hello earth
nora treatbaby

​​I have driven to the edge of who
I can be (I am also a sphere)
and I am a woman. It’s what
they tell you when
you tell them you are
not.  They tell me the
architecture is for my own
good, that these clean
lines and high ceilings
will create finer and
more graceful movements
in the soul but I can’t be
in here with all this normal air.
This new government is
signaling that the self
is the lawman now.
It’s the norms that concern me.
Different slants pointed at
the same object. I step out
to consider why my transness
doesn’t feel like a bird at all.
The norms change around
me as I change.
Is this proof there is
no sound of sound?
I am the type of woman
that feels a strong connection
to her body. The penalties and
the perfection. In the end,
to know oneself
isn’t any kind of freedom.
If I unspooled you Earth I would
see that its lava’s behavior that burns your
surface to its form.

sunset
steven tutino

dissolution is yellow
nora treatbaby

​There is an echo inside of category.  The  essential  value  and pristine edgelessness of
each  in  pure  relationship.  One  is  deposited by memory into the body of all things.
Yet I remain in skin for the sun.  This is the aporia of a flexure that seizes modernity’s
movement.  I  am surplus creature.  I  can walk around the world and compare myself
to the art.  I can produce “feel good” material.  I  can know myself through the dream
synonym of statistical measurement.  I  can  dissolve  inside  the room.  I  am  allowed
this.  I can finger the breeze contingent that I stay at work in the development of ever
new skin.  But it is the most known quantity that each  fever  or  river  that  enacts its
murmuration  as  a  gesture  towards  infinity  creates  a  new  center.  Radiating away
from,   outward   dragging   with   newness.  The   field   is   opened   by   centripetal
arrangement, nothing  freed, betweenness in everything.  Category  doesn’t  need  to
toil to worldbuild the Earth it commands. It is in our own practice to look the objects
of  the  universe  in  the eyes and lower them to the level of a name.  Every plant with
its pronoun.

Nora Treatbaby is a queer poet and essayist. Most recently her work has been featured in The Shotgun Paper and The Weakly. She lives in New Orleans, and she does not spend her time.

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​​Steven Tutino was born in Montréal, Canada, and is a writer, poet, painter and personal trainer. He is currently a graduate student at Concordia University in the process of completing an M.A. in Theological Studies. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals and magazines including TreeHouse Arts, Montréal Writes, Spadina Literary Review, The Montréal Gazette, From Whispers to Roars, The Indianapolis Review, After Happy Hour and Apricity Magazine.