The Mumber One

Winter 2020

Editor’s Note

Launch and Other Thoughts

Poetry

god wearing mask

THE GODS ONCE WORE THE GUISE OF BEASTS

This Morning

Grief #346 I grieve the men I swallowed like stolen pills. I grieve the nights I tried and failed to purchase a second pair of legs. A third. I grieve the ease with which I pulled bodies into my body. I kept them all; I am crowded. I grieve the filth of the twenty-dollar bill, the G-string’s faded pink, the stench of my want, the pit stain of my hunger. I grieve the lights on at last call. I grieve your face suddenly fluorescent lit. I grieve the “sure.” I grieve the “why not.” The bodies I begged, the bodies I borrowed, the bodies I broke and broke under. I grieve snowfall on a ruined hand mirror. I grieve the men I mistook for one another and the mistakes I mistook for men. I grieve the bodies I thought beneath me and the body I became. I grieve the dawns I killed and the days I slept through. I grieve the sweat I left behind like a shadow. I grieve every name I called out in the dark. I grieve that I never, not once, called out my own

Grief #346

Toilet Paper

Little Box

Lamp

Notes on Seroconversion

Feedback

Virginia Slim

self/hood

W 177th & Broadway All night you eyed the man I wanted to be; my jaw flexed tight. Anger slipped into desire. Easily he would rise. Easily you would disperse, pleasure made into light: what you want under him, I put on to amuse— I, your worked supplicant. Yes, love is looking away. My desire greened in your dismissal. Was technicolor and twilight-made and never turning off. The city air hung humid above our charade. What need I could fill: to transubstantiate, to unravel?

W 177th & Broadway

Chiaroscuro

The Meaning of Life

Diamonds

Nineteen

Landscape with Logging Trucks and Invasive Species

the one with violets in her lap a new poem by Kirun Kapur

the one with violets in her lap

Hotline by Kirun Kapur

Hotline

Prose

Hansel

How to be a migrant fiction airplane rebecca ruth gold

How to be a Migrant

A Lieutenant

Interview with Maxim Matusevich

Elevator Story

On Kindess, Advices For Writers

SWELL

Shippy