bullet or a banana milkshake or my own bare hands if I thought I could
get away with it.

Instead: I know every MD and RN and LNP and CNA and caseworker and social worker
and administrator by name. At the hospital. The nursing home. The unmannerly
Hampton Manor. Home healthcare. Hospice. I have their numbers in my phone.

I know your treatment schedule and your ever-changing medications, your heart
rate and pulse, your urine output, your hematocrit and hemoglobin and ejection
fraction ratio, the number of liters of fluid drained from between your thoracic
cavity and chest wall to make space for the weak bellows of your lungs and
your heart’s many failings.

I know when to smile or shriek or shed a tear to get you everything you need,
STAT.

I raise the alarm when we find you in the dining room, finger painting your
freshly-Cloroxed shirt, happy and bleeding, your friable skin torn, your Crocs
filling, filling, spilling red, your body not quite caught up to the fact that your
doctors had discontinued all blood thinners 36 hours ago.

I cook and shop and pay the bills and sort through the wreckage of your financial
life with my sister because you can’t do it, and our mother doesn’t know how.

I pack you lunches and snacks when you won’t eat anything on your tray, and
your cheeks hollow and hip bones jut like a supermodel’s.

Your mail-in ballot arrives along with the get-well cards and cash advance offers,
and it’s only the last that I toss in the trash, because being a right wing asshole
doesn’t trump your right to vote.

A million times a day I make my mouth shape the three intolerable syllables that
make the words my father because nobody—and I mean nobody—hops to it
when it is a stepdaughter hollering for help.

In gratitude: You allow your blood daughter, dark sister of mine, to siren song you into formally
accusing me of elder exploitation one week after she learns you won’t be leaving
her a pittance or a pot to piss in, and one day before she waltzes into your home,
my mother’s home, and walks out with your father’s Liberace-ugly double-
diamond ring—the one he gave you on his deathbed—and your wife’s diamond-
dusted gold cross—the one you gave her on your honeymoon—and left the safe
in the guestroom closet, my closet, empty as a sinkhole.

Last Call: 2

Before my mother puts the phone up to your ear, she jokes about your teeth. Year by year, night
after night, you’ve ground them down to cratered nubs, and Goodness, it’s a good thing he lost
his appetite when he did.

She’s certain that the moment heaven’s gates swing wide, the Good Lord will reward you with a
whole new mouthful, pearly white and orderly as a freshly-painted picket fence. (I’m equally
certain that God knows nobody wants to look at that gaping grey-gummed maw for all of
eternity.)

You haven’t spoken for hours, and nobody knows what you can hear, or understand. I’m
tempted to send you into the afterlife or the underworld or that cleansing crematory fire with my
litany of disappointment and rage knocking around your skull, but my queer brethren were
massacred this morning

—49 beautiful souls untethered without warning—

and if you haven’t already figured out that you were a waste of Christ’s time on the cross, there’s
no point in telling you now.

Instead, my gratitude tumbles through the ether into the hollowed shell of your ear:

Thank you for your vile accusations.

Thank you for sending me scurrying back to L.A.

I bet you don’t know my escape hatch is just an hour’s drive from where you lay dying:
Orlando, where my best friend lived; Orlando, with its queer clubs; Orlando, where I can
be among my people, safe, and seen.

If you hadn’t been so hateful, and I’d stayed and stuck it out in sticky Central Florida, I
might have been in Orlando last night, pulse rising as I danced the night away, away
from you, and back into my self.

So, thank you. You may have saved my life.

Also: Mom threw out your mail-in ballot because CNN told her it’s illegal for dead men to vote.

Then I say:

Go ahead, let go and die, it’s okay, it’s time, we’ll take care of Mom, go ahead, my

people are already there, and they are beautiful and whole, femurs

unshattered, organs plump, blood singing in their unbroken skin.

So go on now and go, go ahead,

show them your teeth.

Lives & Deaths

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21
Eddie Sotomayor, Jr., 34
Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50
Stanley Almodovar III, 23
Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35
Javier Jorge Reyes, 40
Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33
Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20
Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22
Luis Sergio Vielma, 22
Kimberly Jean Morris, 37
Eddie Jamol Droy Justice, 30
Darryl Roman Burt II, 29
Deonka “Dee Dee” Drayton, 32
Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25
Jean C. Mendez Perez, 35
Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37
Amanda L. Alvear, 25
Martin Benitez Torres, 33
Jerry Wright, 31
Cory James Connell, 21
Brenda Marquez McCool, 49
Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32
Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33
Luis D. Conde, 39
Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25
Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19
Frank Hernandez, 27
Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26
Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25
Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31
Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26
Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25
Miguel Angel Honorato, 30
Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37
Juan Chavez Martinez, 25
Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25
Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24
Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24
Paul Terrell Henry, 41
Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32
Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27
Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24
Angel Candelario-Padro, 28
Antonio “Tony” Brown, 29
Gerardo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25
Akyra Monet Murray, 18
C. Ronald Slaughter, 82

Last Call: 3

After the downpour, a double rainbow arcs the sky and frames an enormous billboard with a
rainbow ribbon and just two words: Orlando United.

This show of solidarity is unprecedented.

My people were shot down where they danced and drank and laughed and loved, shot down
where they stood, where they hid, where they ran for their lives—killed for nothing more than
being in the wrong queer place at the wrong queer time—and a city of non-queer folks are
rallying on behalf of our dead, and our living.

A rush of gratitude and sorrow nearly crushes my heart.

We know acceptance, of course, and of course, deep love, from someone, somewhere.

And we know how it feels to be on the fist side of homophobia and hatred.

We know the story history has told of our pathology and sin and aberrant practices.

And we know our history, our herstory, our queer and storied past.

We know the laws that have been enacted and enforced to strip us of our rights, and we protest
and march and Act Up to undo that damage and reclaim our dignity.

We are your daughters and sons and trans*kids, offspring sprung from your (most oft’) hetero
loins, and we know you mean well, we do.

And we know it took this many of us to die—at one time, in one place—for you to take
this kind of a stand.

Tonight marks one week since the massacre, and two days before my stepfather’s celebration
of life ceremony, and I am meeting my best friend at the Parliament House, our favorite dance-
hall-&-drag-queens haunt in Orlando, to celebrate other lives and mourn too many deaths.

The P-House is practically a ghost town—a ghost town with on-site trauma counseling and a
weapons check in exchange for a rainbowed wristband that reads:

WE STAND WITH PULSE
#onepulse #orlandostrong
www.gofundme.com/pulsevictimsfund

The dance floor is empty and I am dizzy with fear.

I locate all the exit signs, plot the quickest way out, decide where to hide if I can’t run.

It’s 2am. Last call. The DJ spins it out.

You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.

It’s a remembrance, a reminder, and Sia’s voice takes me apart at the seams.

I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive

It’s 2:02am, and I’m alive.

It’s 2:03am, and I am breathing, still.

It’s 2:04am.

I step into the light,

polish the floor with my tears, and dance

like my life depends on it.

About the Author:

Flint is a queer writer with an abiding interest in hybridity, generative genre tampering and upsetting the applecart of heteronormative discourse about sex/uality. She earned an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, and her work has appeared in Erotic Review, Arts & Letters (Unclassifiable Contest winner), NAILED Magazine, and Staging Social Justice (Southern Illinois University Press), among other publications and anthologies. Sia - "Alive"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2NgsJrrAyM

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "An Ode to My Latino Bum" by Gastón Tourn

November 17, 2020

An Ode to My Latino Bum

by Gastón Tourn

you told me – you’re too skinny

you told me – that can’t be your bum

I replied with my skin

I replied – these hips don’t lie

you had a point

when you said

your hips don’t shout

I had a point

when I said

your ass is so shy

and don’t start with

Shakira, Beyoncé

not even Ricky Martin

you aren’t cool when you say

my latino bum isn’t on TV

my latino bum doesn’t need prime time

it speaks in tan

it tells you

what you can’t have

About the Author:

Gastón Tourn was born in Patagonia, Argentina. He has published short fiction and poetry, and completed a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. He writes and thinks dans tres languages.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Three Loves," "Pulse," and "Gay New York" by Walter Holland

November 12, 2020

Three Loves

by Walter Holland

By the lamp he lay, all day nailing up boards
and tearing down the past, shirt off, rough

work gloves. Slick sweat, older than me,
a Vietnam Vet. He took me in, rented me

a bedroom, a sealed-off antebellum chimney
filled with bats. Every morning, Chris, I’d

watch the Blue Ridge Mountains through
the cold window, autumn hawks circling sky.

You lay there half drowsy in sleep, although
you knew I’d show up sooner or later. I know

you didn’t want love but knew the loneliness
of my body. How for years I’d recklessly

resisted that kind of sex for sex. But you’d hustled
out west, doing johns for pocket change. I left

you in August. And when the house
was finished, you’d found a young boy, a local kid

with blonde hair who’d share your fetish for antiques.
By winter you were dead from AIDS. Then Stan who worked

the late shift, slept all morning till noon—I met him
in a laundromat. Southern women pouring Tide,

idly reading magazines, but side by side we locked
eyes. I was struck by your face, the tight jeans, thighs;

the tee shirt slightly torn, the stubble on your face,
the lankiness in how you’d move, bend to take out

clothes. So quickly did I know that I’d ignite, hunger
take over. In your car I sat and moved my hand

into your underwear, your skin so pale and fine,
a boy’s hairless behind. We drove off to your

townhouse. I stayed all afternoon. Your body
I consumed, wrestled, bit, slapped and licked;

I lost myself inside the very thick of you. I lay there
heavy, drained of thought. I came to see you

every day. Pinned you down every night. Did things
I’d never done. Laughed at how crazed I was,

rough, and not myself. But then I knew I had to choose,
move away or stay, go back north and make a life,

or keep your ruddiness in my arms. This was why I failed
to ever give you back your keys. Did you die?

I never knew. No trace. Another person gone. And then
came Donnie staring at me with deer fawning eyes.

A flash of adoration. His anxiousness and nervousness
almost every time I came into the post office. A clerk

who day by day stamped mail, at night drank fine
wines, played records listening to jazz as he lit

candles about the room, old books beside his bed.
Sweet and stranded in the town. Lovelorn for a straight

boy, who came for dinner, hung around,
made jokes and lingered late. So Donnie clung to me

for something he could never have, every night drunk,
needing to express his emptiness, muttering till he fell asleep.

A good-old boy who’d sink into his sullenness
and lonely silence, unsteady, staggering and crying.

How I lost my way into this drama, lured in by sad
complexity, to rescue him from being so paralyzed

by someone so young, confused, and amused by
the power of passion, to be desired so deeply

and use it as control. I wanted him to tell me what
to do, to choose a life at home or suffer on alone, go

off to a city ruined by plague. Three loves. Three
thoughts of old want—touch, closeness, and death.

Pulse

(In Memoriam, Pulse nightclub massacre, June 12, 2016)

Violence is subsumed in more violence now
until violence becomes the leveling measure, a growing number

within a number, a stat within a larger stat, and we will focus
momentarily on coffins stacked in the ground or on open

coffins and lines of mourners among lines of mourners,
as mourning becomes our national pastime, a ritual through

repetition and we become better at it, better at sedating rage,
softening the blow with prayer, as prayer becomes the fullest

solution to loss and customary, fleet condolence. Small orange cones
mark the locations of shooters, the angles, the places where the shells

fell or the weapons dropped or the clips were emptied. Vectors
and trajectories have become our obsession, from what perspective

or point of view, how acute the angle, how acute the intent,
was the act pre-meditated? Factual detailing has become

an expensive military science, charted diagrams, iPhone videos, memes
or texts, sent in haste, the twitters of goodbye, jottings in blood on

loose leaf paper, recording and recording and recording until violence
becomes a pixel, a blur, a degree of lighting, a bathroom stall, a dark closet,

an opened window, a school desk overturned. But where are they now?
The dancers of night, their glittery outfits, their frozen drinks, pulse of movement,

jumps, hugs of silly laughter? Smell of cologne and whispers of timid friendship,
Black and Brown bodies and White, that paradise that feels right, queer and young

and wanting, moving with the fling of arms in close emotions uncontrolled.
In the violent violence we attempt to live, but over and over and over and over

we are told to forgive. Perished in the whirl of colors, the shine of mirrors
and bottles and foil; they wanted only the imaginary: a place to dance and love.

Gay New York

Now Cis, he, his, him, I live married, streaming opera or watching
on my iPad the archive at the Philharmonic. Reading Rimbaud and Jericho

Brown and listening to a podcast of queer emerging poets alone.
Looking at the shut city in the throes of change. Town of

long history, I must let you go. In your strange perversity, racist and
false. But let me let you know how I was drawn to your fey show,

your circle of privilege on-the-go and laughter for those who could
afford the fizziness and foppery, the preening and the diva-doting,

the top hats, the glam and glow. Kiss, kiss, but not tell. Ivy League dissemblers of
dissemblance, but that was how we got by, playing Jekyll, playing Hyde, on the brink

of suicide. Once I saw this city silver under glass. Once I danced all-night
and slept away the days. I dreamed I was O’Hara rushing off to lunch

passing down a midtown street, notebook in hand, savvy, cultured, smart—
dashing off to Penn Station to make another party date in the Hamptons;

or pick a young trick—misfit on a mission to smoke and down martinis
as I talked late into the night—young, “pretentious,” “promiscuous”—

but who cared! At night in Bryant Park in the seedy shadows, cruising in the men’s room
feeling up some business man dressed in pricey gabardine. Quelle langueur! to sit

in my silk robe and listen to records of Rubenstein and Lady Day while sipping
on espressos. But that was long-ago. White and silly and coked, I did not see,

the cruelty of inequity, the way I played and played at this glitter-glittery
hypocrisy, effete then elite to effete, complicit in the legacy of supremacy.

About the Author:

Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011). His short stories have been published in Art and Understanding, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and Rebel Yell. Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Art and Understanding, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cimarron Review, The Cream City Review, Found Object, Pegasus, and Phoebe. He lives in New York City.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Things Are Looking Up" and "Care and Feeding" by Jennifer Perrine

November 10, 2020

Things Are Looking Up

says the evening news anchor, and so I do—look up—
at the robin’s egg blue of the ceiling. I gaze
at the constellation of recessed lights that flicker
when the heater cycles on and off, follow each
crease of the hawk and trowel plaster. What previous
owner smoothed and sharpened this expanse? Who chose this
color to hover above the green grass cabinets?
Were you the same one who set the hilt of a fern
in the sunniest spot on this plot, to brown despite
my best attempts? Even now, it unfurls new fronds
that tap at the glass where I press my palm flat to match
all those hands mapped in ochre on the walls of caves
in Argentina, Indonesia, Spain, before land
had those names. Still, we live tucked away, gods of small
underworlds, chambers made by labor to conceal us
as we build lives in our kitchens, on our couches,
awake in our beds, passing time like Persephone
mining in the dark her secret treasure: the spark
of recalling her pleasure from looking at the sky.
—with gratitude to and a phrase pilfered from Walt Whitman

Care and Feeding

The leech clung to your thigh as you rose from the lake. I plucked it away,
placed a kiss upon the wound so I could taste what it had tasted.
I wanted the rusted metal of your blood on my tongue. We did not fear

disease—or not enough. We met in parking lots, got naked in beds
of pickup trucks, in parks by the river’s edge. We did not know how
to be birds after so much human handling. We were nearly featherless.

If we fell from some nest, we fashioned new ones from undone strings, from loosed
buttons. Unfinished in our summer skins, dusted in gold pollen,
I clasped my lips to hipbone, to nipple. I have this tenderness I’ve kept

in my pocket, worn smooth as a coin beneath my thumb’s mindless caress.
On sunny days, I bring it out to glint at the robins singing
cheer up from their trees. Your broad back under thin cloth. The ease of your bare chest

amid a sea of wild bee balm. My fickle and liquid flit. Salt kick.
Soft down of your coverts under my palms. The fold and spread of wings
in each field we could find. Your mouth open, upturned, waiting to feed on mine.

About the Author:

Jennifer Perrine is the award-winning author of four poetry books: Again, In the Human Zoo, The Body Is No Machine, and No Confession, No Mass. Jennifer serves as an editor for Airlie Press and a guest editor for Broadsided Press, co-hosts the Incite Queer Writers reading series, and hosts The Occasion, a poetry radio show on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. When not writing, Jennifer leads workshops on creative writing, social justice, and intersectional equity. Read more at www.jenniferperrine.org.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Cant" by Robert Américo Esnard

November 5, 2020

Cant

by Robert Américo Esnard

It was in the way you looked at me−stuck,
eyes soft, gaze firm−that I first knew.
I cannot remember what you said,
but I followed you, wherever we went.

Eyes soft. Gaze firm. That I first knew
this was a secret, was a portent,
but I followed you, wherever we went
looking for that same stare I'd met.

This was a secret; was a portent
of all the wrong kinds of love I'd go
looking for. That same stare I'd meet.
Me a broken cipher in the mouths of men

of all the wrong kinds of love. I'd go,
but I am stuck. The way you looked at me
a broken cipher. Me in the mouths of men.
I said what you cannot remember.

About the Author:

Robert Américo Esnard was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. He studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College. His work has been published by Glass, Alternating Current Press / The Coil, Lunch Ticket, and several anthologies. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "On Botticelli's Primavera" by Zach Semel

November 3, 2020

On Botticelli’s Primavera

by Zach Semel

Rules for boyhood

Be naked
but only in the right ways.
Streak & skinny-dip
but don’t make eye contact.
In fact, never make eye contact
without a diplomat’s stiff

nod, like
reluctant husbands stuck
together on a double date;
deny that we are all artifacts
of closeness: nothing but knots
of cooperating veins.

Tell no one that you know
there are 500 plant species in Primavera
or that you want to study them all:
to memorize the delicate scrawl on ivy leaves,
then hug the trunks they wrap around—please,
find a way to accept that love

has limits.
Be thankful for being
unnoticed—
the pluckable root,
the scavenger’s snack
do not survive.

When spring comes,
adapt—trade
your sweatpants
for baggy shorts; if
you bought a sundress,
let it age into wrinkles while

you tell yourself, “It’s okay,
the florals will always be
this vibrant,” even
Flora would’ve known
better than to look
like a woman

if she weren’t one.

Nature is full
of contradictions, so be sure
that when the wind blows,
it whistles through you
most loudly, contort yourself
to be heard, color yourself

in toxic shades, remember:

the plant is a self-serving thing
and the forest is crowded—
learn quickly that a mere flimsy
flower cannot dig out a tree’s
deep roots, can only stay close
or lean away

and adjust
to living without hungering
for light, seeing the stars
appear, like pollen
floating down from branches—
god, you will wish someone told you

what you really needed.

Someday, when you step off a sidewalk curb
to leave room for cis-boys slurring
and brawling, watch, and see nothing
but a tangled pair of stems in a canopy’s
darkness, vying for a slightly longer
lick of sun

and know that you deserve better.

About the Author:

Zach is an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Northern Arizona University. He is an avid Celtics fan, a wannabe psychoanalyst, and a lover of all things garlicky. Some of his other work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown, Breath & Shadow,Wordgathering, Read650 Jew-ish, and other places.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "language acquisition" by Noah Oakley

November 26, 2019

language acquisition

By Noah Oakley

i remember childhood store struck wonder,
running fresh hands over shiny, coveted treasure, candy
sweet from the first look, small soon to be forgottens—

adults would say
only one small thing baby
never
whatever you want

i traced this elementary language of limiting desire with my fingers over
and over again,

the way it curves
it lurches

it’s best to learn a language young, they say—
that it becomes harder & harder for your mouth
to form new sounds.

i remember cravings turned towards new diction,
the need to run my thumb over the unnamed,
to know the shapes lips like mine can make.

how do i speak words i thought were silence?

a secret code only caught blanket muffled
in the dead of night,

something inside me waiting
to be touched

About the Author:

Noah Oakley is a young queer writer living in Tampa Bay. They hold a BA in English from the University of Tampa. When not writing, Noah can be found connecting others to cultural experiences in the Bay and enjoying the crazy world of Florida. Noah is a previously unpublished author. You can follow their writing journey on most social media @kno_wa.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "The Difference Between Bad Sex and Rape" by Samantha May

November 25, 2019

The Difference Between Bad Sex and Rape

By Samantha May

For Bean, who lives in sunshine and the smell of outdoor things.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that you don’t remember the details of the day you had bad sex fourteen years later.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that fourteen years later, you don’t still get angry about bad sex.

Years after bad sex, you can forget the person even existed until some random conversation with an old friend when you laugh and say, “Ohhh, that guy! I forgot he even existed.”

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that the memory of bad sex doesn’t make your stomach twist.

Your stomach doesn’t twist remembering the oppressive wet heat of the subway station at 3 a.m. that night in July, waiting to take the train back with him to Hoboken from the rooftop party in New York City that made you feel fancy (but only when you focused on the idea of it and shut out the loneliness, the self-consciousness, the scornful sidelong glances of everybody who seemed to be faulting the 20-year old girl for being there, and not the 30-year old man who brought her.)

Wasn’t it just bad sex? Women make mistakes. We do things we regret, and that’s how we learn to be smarter, less naive, more careful, avoid those situations. Should’ve known better.

The glittering allure of a casually sophisticated Manhattan weekend. Ignore that sinking feeling as you try to find street parking in the shitty little suburb of New Jersey (this is not New York City). Ignore the desire to walk back out the door as he kisses you hello (this is not comfortable). Ignore the filth in the corners of the shower as you wash off the anxious sweat of the six-hour drive (this is not the grown-up apartment you imagined), ignore anything that suggests perhaps this was a mistake. Ignore the yearning to turn right around and drive home because it’s too late, you’re too tired, and, after all, he’s the best friend of your best friend’s new husband, he’s from Spain, it’s all very sophisticated (quit being a baby.) Don’t act like a stupid 20-year old girl, he’s a 30-year old man and you already slept with him once before. It’s fine, it’ll be fun, you’re just tired.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that you don’t have to convince yourself it’s fine.

Inside, you’re already saying no I don’t want this when you get on the train to go across the river into the city; you’re saying no I don’t want this as you pass the bags of garbage spilling onto the sidewalk; you’re saying no I don’t want this to his hand on the small of your back leading you through the dismissive looks of other murmuring 30-year olds. Inside, you’re already narrating the night to drown out the no:

You took a weekend trip to New York to see this hot guy, he’s 30 and European, you met at a wedding a few months before, he was a groomsman and you were a bridesmaid, isn’t that funny? He took you to a rooftop party in the city, the view was amazing, there were strings of lights and potted trees and these huge gorgeous flowers and you felt so small and alone when you went inside to hide in the bathroom and wait no don’t tell that part.

Even before you leave the party, you’re thinking how much you don’t want to have sex. You feel so tired and small and alone; it‘s so late and you feel so far away. And you still have to take the train back across the river back to New Jersey, back to the tiny apartment with soccer pennants on the walls and filth in the corners of the shower. (This is not how it feels to be sophisticated. This is how it feels to be young and clumsy and achingly naive.) You stare some more at the lights and the potted trees and the funny thing is, later, the one detail you can’t remember is whether or not the roof actually had a view of the city. Isn’t that funny?

Even late at night in July, underground subway stations in New York have this thick wet blanket of heat. Oppressive, pressing in at you. Like a steam room or a sauna but with less health benefits and more stench of garbage, flickers of rats darting through shadows, men slouching in corners. Since that night, you’ve never felt the weight of that airless heat without getting dizzy and nauseous. You’ve ridden trains late at night in DC, Boston, London, but New York subway stations make you want to throw up after 10 p.m..

You lean against a warm metal pole for close to an hour, waiting for the train. You pretend to fall asleep on the train ride home. Even though it’s nearly 4 a.m. and you drove six hours and had two, maybe three drinks at a party where nobody spoke to you, even though your body feels like it’s sinking into an abyss of fatigue, you never quite slip over the edge into sleep because you’re too aware that he’s expecting to fuck you. You pretend to be sleeping the whole way; you pretend not to notice him trying to kiss you. You nestle into his arm, hoping this will endear you to him, that he will take the hint, that he will let your tired body just rest in his small dank bedroom that is somehow both blank and messy.

Oh, child.

You never really believed it would work.

You’re lying facedown on the bed the whole time.

The bottom sheet is dark brown. There is one pillow and two cheap throw blankets, neither big enough to cover your body. Everything about this bed leaves you exposed.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that you don’t remember the color of the sheets.

You lie facedown after getting back to the apartment. You don’t move. You pretend to be asleep. It’s past 4, nearly 5 a.m. He nuzzles your ear, undresses you just enough for what he wants. You don’t move or moan or make a sound and he doesn’t miss a stroke, doesn’t even pause when he asks if you’re awake. You mumble something into the mattress. Years later, you realize your answer was irrelevant.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that he doesn’t care whether you’re awake.

It’s not rape, that’s ridiculous. It’s a sophisticated weekend trip to NYC to see this sexy older man, European, the best friend of your best friend’s new husband. Remember how dazzled you felt when he chose you that night of the wedding – peeling off the suit he looked so handsome in, lifting the skirts you ran laughing in, down the hill of the golf course to kiss in the grass, half-empty glass of chardonnay splashing your hand. This isn’t rape, it’s a STORY, a laugh, an adventure, a sexy sophisticated weekend fling.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that you make up a different story.

The truth is that you regretted the whole thing as soon as you got there, even before you left for the party in the city. The truth is you don’t want to be there. The truth is you don’t want to be having sex and you hoped he’d get the hint because you‘re reliant on his good graces, good mood, hospitality, and he’s 30 and you’re 20 and you’re six hours from home and it’s nearly 5 a.m. and you’ve already had sex once before, and once you’ve already done it there’s no going back, right? And the truth is you have nowhere to go.

So you pretend to be asleep. You don’t say no. You don’t say anything. You lie facedown and you don’t move. He doesn’t take the hint.

Inside, you’re already numb, your face scraping against the mattress; you mumble a reply when he asks if you’re awake. He doesn’t so much as pause. He doesn’t stop. It starts to hurt. He doesn’t notice or maybe doesn’t care – does it matter? He complains you‘re “like a dead fish,” that you were “much more fun last time.” He doesn’t use a condom.

Maybe the difference between bad sex and rape is that you keep the details a secret. From yourself, from everybody.

Later, you start avoiding your best friend when she asks why you aren’t returning his calls, when she tells you he keeps asking about you, tells you how much he likes you. She lives in a different state anyway and now she’s married and you’d been drifting apart already and you always tell yourself that’s why the friendship fades away.

A few days later, you’re in the ER with a UTI because it’s 8:00 at night and it hurts so much it’s making your eyes water but Planned Parenthood is closed by then and 20-year olds don’t have a primary care or a gynecologist. So that’s where you go because you don’t know what else to do. You’re sitting there waiting in the Emergency Room and reruns of a game show are on TV and you’re seething. You’re fucking seething with rage that this dirty dirty motherfucker gave you an infection, just to add insult to (unnamed) injury. You are hot with anger, fighting hot angry tears. Anger at him, anger at the UTI, hot anger at yourself for being so stupid, for being so naive, so fucking angry and small and alone and dizzy with the airless heat. The anger comes flooding back every time you look at the medical bills you get in the mail from having to go to the fucking ER because you’re a stupid 20-year old girl who doesn’t even have a doctor, a stupid 20-year old girl who should’ve known better.

For months, the bills keep arriving with grim regularity. You shove them aside, shove your anger aside, ignore that sinking feeling, ignore all of it, ignore it all. You don’t start paying the bills until they stop arriving and you start getting phone calls from a collection agency.

It takes seven years for the delinquent charges to stop damaging your credit.

It takes fourteen years to start asking yourself, was it bad sex or rape?

About the Author:

Samantha May is a writer, educator, and queer person based in California. Her work has been selected for inclusion in the annual Harvard 'ALANA Anthology' and the 'Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans.' She refuses to protect the guilty.

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Golconda Fort" by Rebecca Ruth Gould

November 22, 2019

Golconda Fort

By Rebecca Ruth Gould

The night show begins.
You pass me the mosquito repellent.
Yellow phosphorescence bathes the ruins bright.

Plaintive moans lament
Aurangzaeb’s attack.
The ancient fortress crumbles.

A doting husband photographs
his pregnant wife
covered in a saffron hijab.

I mention I am unmarried,
& your hands squirm over my breasts,
plundering my body.

You thought being single
made me your prized possession.
In fact the opposite is true:

the less tied I am to a man
the less point there is
in having sex with you.

About the Author:

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (Yale University Press). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and for Lunch Ticket's Gabo Prize (2017).

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ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Brunch" by Eric Van Hoose

November 21, 2019

Brunch

By Eric Van Hoose

We were seated on the patio under a vine-wrapped trellis. The trellis and the vines and the mesh grating of our table formed on the patio's brick a pattern of shadows so elaborate I could not look at it.

An orange cat rubbed itself along my left leg.

“Brunch cat,” I said. “You brunch cat. Little thing.” I wanted to bend, to pet it, but could not move; I was held in place by the edge of my headache.

"Might rain," Jay said.

Jarred got up and walked inside.

“Okay. Did anybody notice that Jarred brought his dick to brunch?” Roger asked. He sipped his ice water using two fingers to hold his straw. His hand trembled.

Under the table, which was two tables pushed together, I found my shoes. The left had a black mark on the white rubber heel.

“I mean, those jeans.” Roger looked into the distance.

We looked at the menus, used them to block the sun. We wore sunglasses.

Roger said, “Oh my god, you guys,” and pointed at the corner by the fence where a fern had begun to slink across the ground for light.

I leaned further back and tried to focus on my headache, to see what he meant.

A server appeared on my left and said “Mimosas.” She looked at the flutes, which glinted in the sun and shadow, perched on the tray, like she was hearing them speak. She made a lap around the table, depositing the flutes one by one, four of them, making a show.

“Oh, sweetie,” Roger said. He was talking to her, but I didn't know why. He touched her arm, and she pulled it away.

The drink charred a penny-sized sore on my tongue, became an affirming burn in my stomach. I had grown into my headache, learned to use it, to move along its rim.

A man with a very short haircut walked past the table, and Roger and Reggie noticed him, then looked at each other.

Our server came to introduce another server who would be taking over for her.

Roger looked at his watch; his hand trembled like a car about to stall.

“Trying to leave your shift right on time,” Roger said. And then he said, “I’m with you, girl.” His wrist hung loose, and his voice broke into a squeal.

Reggie smiled in silence. I adjusted myself in my seat, careful not to upset the cat.

It was noon.

“You troll,” she said.

Evan, the new server, said, “You’re in good hands, guys.”

And Roger said, “Oh, I bet we are,” then looked at Evan, regarded him, and said, "Well, Evan," as if remarking on an important discovery.

Evan took our orders. I asked for biscuits and gravy, which at this restaurant were oversized and creamy in a way I had to prepare for. They were garnished with parsley, which I would pick off.

To steel myself, I moved my chair back. The cat ran away, around the corner, and I felt as if I'd suffered a loss. I had to leave.

I walked up the patio steps and entered the dim interior. Inside was cooler. The change in temperature widened the ambit of my headache. The bartender faced the television, where a basketball game was on. I saw only the number seven on the back of his jersey, which matched the red of the jerseys on screen. Someone said “No” with calmness and patience. I walked past a hand-drawn sign that said Bloody Marys for Fairies and depicted an enlarged, shining martini glass with a martini spear on which a woman and tomato had been impaled.

I pushed open the door to the men's room and stood inside, hearing its vibrating silence and seeing myself in the mirror. As I washed my hands, I thought I heard light weeping inside one of the stalls.

“Jarred?” I said the word to hear myself say it and to know if he would hear it. “Jarred?” I said, barely louder, but there was only silence, and I did not want to say it again.

I returned to find the orange cat curled beneath my seat, licking its side, looking comfortable, and I was so happy that the cat was there, that it had returned, that I focused on withholding tears. I tried to re-take my seat without moving the seat itself, without disturbing the cat.

Reggie said, “What are you doing?”

“Sitting,” I said.

The cat uncoiled and ran, and I watched it round the corner, disappear behind the fern.

To everyone, Roger continued: “Yeah, they found him the next morning.”

I leaned forward, to show interest, and said, “Who?”

“That guy, the one from Marketplace,” Roger said.

“Which one?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you know him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

I wanted fur against my shin, but there was only air. I knew the cat would not come back.

The sun moved from behind a cloud and heated my skin. Then another cloud floated into place and I slipped into the dimness.

Sirens blatted.

“Sirens,” Reggie said.

I hadn’t eaten any of my biscuits and gravy. I didn’t notice the server had brought them. I began plucking the parsley out of the gravy with my fork, a process on which I might spend minutes.

My empty flute incased sugar and pulp. I became aware of the mild carnage inside it and had a vision of gore: a man tied to a stool, a drill on the topsides of his feet. Talk, a voice said. Talk.

“They’re totally coming here,” Roger said.

It began to drizzle, and my awareness of the patio widened to include parts—it was sprawling—which I had not noticed. Fifty or seventy people, all eating. By the fern, which looked so healthy, a small, black speaker: A singer's voice: Only you.

Everyone was included in the threat of full rain and the sirens, which, through their power, softened my headache.

“Hot,” Reggie said. The sirens stopped just beyond the fence.

Four EMTs carrying an empty stretcher entered through a side gate I had not known was there.

Someone at a neighboring table said, “There's an emergency.”

The EMTs rolled the stretcher inside. I had collected the gravy-wet parsley on an unused saucer. I added the final piece to the center and began forking the rest into a pattern.

Roger said, “So, so, so.”

When the EMTs returned, the stretcher held a person, swaddled, being jostled as the wheels wobbled over the brick.

“Where is Jarred?” Reggie said. “Jarred?” He was close to whispering.

Everyone watched. Strangers looked at each other across the open space.

"You guys," Roger said. “Stop it. You know he disappears sometimes.”

I couldn’t see the person on the stretcher, and I didn’t want to look. I watched Roger looking on, following carefully, chewing. They went out the same way they’d come in, and the sirens started back up, so I squinted to dull the sound. To focus on it, to hold it away.

About the Author":

Eric Van Hoose's fiction has appeared in Bluestem, Sycamore Review, Bat City Review, Fiddleblack, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His essays have appeared in Salon, The Black Scholar, and Full Stop Quarterly. He’s pursuing a PhD in the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program for fiction, where he's an editorial assistant at the Cincinnati Review.

About All Accounts:

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "Lesbian Desire," "Night Is This Anyway," and "Family of Begin Again" by Robin Reagler

November 20, 2019

By Robin Reagler

Lesbian Desire

My old mouth, my new mouth

They both want to meet her

And although she might expel

Words filled with philosophy

There would be otherables

Of this I am quite sure

I am talking about an economy

Of erotic communication I am

Talking about an unforgivable

Attraction, the double helix

Made up of women entwined

And worshipping one another

With bodies more naked each night

I am talking more than I should

The landscape is thrumming my feelings

Sex is vibrational, I am music

Somebody has spilled sugar on

The sidewalk where a new day

Begins by lunching on sunrise

And I (he/she/they) dictate

A love letter to a woman

A beautiful woman who reads

Constantly who longs for love secretly

Who pretends not to know this much

Night Is This Anyway

The beautiful human machine that

I admire diagonally has grown these

wings under limited starlight, reeking

of tenderness, resting in a bed of leaves.

Feelings leak out into the dark.

Walking over the tiniest of hills

I have no option except to listen,

listen and translate eucalyptus in its

innocence, bent over, grey-green,

incapable of sincere communication

although no one values sincerity

any more because that could unravel

the moon. High-pitched sounds

contain true, random messages;

this one connects the concepts

of bones and loneliness, the 3 a.m.

search for the unlit hallway leading

to the place we sleep. And as we sleep

our limbs tendril around one another,

passion is a vine, climbing. It’s in this

way that people begin to fly.

The Family of Begin Again

Anger begins in the mind and if ignored, floods the body.

I try to believe the mind is one with the body. That’s hard for me.

My mind can’t stop talking, obsessing over the body.

My mind keeps talking to itself about my mother.

It talks about her in her voice, her intonations, and her diction.

It binds the remembered with the feared.

It has the power to make things happen, but instead it makes things

stop happening. It could blind you.

And yet to you, I say yes. I say yes,

whether bridge or ford,

whether seam or hem.

Or yes, as rainwater floods the bayou’s concrete walls and seeps into the city.

Yes, and still yes, as the characters in this story handle each other for the first time.

And yes, as the run-up contains both threads of moonlight and anger.

There is a strand of anger wire-live and tying down my tongue.

There is a strand of anger that can only be quelled by dreams.

Who can explain the small stone in my mouth?

Who dreamed the stone, my mother or me?

I meant to say characters. In that story.

Because these are the clothes we hide in.

We ache for invisibility, for the escape from our own bodies.

And yet. You.

And yet. Me.

Just alive, just bravely alive and vibrating

With words spilling out that hold us in this grid

and never sleep and never cry.

About the Author:

Robin Reagler is the author of TEETH & TEETH (Headmistress Press, 2018), winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize selected by Natalie Diaz, and DEAR RED AIRPLANE (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011, 2018). She is the Executive Director of Writers in the Schools (WITS) in Houston. She recently served as Chair of the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Board of Trustees.

About All Accounts:

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: "The Thing in the Closet is Fanged, Bobbie" and "Indulgent, Impermanent; Bobbie, Remember?" by Bella Koschalk

November 19, 2019

By Bella Koschalk

The Thing in the Closet is Fanged, Bobbie

I know this ‘cause I’ve seen it, ‘cause it gnaws
on me, Bobbie.

The thing in the closet moves with such grace that, Bobbie,
it dances circles around the both of us.

It feasts on doll eyes and cricket limbs, it waits, it’s so
thirsty, Bobbie, what does it drink?

What does it drink?

In the crooks of its mossy teeth, Bobbie, it crunches
the way I seek love, it crunches the color out of my eyes.

Bobbie, do you remember when it got me by the ankle.
Do you remember how you said
what is to come will come will come and the monster in your closet
is just a magnet to fate.

The thing in my closet
holds my vestiges.

Its laugh sounds like the last
halting break of a car as it falls off the cliff
when the glass shatters and phone calls come through

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry but—

The thing in my closet has a belly roar

that shakes the windows that shakes our soul(s).
Bobbie, my skin erupts in goosebumps, Bobbie,
the sun takes so long to come out again.

Is there no place where I can be?
Where the milk simmers and the spiders
don’t spin to kill,
just spin to tell this story.

Once I was just trying
to pick out a dress for Easter, Bobbie, remember
how it stuck its talons deep, bone-deep,
under my clavicle
remember what spilled, Bobbie?
Remember how it shone?

The thing in my closet thaws,
puddles, thick and runny.

When the light comes let the light come
let the light come—

Indulgent, Impermanent; Bobbie, Remember?

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About the Author:

Bella Koschalk is a creative writing major at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She identifies as a lesbian and queer. She is a proud member of the LGBT+ community. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Sonder Midwest, and in Parallax.