aidan

being trans is awesome and trans people are amazing and gender is a dumb box and anyone who makes their own crowbar to smash it from inside is a hero actually.

Put the dead into your poems without garbing them in your grief. Give them cake, put on their favorite music. Listen to their gossip. Let them tell you how they've learned to bake bread. To carve clarinet reeds. Let them comb your hair. Help them remember the color orange. The scratch of wool.

Donate to beestung: Years Six & Seven, organized by Sarah Clark What is beestung: beestung is a quarterly online micro-magazine for non-binary, genderquee… Sarah Clark needs your support for beestung: Years Six & Seven

Happy non-binary day and week!

We're a small mag publishing non-binary, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers.

If you'd like to help us out, we're currently working towards our goal for paying writers for this and next year.

Shares are very much appreciated, too!

www.gofundme.com/f/beestung-y...

happy pride! i edit an online literary magazine called beestung that's for two-spirit, non-binary, and genderqueer writers and readers.

you can support me by reading us or tipping a bit of scratch if you like what we're doing.

beestungmag.com

last day to buy straight books until july

The Raincoat by Ada Limón When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet. [poem also here: https://poets.org/poem/raincoat]

mother's day is a challenging, conflicted one for me, as i'm sure it is for so many. but i can't help but think again of this beautiful poem by Ada Limón—

ahh that's so gay of me, how homosexual of me

(me, doing anything)

SIMPLICITY is on sale 7.29.25!!!

my new book SIMPLICITY is about a timid trans academic in the near future treks into the wilds of upstate new york to study a cult and winds up with way more than he bargained for. it’s is out 7/29. preorder it from your local! simplicitybook.xyz

Purple flower background with yellow text field. Text reads: beestung issue #22. “How you let them make you into a monster, or a fantasy, or salvation like you weren’t an offering. Like you weren’t conjured from the people in every corner of the planet.” —Kelsey L. Smoot

Friends with exes & pogi bois. Imprints of teeth & walking McCarthyism. Summer rains & data farms. Thunder thighs & a cool rock. Siri & The Brooklyn Bridge. Feathers & trains.

beestung #22, a rich double issue guest edited by KB Brookins (@earthtokb.bsky.social) is here!

beestungmag.com

Sleep The friends who come to see you and the friends who don't. The weather in the window. A pierced ear. The mounting tension and the spasm. A paper-lace doily on a small plate. Tangerines. A day in February: heart-shaped cookies on St Valentine's. Like Christopher, a discarded saint. A tough woman with black hair. "I got to set my wig straight." A gold and silver day begins to wane. A crescent moon. Ice on the window. Give my love to, oh, anybody. Pg 183

A little James Schuyler Valentine this morning.

I need every cis person that follows me to read this and genuinely think about it for a while, and I need them to understand that this is the explicit goal of this administration.

If you’re trans, you know the stories like it already; spare yourself.

my heart is in my body someplace & so I have these feelings about everything I do.

Eileen Myles

boy to boy to the sidewalk, fingers that tingle like grass and touch. boy to boy to arms embracing and the streetlights all go out at once. boy to boy to hunger, to Yom Kippur, to Jewish holiday psalms and songs that say, tonight you atone, just be ready to fuck me at daybreak tomorrow. boy to boy to fence, pressed, our skin, how it molds and fits between slats, between lips, displaying our brand-new love. boy to boy to boy, a stranger, walking suddenly by, who spits, who screams, you fa— names we used to yell, back when we hated ourselves, we learned to spot the difference, knew to draw the attention away. we’ve been disgusted, disgusting, too. how we chuckled, in the moment. like we were waiting for it. boy to boy to hug, to bed, to evenings that end abruptly in fear, in where are your keys, keys? with a snap of twigs in the wind. with narrowed, nervous eyes.

Starting 2025 posting NEW PUBLISHED POEMS!! Here’s the first one with the Los Angeles Review, a little poem I wrote for my MFA thesis collection.

losangelesreview.org/boy-to-boy-t...

Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and Helen Acheson Funds, and Serge Sabarsky

Gustav Klimt, Hope, II, 1907-08

https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1135506

Today’s Featured Poem:

“Masturbating to Greek Myths” by @tagreathouse.bsky.social, from Deed, published by @weslpress.bsky.social.

Read here:
poems.com/poem/masturb...

It Hurts

It Hurts, 1986
https://botfrens.com/collections/27/contents/5297/

All 30 chapbooks in the Glass Chapbook Series. Probably not the best photo, but I did my best 😎

Hi to all our new followers!!🙋

Y'all might be interested to know that we'll be reading chapbook submissions in October and our submissions are always free free.

Glass is entirely funded by chapbook sales, so maybe check out the 30 chapbooks we've published so far.

www.glass-poetry.com/store.html

some Tim Dlugos for your sunday

why is my friend sending me mark doty lines out of the blue, how am i supposed to continue working with “longing, of course becomes its own object” rattling around my head

losing my mind (at the cleveland, oh greyhound station)

What the Silence Said Do you still believe in borders now?

“Look at the sky: are you

willing to be the sky again?

You think this lesson is

too hard for you You want the time-out to end.” — Marie Howe

The National Park Service Warns Us Not to Lick the Psychedelic Toad by Carla Sofia Ferreira Please don’t lick this psychedelic toad,                                                                         National Park Service warns. I have         �...

Hi, folks! We're got a terrific new poem up on the OKD website for y'all this weekend, "The National Park Service Warns Us Not to Lick the Psychedelic Toad" by Carla Sofia Ferreira! Be sure to check it out! You can read it here:

РОЕМ Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up 1962

Frank O’Hara.