Poetry Drop 01: July 2026
Our first collection of poems to keep queer love in mind after Pride month.
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To kick off our new poetry endeavor at the close of Pride, I compiled a collection that showcases the community that we build around ourselves, in unusual places, made out of the scraps of old relationships, queer culture, a knowing look, memories, and daydreams to create a world that can only be described as non-normative. And with that community, we also look at the unique ways that we crumble and rebuild with our anger, our queerness, and our love.
The God of Love's Ex-Husband Is a Libra
Anthony DiPietro
which means he can talk to anyone.
They weren’t even boyfriends
at twenty-one when he told the God of Love,
‘I want you, and I want everyone,’
a truth that echoes between their frictionless
souls for decades. No need to speak
of the summer of love letters or
the staticky year he moved in next door
to the God of Love and his new boyfriend.
Toot, toot! went the car horn
each morning in greeting. Or the nights
at karaoke, because Ex-husband can sing
‘Mandy’ almost as smoothly as Manilow,
with dimples to make men salivate.
Jealousy like a concussion, but
the Love God wasn’t built to hate.
They made no vows but became
family anyhow. At cookouts, their mothers
meet to gossip by the pasta salad.
Two friends, now grown older, vacation
together, share a hotel bed,
and whatever—fvck or don’t fvck,
have a threesome, walk all afternoon
across separate sand dunes. After dark
on the patio, Ex-husband swaps stories,
laughing with other guests for hours
while upstairs the God of Love aloes his sunburn,
lies under a slow-turning ceiling fan.
Out of the Group Chat (We’ll Never Make It) Jamie Scott Traeger (he/they) One man’s group chat is another man’s pressure, and I think that was probably (I am only now prepared to venture) what your sorry excuse was for dissolving ours like one of my good pills, you pathetic phantom. See? Bet you thought I’d go with ghost. Aren’t I clever? We always were trying to impress each other. And, on the subject of oral medication, I tried to tell you once that this sublimely bitter, digital family was the only cure or therapy I could access anymore. I could tell you for sure if I had the receipts, but I think I described it as a healing tablet of sorts, onto which we could scrawl any observation, big or small, whether filth or remorse. Or maybe I said we could swallow it, as needed, like a drug or a guffaw. You, of course, saw where I was going with that. Or else I called it a virtual bulletproof bar, a space to pour our queer hopes and fears when we didn’t have other mouths or ears that could easily receive them, and you said “of course, doll.” Until you got (or already were) tired of so much laborious typing back and forth. Is now a good time for me to tell you the worst? Or are you at capacity? I’ve always prized the phrasing over pacing, but for you to appreciate that would have required you first to understand me at all, and meant you could perceive how each ephemeral text bubble appearing, however irregularly, blue and small, was still my greatest treasure, particularly when, if you care to remember, it felt like many a potential friend I could have made here IRL fell dead in vivid pools of gay trans analog blood, and I heard they took them out in real plastic bags like the trash we are to so many. Or one man’s, anyway. That’s all it ever takes. I had meant to tell you thanks but one man’s screen is another man’s shots. Please consider this my last shrug emoji.
olfactory memory Jo Berliner (he/they) I ran out of my hand soap a bar of dark red-brown hand-milled soap smelling like patchouli like a crystal shop. like a hole-in-the-wall selling cloth and incense, and the kind of tarot decks i dislike because they pretend to know kabbalah and try to tell me what my body means. The soap a thin cracked wafer stains the soap dish a dark orange, at last crumbles in my hands to slip piecemeal down the drain. I have to use the guest soap instead, a big cream-cheese-white heart with carved flowers looking pristine on the counter. my hands are full of soap suds and my brain is in her apartment bathroom and her skin is roses and goat’s milk. when i lather and rinse my hands it is like holding her hands again. like reading her cards on the dusty rug of my room until she cried because what I said was true. Previously published in Beloved zine issue 2
Why Do You Wear So Many Gay Shirts? Are You Angry? Jendi Reiter (they/he) Because I have no team, don't care to advertise where I've been. Because the men's colors in Walmart are gray, black, beer, and America. No, I did find one Ken: Dream Date tee but that was in 2023, when we thought Barbie could beat the Destroyer of Worlds. Because there used to be breasts under Lance tongue-kissing Drew on this faded cartoon cotton reading Kyle's B&B: Where Love is Love and I hoped those three-dimensional boys would shake too-quick pronoun assumptions. Because I'm no angrier than a Wine Mom, a biker who swears by John 3:16 over a bleeding heart on his leathers, a wet baby squalling in a Daddy's Girl onesie. Because I can't resist an octopus. Because I had to pee in the supermarket men's room and I'm waiting for the one stall when the urinal is clearly open, anxiously praying testosterone means never having to explain yourself, because another short guy with earrings presses into the small space behind me and just stands there, because he clocks my lightning bolt in pink-white-blue at the same time as I clock his wide hips, and we smile together.
Just a Broadway Baby James Penha The first Broadway show album I saw stood next to my aunt’s handsome hi-fi console. A real bound album of seven 78 rpm records— one for each of my years. I had never heard of South Pacific. But once my aunt taught me to stack and drop the discs onto the turntable, I played it over and over rolling over and over on her great oriental rug until I knew every lyric, every intonation, enough to sing “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” to great acclaim at my aunt’s dinner party. When The Wizard of Oz arrived on TV in ‘56, everyone fell in love with Dorothy, and some of us, in some way, somehow, somewhere! identified with her. I pleaded with my parents to buy me a hi-fi; my allowance to be spent on cast albums— LPs by then: My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Gypsy. I lay in my bed, reading the back covers’ synopses of every scene and lyric: I climbed every mountain with Mother Superior, met some people Rose knew, wept for another somewhere with Consuelo. How did I get Judy at Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. Practice. A double album I still—sixty years later—could harmonize with Rufus if ever I have the chance. At sixteen, my high school crush and I cuddled as we covered Judy-Barbra. No surprise, but what I don’t see yet is how that child I was leaned into queerness long before he realized I was gay.
Last month I went to the "Too Many Queer Poets" event at Main Point Books in downtown Wayne, PA. The universe seems to be pushing poetry back into my life.
I,'m grateful.
hey I wanted to ask if people would be able to submit under a pseudonym is theyre not out yet.