The Earring Collectors
by Robin Gow
We are the earring collectors. We are goblins. We are hungry. We are queer.
Our most recent pair are stained glass windows. A wooden frame with thin colorful glass on the back. They’re on the heavier side, but when they catch the light just right, they’re worth the slight ache in the earlobes.
“I like your earrings,” is probably the most common greeting we get, whether it’s on TikTok, or waiting in line at the coffee shop.
There is no accessory more symbolic of our gender. Our collections are eclectic, ranging from hand-beaded barn owls, to sets our partners made from testosterone vials.
We laugh at the question: “Which ear is the gay ear?” The correct answer: “All of them.”
Late at night, we ravenously click on a small business’s promoted post of Mothman earrings. We forget we order them, and when they arrive, we rejoice.
Greedy, we will make whatever we can find into something wearable. Dollhouse food miniatures, and our exes’ fingernails, and tiny jars of jam.
We are the keepers. We are the chain link fence back to our gold-earringed ancestors. Back to a needle heated over a flame before piercing skin.
Our flesh asks for more. Asks to hang on. Asks for burial jewelry and bridal pearls. Asks for picture frames and the smallest possible figurine of a dog.
Remembers the clip-on days. Remembers what it was like to first hammer a nail into the wall of a room we knit of our own hair.
Elegant and gaudy. Profane and sincere. We pick up shards of necklaces off the subway floor. We take orphaned earrings to lost-and-founds, saying, though we know it’s probably not true, “Someone might come looking for this.”
We are not sure if we are dragons or angels. We are not sure, sometimes, what draws us to shape or design, but we know we want to be remembered.
A few will stretch our ears wide. Scream into that opening. Place a plug there. A stopped drain at the bottom of a lake.
Often we are told we are too much. In loving ways and painful ways. Our bodies are turned into catalogs and museum gift shops. Our glitter, gulped down too fast. Some of us are eaten. Others let the hole close. Say, occasionally, “I used to wear earrings.”
Some of us pile our hoards in old jewelry boxes. Some of us hang our lives neatly in a grid on the wall. Share earrings with lovers or say, “These are all mine.”
Our culture is one of harvest and holy. Of reused pickle jars and first dates on the moon. Kissing in the backseat of a car and saying, “Wait, I have to take out my earrings.” Earrings on end tables. Lost in passenger seats. Held onto by the other party, unwearable in their loneliness.
We do not ask what they will think when, in hundreds of years, they try to make sense of what we wore. We already know. We know they will say, “I want to make something, just like that.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Robin Gow (it/fae/he & él y elle) is a trans poet, witch, and community educator. It grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and lives with his partner Rain and their menagerie of animals on unceded Lenape land also called Allentown, Pennsylvania. Robin is the author of several poetry books and young-adult and middle-grade novels including Dear Mothman and Lanternfly August. @robin_gow_poet on Instagram. robingow.com
by Greg Santos
For our first issue of 2024, the carte blanche team and I are proud to present twenty-four creative works of fiction, comics, photography, poetry, translation, and creative nonfiction which make up our outstanding open-themed issue 48!
by Jordan Penland
Jordan Penland is a 27-year-old, half-Black, half-Ecuadorian artist/cartoonist from Los Angeles, CA. He predominantly works with watercolor markers and gel pens on paper to create brightly colored drawings with a strong doodle aesthetic.
by Jessie Carson
First, finish watching Mister Ed on TV at your sister Pearl’s house. Give her a hug before you leave and walk the short distance home. Pass the man who would soon murder your family as he passes you in your yard.
by Samuel Freeman
On a cold, rainy, April morning, Catherine called to tell me our baby was coming. Her gynecologist was sending her straight from the clinic to the hospital. The baby—our first—had stopped growing and needed to come out, even though her due date was a month away.
by Robin Gow
We are the earring collectors. We are goblins. We are hungry. We are queer. Our most recent pair are stained glass windows. A wooden frame with thin colorful glass on the back.
by Katherine Li
Take, for example, my family. We are a closed system. The sum of our energy remains constant, even when it takes on different forms: over time, rage turns into bitterness; happiness dulls to a slim sense of satisfaction.
by Jonathan Bessette
Steven trips through the front door at 5 a.m. with Kim in tow. He swears the Blundstones on top of the other piled shoes had grabbed him. Carla slinks into the hallway wearing the silk red pyjamas he bought her in Singapore—he promised not to make noise when he got back.
by Megan Callahan
When she wakes on Tuesday morning to the prickle of smoke in her nose, Janie’s first muggy thought is that her father has come home, miraculously—has simply walked in the door like he never left. Her second is that her mother has picked up smoking again.
by Michaela Di Cesare
Nothing feels better than someone else’s mother saying she’s proud of me. I instantly regress to a blissful embryonic state, suspended in warm amniotic admiration.
by Elliott Gish
Ella wants to have a baby. She tells Maddi this while they are both drunk, crushed together in the throes of awkward and slightly unsatisfying sex.
by Miriam Richer
In August I feel dark and stretched and translucent, like a shadow inching across a bedroom floor. I’m living out of a suitcase in a sublet I found on Craigslist: a two-bedroom apartment swirling with Keith Haring squiggles and earth-toned arabesques.
by Eleni Zaptses
When Baba asked me to come to her annual eye exam, I should have been suspicious. My mama and Teta Maria typically handled all health matters concerning Baba. I wasn’t the first, third, or even seventh person who was called for help.
by Mischa Jakupcak
Raised in a log cabin on a goat farm in Montana, Mischa Jakupcak is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. With a BA in Creative Writing from University of Arizona and an MA in Filmmaking from London Film School,
by Grace Wang
It was one of those perfect summer days. A beautiful home-cooked meal on the patio overlooking the river with produce freshly picked that morning. The next day, in the sunshine, we walked down the stairs from the backyard into the river, and just played.
by Amanda Yskamp
Amanda Yskamp is a writer and a collagist. Her artwork has appeared in such magazines as Black Rabbit, Riddled with Arrows, and Stoneboat.
by grace (ge) gilbert
If the villain is absence, I write over and over again, then all we see are reactions to it. / Villain once meant peasant, low-born. / It’s easy to mislay the villain if the villain is negative space.
by Sophie Hoss
And this is what it is: / A hand up my shirt in the quickening violet, / a caul of dusk holding galaxies of night. / It isn’t honest, but it’s all I have.
by Dani Janae
I have yet to meet a snake in South Carolina. / My brother tells me a story of his front yard, / a hole in the ground. His neighbor charges
by Dana Murphy
We met on opposite sides of a door— / swift as a kiss of steel splits fresh wood / our smiles unbridled a careful follow me, / returning our fingers to their pastmost forms:
by Erin Robinsong
The ocean is as close as the cunt / you come from & now it’s like we // never met, some irrelevance far / from our star, the metropole
by Julie Triganne
I was cast as the dove in a church recital: / “I am the dove of Christ.” Five years old, / I held a paper-plate bird. If the dove means salvation, / reconsider salvation. Pluck feathers from the gravy.
by Stephanie Yorke
the little debit / machine says ma-ma-ma / to get the satellite’s attention / by now she’s impervious / so he uses her first name
by Diana Halfpenny, translated from Suzanne Jacob
The alarm has only just sounded, and already the three women have started to run. Are they running towards or away from something? When I first saw them in June 2014, I assumed they must be running away
by Dominique Russell, translated from Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau
It’s not about pulling things by the hair / Tying a woman’s hair to a pony’s tail / Piling up the dead in a line / On the edge of a sword, on the edge of time.
by Audrey Larson
Audrey Larson is an artist and writer who lives in Bellingham, WA, USA. They are known for their love of dreary beaches, public libraries, and old bicycles.