playlist to sing by yourself of hallucinated vocalists, probably, possibly, dead
by Liam Strong
trans-
versal.¹ pickled blueberries left in the card
-board.² on a dimensional level, maybe
you don’t die in this one.³
a political narrative or
few normalize suicide as part of the queer
experience.⁴
you’re *so* dead this time, dude.
the bully in me is me. their name is a primordial
gender & sounds like a torn
tendon.⁵ i surgically remove stones from
the blood. the EMT recommends i use
more tylenol next time. yeah. it’s
fucked.⁶ because ibuprofen is cheaper, & no one
wants to sing sad songs,
you know this,
you do, i tell myself, yourself, which
-ever self feels best in the moment, which is so very
few.⁷ because most songs are
about nothing, i tell
me, in a distant mania. no one composes
songs with the blood drawn from them, or songs
about being afraid
of opening brand-new jars of pesto
because of the
shattering, the blood again, redux, & re
-mixed, because no one else can
do it. i don’t know
what else to say. my social
workers put washcloths to my hand like
an axe, wounded dabbed with another
wound.⁸ i let the migraines stay
because excedrin can’t,⁹ patchwork soffit
& a chorus that repeats the whole song, just
is the whole song, from
your other life where you lived,¹⁰
you, me, unopened jars of un
-named sauce lining the cupboard, who won’t
last forever, because everything’s
got to go bad at some point,¹¹
the song ends, you make a playlist with
the same names as
yours & glass so
they can keep on breaking
until they disappear. i haven’t written
a fucking song in a decade.¹² you weren’t a
-live then & neither were
you.¹³ i don’t have to write it
to get it out of my blood
-stream.¹⁴ i think you’re surviving, you’re
surviving,¹⁵ i feel the plums
getting soft again, blue as
the inner parts of flesh from the
outside. i’ve got them, a whole basket,¹⁶
& you can’t tell me that i’ll
let them grow mouldy again.
¹ “Disorder” - Joy Division
² “Kettering” - The Antlers
³ “The Hero Dies in This One” - The Ataris
⁴ “Real Death” - Mount Eerie
⁵ “Transparent” - Milk Teeth
⁶ “(Hospital Vespers)” - The Weakerthans
⁷ “Hair of the Dog” - Senses Fail
⁸ “like blood from a stone” - Old Gray
⁹ “Using” - Sorority Noise
¹⁰ “If I Don’t Make It” - Ghost Key
¹¹ “To Our Dead Friends” - Respire
¹² “Healing” - A.L.I.S.O.N.
¹³ “St. Ides Heaven” - Elliot Smith
¹⁴ “The Devil in My Bloodstream” - The Wonder Years
¹⁵ “I Exist I Exist I Exist” - Flatsound
¹⁶ “Dog Days Are Over” - Florence + the Machine
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. @beanbie666 on Twitter and Instagram.
Issue 42 (search by genre)
by Greg Santos
This fall, carte blanche put out a call inviting creators to mull over the word “soft” as a theme for our final issue of 2023. After a challenging number of years building our collective resilience during a global pandemic, I was interested in having our editorial team consider works that touch on the soft, slow, open, and gentle.
by Mélina Lopez-Racine
Mélina Lopez-Racine lives in Tiohtia:ke (Montréal), works as a bookseller, and manages the Drawn & Quarterly Zine Club. One of her pieces has been published by Frog Farm in their collective zine called HELL FARM. The rest of Mélina's artworks may be viewed on Instagram @mlracine.
by Reid Urchison
Reid Urchison is an artist and writer living in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. Their comics have been published in ReIssue, Open Word, and elsewhere.
by Moira Brown
The weekend following my twenty-fourth birthday is the weekend I go honeymooning with my sister. The Executive Suite at the Motor Court Motel in London, Ontario, looks something like the dream realm.
by Adam Alokby
Reed’s my twin, but I never felt like we were that connected or anything. Not in that special way people ask us about. To be honest, I think it’s all a big joke, feeling your twin’s pain and all that. It doesn’t make sense.
by Emily Cann
Sally has said on numerous occasions, It’s me, it’s me, it has to be me. At book club we surround her, we smother her to say it’s not you. Of course it’s not you. It is men. It has to be men. She says yes, yes it’s the men. I pick the wrong men. Someone inevitably says, They’re all the wrong men. Sometimes it is even me that says that.
by Bronwyn Garden-Smith
An ice storm knocked the power out in your city on Valentine’s Day. The next day, the temperature rose obscenely, causing the ice that had coated the trees to melt, making the water drip drip drip drip on your coat insistently like an anxious tic. Then your power came back; you charged your phone, boiled water for tea.
by Adam Haiun
Everywhere there are holes and bad fathers. Last year a woman stepped into her pantry and fell into the canopy of a pine forest. Just a few weeks ago a garden shed opened to the sea and a new kind of squid spilled out onto the lawn. Each room is an opportunity for a hole and each father is an opportunity for a bad father.
by Edmario Lesi
Two girls watch a YouTube video of the accident that removed me from Never Never—a reality TV show wherein teenagers are stranded in a remote part of northwest Queensland. The girls sit against a bookshelf, and the smaller of them rests a laptop on her overturned school bag.
by Alex Manley
The whole cab ride back Marie kept thinking it was a bad idea, staring out the window, picking at the edges of the clear sticker on the window with the different fare rates. She had a hard time putting into words just what it was she was in the process of doing but it made her stomach tense up
by Gabriela De Paz
My photography is typically inspired by the details of my daily environment. This series specifically was an attempt to capture the magical childhood nostalgia I felt one rainy evening while looking at—rather than out—my window. I wanted to capture the layers between the self, the home, and the outside world, as they weave together to produce the essence of who and what we are.
by Savannah Dodd
Through a slow and embodied creative process, I have sought emancipation from the “colonisation of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency” (Odell, 2019: 14). Fanned by the gig economy and entrepreneurial culture in which creative people must necessarily participate, it is this drive toward productivity upon which capitalism relies. In this way, my work is not only personal, but political.
by Esther Mathieu
In the course of a week, a day, an hour in Montana’s Centennial Valley, the sky and air and landscape change so many times it is impossible to chart the soft gradations. Life becomes a series of in-between spaces.
by Ying Zhao
Ying Zhao is a writer and photographer currently interning at the United Nations Environment Programme. Landscape and nature hold significant roles in her photography. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Upper Mississippi Harvest Literary and Arts Journal, the Santa Clara Review, and the Salmon Creek Journal.
by Katrina Agbayani
my whole body stupid with it: / July on the lawn. / through the screen window glows / the stovetop purpled with heat,
![[wither]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605533b04199844a48a51290/1702334375499-BBSLGIORCBBOX1POPUQR/image-asset.jpeg)
by Logan Anthony
a brittle flower bobs / her head in the october rain, / each strike of a drop / as it cascades in descent
by Sheila Black
If you stand in the gallery on the first floor / and keep still, the stone appears to breathe a little. / The Nereids are braced against the wind and spray.
by Elisabeth Blair
My miscarried children loiter nowhere, / not mentioned in any newspaper // nor honoured online. / No memorials on earth
by Lauren Camp
One day this spring, the sky taunted the sycamore / to toss down leaves. Tested the boundary of elm / to take a barb of wind. The ground knew what a clearing
by Ashton Diduck
when I / felt / it didn’t seem right / the way / it tasted unseen
by Kate Genevieve
Midday and I’ve yet to wash. / The lemons give me no respite, / and I’m sick of the garden fountain / bubbling incessantly.
by Liz Howard
All my girls growing up we had hard times / the lattice-structure of our future interiors / sung like a diamond bit drill against our / temple of stripped spruce before we lost
by Nisa Malli
The monster has taken to sinking / in every available body / of liquid. It flicks the light- / switch trying to turn / the water in the dark,
by Rajiv Mohabir
Some are lonely before / they know. An orca / separated from his pod / calls out every night
by Nnadi Samuel
how does mist quantify loneliness? / on no occasion has it been the cloud to end a day without company: / the way at harm’s length, a relative slips from my grip.
by Liam Strong
trans- / versal.¹ pickled blueberries left in the card- / board.² on a dimensional level, maybe // you don’t die in this one.³
by Gaby Bedetti and Don Boes, translated from Henri Meschonnic
after the great stories are lost in the world’s upheavals / memory begins to listen to each silence that is swallowed by the noise of now
by Gaby Bedetti and Don Boes, translated from Henri Meschonnic
My hand does not know it is hungry / my skin does not see the night is coming
by Nicola Danby, Pablo Strauss, and DeepL Translate (AI), translated from J.D. Kurtness
Zachary’s mother and father make no effort to shelter him from the storm of life. He is a busy child: precocious, gifted, and anxious. His parents do their best to give their only child every opportunity.
by Marne Litfin
Marne Litfin is a postgraduate fellow in fiction at the University of Michigan. Their stories and comics are published and forthcoming in Electric Lit, Joyland, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, Southeast Review, on The Moth Radio Hour podcast and elsewhere.