issue 7
aug 2, 2023
art by Morgan Alexa Braid
editors’ note
Hello everyone!!!!!! It is us, Sam and Chen. Oblong and Undertow. O. Buttfleer and Blossom. Your whacky editors!!! Whack, busy, stressed out, angelic little bees. Buzzing back, to you, the most joyous blongees imaginable, surviving in our fucked up, beautiful little world. Like what the fuck, world. Can you, dearest world, give us maybe the slightest I mean smallest I mean most miniscule and tiniest reprieve!! From all!!!!!!! Gosh all of this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We (les editors) have been buried, drowning, sinking, grasping, talking, not talking, missing calls, missing emails, surviving horrors unimaginable in nature (academia), seeing each other for small, not-enough spurts, trying to have time, sweet time, sweet breathing of time together. Trying to have togetherness. Trying to grip each other’s arms and swirl, swoon to Neptune, to some moon, to some free place. We are craving it. Wildly reaching for it.
It’s hard to imagine we can come back from all this isolation and loneliness and heartache to this, our beautiful blongproject, our lovebaby, and say, wow, these poems are literally so good we want to be leapfully alive for the first time in forevs!!!!!! These poems are so good we can see a future, a real future, where we beat all this fascist nonsense threatening our undeniably queer, magical footsteps, toedreams. These poems are so good we are renewed in our sense of poetry as world-reviving, as a juicy juicy force save-swooping us literally, quite literally, from the mindless, anxious, tunnel of doom we feel trapped in.
And what do we celebrate? We celebrate being “called intense too many times” and being “sweet like rotisserie chicken” as Jade Vine asserts. We celebrate Penelope, a platypus liberating herself from cis het zookept norms!—thank you, Emdash, for showing us how. We celebrate “the happy clash of teeth and nincompoop” as Jane Flett describes it. We celebrate Rita Repulsa and the “communist Korean butches” L.E. Gill celebrates. We celebrate Jay Pabarue’s “streetlight streetlight streetlight” and Gaby Benitez’s fireflies with their “sex sex sex.” We celebrate Wren Hanks’s “bag of dreaming shrimp.” Of course we do.
We celebrate by eating “meteors for lunch” after seeing Divyasri Krishnan’s speaker do just that—and make it look so easy. We celebrate milk and milking and being milked because Harry Hoy said go for it! “Each jar to the brim”! We celebrate burnt croissants and minor gods because Kalyn Livernois said “Here is the world.” We celebrate Day Heisinger-Nixon’s gel pens. M.R. “Chibbi” Orduña tells us to “fall for the touch of petalled tongues” and you know what, we celebrate that. We celebrate each of the poets, each of the poems in this superb issue, many of which happen to be written in couplets, so many couplets, we don’t know how that happened, but yes, we celebrate couplets.
And! We celebrate you, dear blongy readers. Thank you for sticking with us!! For continuing to read and support and gush with all kinds of giddy for this journal, this space. Merci BEAUCOUP from the hearts of our bottoms.
Love,
Sam & Chen
poems
Jade Vine - “this is not a rap song this is a fap song”
Emdash AKA Emily Lu Gao - “Penelope the Platypus”
Chessy Normile - “The Goldfish by Paul Klee”
Fox Rinne - “Testosterone at 10pm”
Kurt David - “Community Pride”
L. E. Gill - “You Work for Me”
Sara Mae - “Pathos!”
Divyasri Krishnan - "Aubade as a middle finger"
Ica Sadagat - “Saturation is another word for concentration and I am very focused”
Cassandra Traina - “Anthony Bourdain & Other Men I Love”
Harry Hoy - “Milk Boy”
Daniella Toosie-Watson - “Praying After Sex is my Genre”
Day Heisinger-Nixon - “On Surplus Value” + “In Which a Single World is Made of Fragments”
Kalyn Livernois - “Here is the World”
John LaPine - “When autocorrect turns ‘suitcases’ into ‘suicide,’ I wonder if that’s apt”
M.R. “Chibbi” Orduña - “Apparently Straight Boys in Middle School…" and "The Curse of the Blue Footed Booby"
Lisa Summe - “I wonder the distance"
Jane Flett - "Schmerzy" and "In the Days Before Quarantine"
Jay Pabarue - “autozone”
Wren Hanks - “Transiversary" and "Powder Blue Isopods”
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo - “my once a man twice a child era is rearing its baby-sized head”
Katie Christian - “I'm Having Fun, What Are You Having?"
Wesley Kendall - “Party's Over”
Gaby Benitez - “summer bb”
Morgan Alexa Braid is a Canadian-American writer, artist, and ceramicist, currently living in Washington with her husband and two pups. She is equal parts cowgirl, mystic, and 80's rock-and-roller. Her work is rooted in mythology, beloved folktales, and studies in language and ancient religion, always featuring the cast of bold, imaginary women who inspire her. You can see her artwork @notyourmamascowboy.