the poet enjoys sensation. She jabs out the title ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor,’ makes a row of penises the aftermath of something, hints that what is there might have mushroomed out of torture, war, or concentration camps. It gives voice to the penises, stokes up a ghoulish horror. But male-to-female surgery is not a severance; post operation, a penis wouldn’t lie intact upon a silver tray. The surgery is realignment, tissue scraped to hollow out the male member, penile skin then tucked inside to shape a new vagina. Vaginoplasty is creation, not removal. It’s not a loss, a cause for grief, but gain. Instead of Dr Frankenstein that poet’s surgeon might have been a gardener in Eden restoring the should-be-ness of the body-in-waiting.
Cath Nicholsteaches Creative Writing at the University of Leeds, UK. Her pamphlets are Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005) and Distance (erbacce, 2013). Her collections: My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007) and This is Not a Stunt (Valley Press, 2017). These contain queer, trans, and disability-related poetry. Plus occasional dogs.
sunflower seeds and Bazooka Joe, tightening and re-tightening our batting gloves, rubbing small dabs of pine tar into the underside of the bills of our hats.
Theory Slut. Stacy Graber. I once dated a woman who looked like Fran Lebowitz but I didn't recognize her as Fran Lebowitz. I had never read her. I would have recognized ... went crying to the groom, my colleague, a guy who knew theory. ... the lemon
Men with torn clothes speak to the Home Kids. Do you have any change? Goose pimples ... The man in the apron hurls the fat, shiny thing over the heads of the.
Neighborhood Watch. Sandra Kolankiewicz. Before dawn each morning I see the obvious parts of his daily routine. First the bedroom light flips on. Within.
She wore Eastern European, tuxedo shirt, jeans, cowboy boots. Her face like. Kafka's sister. She played with her watch and had a split between her front teeth.
Strip-Mall Bakery. Beth McDermott. We're all standing on black and white checkered vinyl, over land altered by glaciers. In the first stages, so-called break rollers crack the kernel open. The children smudge a case of assorted donuts. I spent my chi
The Starry Night whirled across a horse of fiberglass ... My favorite horse was bolted down and wore a ... the beginning bending clear and painless as the end.
stages, so-called break rollers crack the kernel open. The children smudge a case of assorted donuts. I spent my childhood looking at braided spikelets in rapid.
in magma, and thought, We should have gotten a house on a hill. i was mauled horribly ... a credit card number into the computer that would save us all. After the.
