Transitive
Rag

On Content Warnings

You won't find content warnings attached to each piece in the rag, but there are warnings below for content that explicitly deals with death, serious injury/assault, or mental health.If you have a more specific trigger, I encourage you to use CTRL+F/CMD+F to see if your key trigger words appear in the issue.General Content Warnings (Present throughout the issue)
Reclaimed slurs.
Transphobic language and misgendering.
Objectifying trans bodies.
Transition and trans-medicalisation.
Sexual imagery.
Explicit language.Specific Content Warnings
hook up — mention of needles
XVII — themes of death and loss

Editor's Foreword

The positive response to the first issue of transitive rag has absolutely bamboozled me. I've received so many lovely messages and comments from folks like you reading the issue. I'm stoked to be sharing this second issue with you as well.January's edition contains some glorious pieces, and I was so pleased with the submissions in our new fiction category. In putting together this issue, I felt especially drawn to the pieces that are slightly off-centre, those that build a strange little world around the artist and make me believe their truth.Issue #2 comes a little late in the month thanks to the holidays (and my new full-time work) so thank you for bearing with me while I put it together. It's been a pleasure and a privilege to connect with another cohort of talented trans and gender diverse creatives.If you enjoy your time absorbing the delicious art on this page, you can choose to purchase your copy of Issue 2, and Issue 1 is still available in the archive. Happy reading!

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Ori Diskett

Ori Diskett (he/she) writes and works in Meanjin/Brisbane on the unceded sovereign lands of the Jagera and Turrbul people. Ori writes about things that are important to her like love between monsters and being trans; her poetry appears in print and online. You won't find him on social media, but head to oridiskett.com for more info.

Purgatory Ablaze

a burning haibun, after torrin a. greathouse

i spent my life yearning for freedom from piety. i spent my life as the child of saints who yearned to raise an angel. how many beatings did i receive in pursuit of wings? my only golden quality was the halo shattered beneath me, shards digging into my bare knees as i took communion from the cock of a stranger. joints aching from the tile floor of a bathroom stall, singing their own hymns to the rhythm of pulsing veins. restroom is a misnomer; they have always been a battleground for the queer. i spent my life negotiating for peace inside their piss-scented borders. does it make me a priest if i trade in transfigured flesh? does it make me a savior if they drink of my blood? how many beatings did i receive for the teeth marks in my trapezius, trading scars for scars? blessed hands carved pale flesh into patterns like marble. i spent my life pleasing others. how many beatings did i receive when i finally spread my wings? screaming for white feathers, they found only black eyes, trading morning worship for nocturnal. i spent my life pleasing others, but when i chose whom to please, how many beatings did i receive? i could not count the marks that numbered like stars. consent is a crime when faith is the law.


i spent my life yearning for freedom from piety. I spent my life as the child of saints who yearned to raise an angel. how many beatings did i receive in pursuit of wings? my only golden quality was the halo shattered beneath me, shards digging into my bare knees as I took communion from the cock of a stranger. joints aching from the tile floor of a bathroom stall, singing their own hymns to the rhythm of pulsing veins. restroom is a misnomer; they have always been a battleground for the queer. i spent my life negotiating for peace inside their piss-scented borders. does it make me a priest if I trade in transfigured flesh? does it make me a savior if they drink of my blood? how many beatings did i receive for the teeth marks in my trapezius, trading scars for scars? blessed hands carved pale flesh into patterns like marble. I spent my life pleasing others. how many beatings did i receive when I finally spread my wings? screaming for white feathers, they found only black eyes, trading morning worship for nocturnal. I spent my life pleasing others, but when I chose whom to please, how many beatings did I receive? i could not count the marks that numbered like stars. consent is a crime when faith is the law.


i spent my life yearning for beatings in pursuit of communion from the sin t queer. i spent my life negotiating for transfigured flesh i receive scarmy wings? trading my life pleasing others, but when I chose whom to beat I could not count the marks consent is the law.

Abigail Lilith Ravenheart

Abigail Lilith Ravenheart (she/her) is a queer, transfemme poet residing in Carbondale, IL. She is a winner of the Jon Tribble Memorial Award for Poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in Grassroots Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth, Blood & Bourbon, and fifth wheel press. In her spare time, she pretends she is a dog with her silly little friends. She can be found exclusively on Bluesky @abigailravenheart.bsky.social

SUMMER POEM

Summer in South Bank and on the
bus station stairs sticks a wad of white gum.
Large and shiny like a lump of fat.
Like the tissue in my tits that I wish could just leak out
one night, in bed, in this dense caramel air.Summer in my garage, where I do my painting
and sweat runs down my pituitary gland,
I smell it, mixing with the turpentine toxins
and my crusted paintbrushesI swear I like this life, I do,
I've learnt an ambivalence toward my body.
Where would the fun be? If I was born
completely satisfied?

Wesley Carlyon

Wesley Carlyon (he/him) is a trans masc artist living on Turrbal and Yuggera country who creates visual art in a wide variety of mediums and writes poetry. You can find his stuff on instagram @ivorytowerouttake.

Dandelions

I found a garden in my neighbourhood. I would walk by every so often. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with my boyfriend. In that garden, everything lived by its own logic. Nobody controlled anybody. Stepelia flowers spat out a smell of decay. Calling to flies who lay maggots. Who feast upon their making. And still, the flowers bloom. It reminded me that there are countless ways to exist. Existence is not a monolith. You can survive, smelling sweet or bitter. I don’t have to be written in a language that doesn’t feel like home.One morning I picked up a dandelion that was sprouting in the foliage. I was alone but I was okay. Strawberry guts spilling out of the sunrise. A sky filled with bloody nectar. Oozing rose gold. Air painted like the body of a bloody bumblebee. It was the first time I looked up at the sky and thought my face belonged here. My skin belonged here. My body is not a wound but it is allowed to bleed. It is allowed to be.The dandelion rested peacefully in my palm. Specks of sunlight scattered across its bright blonde hair. A supple independent being. I want to love like dandelions. Cuddle my strawberry skin. My cheeks flushed and textured. Hair a halo of honey fungus. Curves cauliflower florets. My skin belonged here. It is allowed to be.

Bella Melardi

Bella Melardi is a poet and author. They write about the political and personal, and attend OCADU.

Mixtape #1: We Have Salvaged All We Can From the 600 Feet of Human Trash in the Sediment of Formerly-Known-As Lake Powell

A new subgenre of techno has been invented. The cool kids of Oakland, the real heads, let me borrow the three cassette tapes that came from the land that once was known as Zion. Like decimated industrial wasteland and urban poverty inspired techno’s inventors in 1970s Detroit, so have the salt flats and empty red rocks inspired these new up-and-comers. In a landscape whose rivers became dust a generation ago, the remaining holdouts have either joined the fundamentalist Mormon communes (where any non-religious music is strictly forbidden) or been required to get both creative and violent, by turns raiding the fundamentalists’ water tanks or leeching water from any available life forms: voles, rattlesnakes, the last few struggling stands of sagebrush.Detroit produced a genre of music that sounded like it came from outer space. This new subgenre takes a more minimalist approach. The desert lifestyle does not lend itself to amplified sound: if our musical pioneers raved too loudly, the fundamentalist patrols would discover and slaughter them. So the techno they’ve developed has no beats and no audible rhythm, a landmark of originality that has the Bay Area’s warehouses and house parties all abuzz. Music journalists have proposed genre names like Desertcore, Windcore, or NoBeat. Their removal of techno fundamentals is their key innovation, a bold intervention in today’s stale sonic landscape, as a cover article of Mix Magazine proclaimed. Within the United Western States’ few remaining Cultural Studies departments, techno academics are racing to pitch projects to Verso publishing, salivating to museumify this latest phenomenon.Listening to the tapes, I find myself transported. I hear wind. Crickets. A human murmur? Or it could have been a vole’s dying breath. Impossible to tell. The desert has always been marked by its seeming emptiness but in this recording I hear a silence that speaks to a deeper wrong, to decimation from humans that won’t be undone in a human lifetime. I hear the absence of water. I learn that the absence of water has a sound.Yet unmistakably it is techno. Unmistakably it makes my head nod, my hips sway. The perversion is what moves me, my body commanded to express rhythm by the mystery and horror, and by my shame at taking entertainment from the irreparable silence.The DJs call themselves the Collective of What Remains, and comprises three people: DJ Empty, DJ Void, and DJ Invasive Species. One camp of academics theorizes that because: a) the collective’s continued ability to survive and make art outside of even the limited outposts of civilization offered by the communes, b) their loyalty to the land over fleeing like the rest of the population, and c) the connections to certain myths and archetypes that can be read into the silences, it’s likely that at least one of the DJs have ethnic or cultural connections to the region’s indigenous tribes, those who could not prevent us from stealing every drop from the land they never called Zion. An opposing camp argues that since: a) refugees from desertification escaped only to face horrendous conditions and short lifespans in the neighboring city-states, b) wilderness survival courses were always popular in the region, and c) the American caucasian male has a well-documented fetish for both techno music and life-threatening danger, it is just as likely that the tapes came from white men. Or we could be listening to techno composed by a trio of ex-sisterwives who escaped the communes, although most agree that this is a stretch, since any sisterwife wouldn’t have been exposed to electronic music growing up, and this subgenre’s deconstruction of all that came before it demonstrates a deep and sophisticated knowledge of the art form.This is all speculation. The rave industry would love to know more, but as trendy as these tapes have become, no one loves techno enough to travel west of Nevada’s last outpost with potable water. We know what Zion has become. We’ve seen sci-fi movies set on Mars. The magazine article tactfully left this out, but these DJs can’t possibly stay alive for too much longer. Their first tapes will likely be their final contribution to dance music. DJs and producers in more hospitable regions will grasp their artifacts and interpolate them into a new wave that will surpass the original. We’ll consume drugs and listen to the songs they inspired at clubs, raves, music festivals, and gulp $30 paper cups of water sloppily down our chins, because it’s critical to stay hydrated when you’re dancing for hours, and forgetting our urban worries is thirsty work.Addendum:

Caio Major

Caio Major is a trans latino writer and currently a second-year graduate student in the MFA-Fiction program at Syracuse University. He lives on occupied Onondaga Nation land, with his wife and their dog Bagel. He has published nonfiction in So to Speak and Plentitudes Literary Journal, and fiction in Coffin Bell Journal.

war is menstrual envy

Time sings like a canary with its throat cut
i watch the papier mache angels dream in a cluttered syntax
tumescent with the breeze in Aprilthe wheel spins out of tune
as i search for a way to use the word felony in a poemi dream of fish and harlots and the cheeks of lovers
and surround myself with wetness as i unclasp
the heart from its historythe dawn blooms eastward into a lament
the masses of people in the streets making fools of themselves
i have tried my hand at automatic writing compiling lines
for all the world to see a long letter came back
and these words belong to nobodyit was women like us who organized
to get back at the conformists curtailing freedom of thought
as i repeat myself once again in the breath of my poema strictly private endeavorthe source of wealth in the electronic age

Joseph Sheehan

Joseph Sheehan is a poet and essayist from Baltimore, Maryland. His poems have been published in Porridge Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Memoir Mixtapes.

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