LIFE IN THE KINGDOM OF CATERPILLARS
by Sam Grudgings
Hail our disordered bodies & their possible forms! Hail the scapegoat! The sending! The metamorphosis in waiting! Hail the bodies untameable with dialogue! Their contract of wrecked veins! Their country fucked speech patterns & unclaimable warranties! Hail all waiting alibis! The machete body reveals it wants cleave & wound & facial recognition technology. Wants bodies tessellating with needing incision & demanding borders. Bodies tired of demands & no one knowing how hard it has been because everything has been difficult & different. Bodies as a favour. As currency. Bodies who have no other bodies. Under the earth a body can become a natural disaster. Hail our natural disaster bodies.! The border body wants to become an open body & so tears itself apart. Hail the body unable to be idolised seeing as it can instead become a river! A body is an exhibition to bodies. Monuments to normal. Memorials to want. A body can be blessed with not being. Bodies without bodies offer bodies of evidence of ownership. Hail the Bodies forced to be for policy, or for paper, or for hallowed institutions, that only house bodies as curios, as precedent, as an example are unable to be anything other than bodies. Hail the body prepared to be your body! The guarantees of a body only fulfilled in the absence of it.
Krebsgang
by Andy Qifeng Zeng
Nietzsche said that by seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab—so when you asked why I stopped loving you, I became one. Backwards I shuffled through our fifth-floor walkup, un-making coffee, un-cracking eggs, un-sleeping beside you in the blue hours of November, then sidled down the stairs, past the leaves lifting back onto the ginkgo, the dollops of snow lofting from the yard. I back into the night we met, your cardigan unsagging with rain, your hand un-highlighting “Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other.” And I keep retreating, un-ashing your cigar, the white ghost of the leaf darkening vein by vein back to green, your name unforming in my mouth. Finally, I reach the real center of it all, where those incoherent threads of meaning should knot into a first cause, and find nothing. I try to right myself, but my legs won’t work that way anymore.
What Will Be Left
by Penny Blackburn
The darkness at the bottom of reservoirs.
Motorway bridges. The M62.
The highest point. Sleet.
Photos of empty streets at night.
Traffic lights reflecting onto wet tarmac.
The noise of trains braking, the memory
of tracks washed away. Storm petrels,
black vees of loneliness over the ocean.
Empty mills. The gap where they should be.
The creak of rusted swings. Ferrous metals.
Radium. The softening of bones.
Half-skinned horses: museum exhibits
under glass. Fragmented artefacts.
The disturbed memory of an underpass.
Industrial effluent. A river stained yellow.
Wastelands. Broken concrete. Lost spaces.
White noise. The shadow of a cooling tower
falling over its neighbour, slantwise.
The Skin that Clung the Longest
by Jessica Tillings
Just leave me here for the birds,
let my body deescalate–
like the trickling of water over pebbles,
accept my awkward posture
as part of the landscape–
buckling, fawnlike, nose to the moss.
Sam J Grudgings (he/they) is a queer horror poet & events host. Their books The Bible II and Nation’s Saddest Love Poems are available from Verve Poetry Press & Broken Sleep Books.
Andy Qifeng Zeng is a writer from Beijing and an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University. Find more of his words at andyzeng.io.
Penny Blackburn is a Yorkshire poet now based in the North East of England. Her work has featured in many journals and anthologies, including Writing Magazine, Quartet, and The Fig Tree Review. She was Forward Prize nominated in 2025 and was the winner of Crossing the Tees 2025 story competition, as well as Poetry Tyne 2023 and 2024. Her debut collection, Gaps Made of Static, was published by Yaffle Press.
Jessica Tillings is a mother and poet based in Lancashire. Her poetry and artwork has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Blackbox Manifold, HVTN, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, SPAM Zine, The Wolf, Zarf, DATABLEED, and others. Currently, she is undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.