These three poems by Katelyn Alcott explore the fantastical nature of queer love and family, examining how relationships transform when liberated from the confines of heteronormativity…
by: Katelyn Alcott
Free Bleed
The cat is flying around the room, her paws swatting the air. With nothing to hold onto, she drifts, bouncing against the walls. Perhaps now she’ll be able to reach the spider that’s been 12’ up for two months now and eating all the flies but giving creepy vibes.
I’m on the floor, lying on my back, free bleeding into the carpet. Hydrogen peroxide will clean it up in the morning. Tomorrow I’ll pour it out of the brown bottle, watch clouds bubble as it consumes the blood. But tonight I let it flow. The mess can wait. The cat is flying and I couldn’t miss this maiden voyage.
My wife’s on the couch humming as they try to find each chocolate bit in the Ben and Jerry’s. The song is one I know but don't know the words. They don’t know the words, too. So we hum in candle light. The cat knows the words. She floats down to my wife’s stomach. She sings.
This music: my family, my blood on the carpet, my wife on the couch, my cat on their stomach. My spider left hunting for another day.
The Fire Will Not Consume Us: A Folk Tale for the Boston Dyke March
The old dyke on the Boston Common with the box of matches is my mother. She carried me in her belly nine months; her hair short, her breasts bound.
She strikes the match, brings the flame to her lips, swallows the flame.
She says that’s how I was made. She swallowed the fire, and I began to grow. She says I’m half Irish, half fire. She says there’s not much difference.
There’s no other story. No artificial insemination. No cruel ex-boyfriend. No horrible scene of force in the darkness. Only the match, struck. Only the flame, swallowed.
1,859,116 miles
The closest
I have ever been
to her round body:
1,859,116 miles away
We swap oblong paths
through inky darkness;
our love, gleaming for milenia.
She’s a burning,
a red hot, red hot, red red red hot tug.
I burn blue, and crave
her heat always.
Always always always
drawing closer, stretching apart
pulled back again.
I tell my days by her distance
1,859,119
1,859,118
1,859,117
Stretch my limbs of light
to brush against hers
across 1,859,116 miles.
This proximity, our closest point
is the only day that matters
in all the infinite days of dark.
Today I can almost touch her.
I reach out for her in
blasts of blue–
but already I am drifting
1,859,117
No no no
1,859,118
My love!
Pressure drops within me
For a moment, cold.
And then–
Shattering.
All of me,
flung away from me
In the brightest of blue light.
I fall towards my red red red hot everything.
And for a moment:
purple.
Katelyn Alcott (she/her) is a writer from Massachusetts with a great fondness for the fantastical and the surreal. Katelyn is an ex-English Teacher and is currently studying for her MFA in Creative Writing at the Writer’s Foundry St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn, where she lives with her wife and her cat.
