Volume I, no. 1, early June 2026

Robin S.C. Griffin starts our soiree with a declaration that leaves skin sizzling. An elastic, expansive body, an erotics of the edge and the earthlight. Jennie Mathewson’s words sweat planets, nebulous and stupefying. Her girls kick and thrash, find their own passionate circuitry in every hovel. To kick off this Pride Month, Robin and Jennie both help us see dyke desire as all-terrain, all-purpose. Ever-knowing, and ever-known.

xo,

Lillian

She grows a crop each morning, and reaps it when she pleases
I. I do. I grow this crop and shave it.
I wake up and wear this plenty of body in every direction.
I hug you, tight folding elbow-deep everything is fine in these arms.
I let you breathe a little.
I only hold too close
those who risk my play
in dance of limbs entangled.
I speak in the breadth of my chest, lisping in baritone timbre
because this horizon across which I speak is an event you are privileged to behold:
a black hole blessing your atmosphere in rare cosmic resonance I
talk like a woman because I am a woman who’s talking right now.
Listen,
who has the time to sweat clocky babes’ broad-shouldered presence in space?
Who has the gall to say brick and not mean housebuilder, mirror-breaker, asteroid?
Where are my shemale sisters at this thing for “women and themmes”?
Gravy-thick once-whittled trans woman—why should I default to femme?
Fuck you.
I am the dismissed miss gender-fucked fuckboi, I stay strapped and ready.
Toy-soldier TMA dykish confetti cums hard on fellatio;
my love is a bridegroom girldick gone limp between straps of leather.
My love is my fingers forging my name on the bell of a bruise
when I please.

We take the four-lane highway lined with pines, idle by the raised bridge as a boat tugs past, slow when the road cedes power to the forest beyond it. Houses off the shoulder are squat and submissive, one torn through by a fallen tree. The music on the radio starts and stops between stations.

We park on the lower level of the ferry and stand against the railing. Islands drift. My mother names them in Spanish and Salish. A small child in a large raincoat recites the story of Chief Leschi’s execution as his parents try to wrangle him inside. Rain pounds the car roof. My mother flicks on the high beams. The water is punishing, a thick wall of it. The windshield wipers can’t keep up.

We stop for lunch next to a gas station. In the seven steps to the door, we are already drenched. I peel off my sweatshirt, and my mother tries to dry her hair with paper napkins. We both order grilled cheeses and malt shakes. I begin to cry. Truckers look over at me. The place smells like shit, like a lumber mill.

When I get there, they make sure to tell me repeatedly that this is not conversion therapy. None of this is about my sexuality or presentation of gender.

My son is gay actually, one of them says. Right.

They bring out a young woman in hiking boots and cargo shorts. She and I go into a separate room. Just us girls. I am told to take off everything except my underpants. She spreads my legs and runs her hands over the grooved skin, lifts my arm and examines the scars there. She tugs her hands through my hair and inspects under my tongue. Her movements are not cruel or punishing, just impersonal. This intrigues me.

They flip through my notebooks and my copy of Hamlet from school. Both are thrown away. Suicidal content. I’m given a trash bag full of what belongings they’ve deemed acceptable. I’m given a pair of long underwear with someone else’s initials on the waistband. I’m given a tetanus shot. My mother signs some forms, and it’s done. We hug. She lets go first, the car keys in her hand.

I’ll see you in September.

They put me in a van, and we drive into the mountains. At the edge of a service road, a counselor comes to meet me. We walk a trail next to the dark, churning ocean. We get to the campsite at dusk. Heads turn to meet me.

You are eight other girls with salty lips and peeling skin. You are not yet yourself, not discernible from one another, and when I finally do recognize you, it will be a shock. You are in baggy shirts from a 5K someone else did and rough pants made for a boy’s shape. You have the wrong shoes, and they are covered with duct tape. I’ve been dropped into a story already in motion, and you do not make room for me in it. If you stop moving, the mind will collapse. You keep going, or you get left behind.

I put my trash bag down, and one of you hands me a tin cup. Another pours distilled water into it. I drink the water. Then, they fill the cup with chili that’s been cooking over the camp stove. After dinner, I wash the cup out with seawater and keep it in my pack for breakfast. If I lose the cup, there will not be another one. After a silent meal, I am led to a tent where I fall down into sleep.

When I wake, there is oatmeal for the cups. There is tooth brushing and castile soap lathering and seawater rinsing. There is hair. Some of you chose shaved heads over dealing with the constant detangling of crusted knots, while others work to maintain their hair because it is the only thing they did not have to leave behind.

Come here.

One of you pulls me down to the ground and between her legs. This is an easy intimacy, but utilitarian. I know not to mistake it for something more. She runs a sharp fingernail down my head, parts my hair, combs knots out, rolls them between her thumb and pointer finger. It hurts, but she doesn’t ask if it does, the way another kind of girl would.

Now look down for me. She folds my hair into two braids and ties them off, before tugging at the ends. Good girl.

After breakfast, I am shown a map of the land, each campsite on our route marked and numbered. Every day, we will hike from one camp to the next, regardless of distance, weather, or terrain. We will carry all our supplies in backpacks nearly as large as we are. We are told this will make us better people.

I don’t believe it, and at first, I refuse it completely. I’m too slow to walk through three months of wilderness, too angry to sing campfire songs, too solid to be remade. When a counselor tries to get me to move faster, I spit in her face. I am impressed by the green of my phlegm and the way the counselor fails to react, letting it slip off her chin. She ties my pack to hers and yanks me along. We talk for hours about her dorm decorations at Brigham Young–Idaho. She says she hopes we can be friends.

None of you are surprised at my resistance. You’ve each tried to sneak off, break your legs, fake asthma, bite someone, or be otherwise so difficult that they’ll give up on you. No one has figured it out yet.

***

When the grub has been scraped into the compost bin and the tents hitched, a fire is built in our camp each night. This is a job entrusted only to the counselors, who carry the various matches and lighters in a locked box, alongside other things forbidden to us; they often spend half an hour huffing and puffing by the ramshackle cabin of twigs they’ve made before giving up.

Helen is tall and sullen and wears the shell of a Dungeness crab on a string around her neck. But when a counselor hands her a match, she has a flame in moments. Eventually, they leave off with the pretense and let her go at it first. She inspects our firewood when we bring it to her, then tosses it, saying it’s wet, or it’s puny, or it will burn fumes. She is authoritative when she speaks but with no pleasure in it. She is still just one of you. When the shell starts to rot, they take it from her in a loud, nose-breaking struggle, and for three days, she refuses to make a fire. We eat cold Spam sandwiches. The injured counselor has to hike out to have the bone reset.

We keep close to the water on trails skirting the edge of dark, red forests. We camp by the shore and fall asleep to waves crashing. We wake to find raccoon tracks in the sand, their muddy prints covering our supplies, food strewn about. After that, everything is locked up even tighter.

I taste time passing in the grit that builds up in my cup, meals of steel oats and lentils and rice and potatoes all not-quite washed away by seawater. A scraggly braid runs down my spine. My palms stain brown, and my fingernails collect dirt I can never reach. I lift my arms to find thick patches of hair. In this way, it works. As I am made smaller, made quieter, made not myself, I become desperate to live.

The mechanical elements of survival fascinate me. I get greedy watching Helen tie a trucker’s hitch and ask her to repeat it over and over. She moves through the forests with ease, so far ahead of us on hikes that we often turn a bend to find her sitting on a rock with a book. She pulls bark from fir trees and chews the resin. She lights fires with cotton balls and petroleum jelly. She dispenses knowledge sparingly and like it’s worthless. I didn’t know trees could be young, flowers eaten, tides mapped. The sky is pale and widens each day without rain. Clouds shrivel on the horizon. Leaves burn. The mud on our legs hardens to dirt. We are slick with sweat. Hungry. Behind schedule.

We come up on a ranger hut. Gingham curtains hang in the window. A kayak rests on blocks. The ranger sits out front, cleaning her nails with a pocketknife. Her khaki shirt is half-buttoned, breasts hanging low against the fabric. She stands as we pass, tucks her shirt back into her waistband.

Hey there. Have you all heard about the fire ban yet?

She looks between us, and I can see something stir in her, a kind of soft disturbance. She tells us to wait. She flips a spigot and fills a bucket, takes a sheet and tears it into rags. The well water is so cold it’s almost frozen. I leave my hands in there until they sting, throw the rag over the back of my neck, and tie it at the throat. Water drops down my spine, settles.

Helen lingers by the ranger and asks her about the burn ban. The ranger’s nose twists slightly. The counselors are assembled on a log, turning a map and arguing while the rest of us pour buckets over our heads. We are so happy with her scraps that we must be giving ourselves away.

Are you alright?

I look at the ranger when she asks. She’s not quite old, but rough-looking. I trust her completely. Silently, I ask her to take me in her thick arms and carry me into the cabin. She can see I am someone still worthy of gentleness, can imagine me as I should be. Nothing is so wrong with me that she could not correct. But I can’t say it. I’ve forgotten how to ask.

Helen takes a breath. Sure. We’re just camping. She sounds bored, indifferent, though her hands are picking at the bug bites that cover her arms.

The ranger nods. Her gaze is long and reaches above our heads. Stay cool out there. We’re not used to heat like this.

I blink. She’s gone back to flicking dirt from under her nailbeds. We grab our packs and rejoin the group. Helen looks at the ground, wipes her forehead with her wet cloth. I pull mine off my neck and toss it away.

Why’d you tell her that?

Helen is almost surprised. When I talk to her, it is only ever in the weakest voice, always with a request for help.

She didn’t actually care.

How do you know?

She just shakes her head and quickens her pace.

***

My period returns in the middle of a hike. Pants around my ankles and the thick splat of blood spilling out—this is what it feels like, one long bad thing that I never asked for. I’m given tampons, which I save in a Ziploc bag until we can burn them. Blood attracts animals.

One of you admits she needs us to teach her to insert tampons, and she drips all over our fingers when we do. One of you has pierced nipples. One of you is from Reno. One of you died for ten seconds. One of you is a dancer. The dancer keeps her hair brushed and shirt tied in a knot above her belly button. She explains that there is a type of dance where everyone agrees to hurt each other. Moshing. We have questions. We beg her to show us something. The counselors have phones, but they won’t let her play a song, so she dances to nothing. I don’t recognize the laughter and purity on her face as she flings herself across the campsite, the beauty of a body that knows where it is going.

Then, rain, finally. Rain so strong it puts the fire out, and we string a tarp across four tree trunks, huddle under it to eat canned fish in the near-dark. The silence between us is a deep, empty bowl made from black stone. Slowly, we begin to fill it.

They told me they would think about the surgery if I agreed to come here.

Sure. My parents lie all the time. They told me this would be like summer camp.

My mom wouldn’t stop screaming in my face and slapping me awake. I guess it was her sleeping pills I took. The doctors made me drink this nasty-ass charcoal thing and everyone was yelling at me so much that I forgot about wanting to die. In the end they said I probably would’ve kicked it if I hadn’t eaten such a big dinner. Which my mom thought was hilarious.

This is maybe random, but it was really weird when I lost my virginity. It hurt so fucking bad that I thought I had like a medically tight vagina. I asked him to stop, and he did but it took like a minute. How long between you saying no and him stopping before it’s rape? It didn’t feel like rape but sometimes I wonder.

So Kelly drives me to Fred Meyer to get the pregnancy test and we go to the self-checkout obviously and I’m trying to scan the test but it’s not scanning. And I’m telling Kelly I’ll just walk out with it but then the screen freezes and says help is on the way and this asshole in a vest comes over. He’s like, What’s the problem? And I’m like, There’s no problem, can you go away? He sees the pregnancy test and there’s this look on his face, like I’m trash. I want to reach into his head and knock his brains around because why does he get to look at me like that, or at all? And I don’t really remember what happened next, but I guess they had witnesses and camera footage, so I was screwed. But yeah, Kelly drove me to Seattle and we went to the aquarium after the abortion. Did you know that whales sing, and no one knows why? They just do it. That was on a sign next to the whale tank. I was bleeding like fucking crazy into a diaper in that aquarium, but I didn’t want to go home. It sucked. And everyone acts like this whole thing is why I don’t fuck with guys anymore, like I haven’t been bisexual since I was 12.

Bullshit. There are no whales at the Seattle Aquarium.

My mom’s boyfriend took me to a whale show there once. We were in the splash zone. They gave us rain ponchos.

What if they were small whales? Really small ones? Whale sharks?

They were normal whales. The big ones.

They don’t put whales in aquariums. That’s SeaWorld.

They used to. Maybe they’ve stopped now.

There have never been whales at the Seattle Aquarium, and definitely there were none six months ago.

Fuck off. I am full of the anger I thought I’d lost. Are you an idiot? Helen said there were whales there, so there must’ve been some fucking whales.

She looks up at me, a face long and dark and so bright I warm myself in its gaze.

***

At first, nothing changes the way I think it will. Then, she begins to slow for me when I can’t keep up. When I say she can leave me, there is no question that she will stay. She brings me pale shards of robin eggs and a braid of wild onions. When I use the solar shower, she leaves smooth stones in the pockets of my clothes. She denies doing any of this.

She starts dropping bits of information. She is from the Inland Empire. She plays soccer. In the fall, she picks apples for pocket money with some other girls. She drives a RAV4. She was alone a lot as a child. She is popular in school. Coldplay makes her cry. She has eyes the color of moss. I never say this. She would laugh at me.

That worn shirt slipping off her shoulder as she pitches a tent, that briefest sight of a bra strap. We all wear the same graying sports bras with no shape, but this is different because it is her. I run to the tree line, slam the door on the compost toilet. Warm, green light slips in through the wooden slats. I fall apart a bit, collapsed inward by want.

I want to touch her. She sleeps six feet away, and in my dreams, I am touching her. But someone’s in the sleeping bag between us, and the counselors take night duty in shifts. She is unavailable to me.

I want to hold your legs in my hands, she whispers once, as she passes me on the trail.

Later, I feel at the fat on the backs of my calves. It hardens to muscle when I tense. Light hairs grow in many directions. A tan line rings my ankles. The deepest part of me turns and vibrates.

Shorebirds scatter in the sky. She says they’re always the first to head south. The stars have gone crooked, moving west toward winter. A mail boat meets us on the shore, and the letters all say August.

It rains for three days. We eat only crackers, Kraft singles, protein shakes, apples. When we finally get a fire going again, we are moved to dance around the flames, the silence loud with panting and shaking. We attempt some anemic pushes and punches. Helen thrusts her hips with the shy confidence of a boy at a school dance.

She is tired of endless knots and snarls. They let me take the blunted scissors and hack off her hair. I paw at the rough contour of her grown-out undercut, the smiley face tattooed behind one ear. I think for a second that she might be really dumb, but I am in love with her.

Dry brush hugs the cliffs, scraping at our legs. A seedpod is propelled through the air by nine heaving breaths. I watch Helen strain to keep the seedpod afloat, her face mesmerized as it goes swirling towards the water. Her hair is many kinds of short now, her movements full and decisive, her arms in conversation with the world, swinging, swaying, plucking clover, clawing bark. She falls back until she’s in step with me and the other stragglers. She bends to tie a shoelace and grabs my ankle with her hand. I go still, leg hovering mid-step. Her thumb grazes my skin and comes to settle just under my sock. Only for a second.

She rises, and nods toward the cliffs. I follow her off the path. The sensation of her touch remains.

Seals sun themselves on an outcropping along the shoreline. She lowers herself to the ground, eyes fixed on them. The figures on the trail behind us keep getting smaller. I ask what we are looking for.

Orcas.

I stoop down beside her. For a long time, I thought whales ate barnacles off the sides of boats. I have never seen one thing kill another.

We wait for a while. The seals don’t demonstrate noticeable fear, but maybe they just haven’t figured out how to perform it. One flops back into the water, and its baby tumbles in after. I remember the group, my obligatory fear of being left behind. I’m reaching for my pack, but I come back down with the yank of her hand.

Stay.

I am crouched over her open face, dirty ears and oily forehead, her sour breath on my neck. Her mouth widens into the beginning of something beautiful. And then I’m looking up at an empty sky, her hands pinning mine to the ground. We roll over and over the grass, each trying to shake free of the other’s grip. I jab her stomach with my knee, and it does nothing to her. She tugs my hair, and I laugh. This must be moshing, the way we each take interest in what exactly we can do to the other person. Where the limits are. We are joyful, shining, when we get back to the group. I don’t mind carrying the compost pail those last three miles.

***

Early in the morning, we go out looking for firewood. Even without saying, we know that we won’t come back, will move away from the map we’ve memorized. I keep pace with her, and it is almost easy now. I am surprised to feel the places where I have changed. On either side of us are trees beyond trees, mountains rising into mist.

We move through the afternoon downpour. A maple leaf falls across my face, heavy and cold. It won’t be night for hours, but already it is dark, and even darker in the trees. We stop under a canopy of dragging boughs. The bed of fir is warm against my palm.

In our excitement to leave, we have carried nothing with us. She shows me a few matches she’s wrapped in a bandana to keep them dry. We split the granola bar I have in my pocket. We have no cups, and anyways no water either. The counselors keep it from us, maybe for this reason. We might at least make a fire, but the wood is all wet. She takes her shirt and wrings water into our mouths.

We curl into each other. She slips my hands under her armpits. I bring her fingers up to my lips and breathe. She takes my hand and slips it into her long underwear. The need to touch her is no less urgent when I am touching her. The soft fat of her waist, the coarse pubic hairs, the warmth of her, cupped in my hand. We listen to the rain strengthen until it consumes all other sounds. Then, it subsides again. We fall asleep.

We don’t know what to do without the ritual of breakfast. We settle for conks lodged to tree trunks, fat porcini, orange lobsters, honeycombed morels. She fills her pockets with salmonberries and chews them as she goes. Her mother was a survivalist, she tells me when I hesitate to take one.

This is what we did every weekend.

She gets a fire burning the second night. She fashions a rain catcher from her shirt and says we should find an alpine stream. It’ll be better if we wait it out until fall, when they’ll have given up on us. We can forage on the shore and in the woods and find a cave to sleep in. Humpback whales will move through these waters in September. They’ll be impossible to miss. After the leaves turn, we can make our way out of the forest. Eventually, the trails meet dirt tracks and lead down to roads. Cars will stop for our thumbs and take us on to Portland and Boise and Cheyenne. Then, we can really get lost.

For how long?

What do you mean? she asks. Forever.

What about home?

She spits huckleberry seeds from her mouth. Who’s at home?

My mom.

She brought you here.

She didn’t know, I say, and I believe it. I had a nice room and a soft, quiet mother. For a while, we were lonely together, until I started banging my head against walls and making us both cry.

Helen gives me a look like I’m a dumb kid. They all knew.

We hike, sleep, get by. I get by. She is really alive for the first time. My socks are never fully dry. After a week, I have conceded to the wetness, waking always to rain in my boots.

One morning, I disentangle myself from her and pull pine needles from my hair. I squat on the shore, and piss rushes out, water spraying back up into me. Mist hangs low on the horizon. Black fins glide over still waters.

My heart drops. There is a moment, and it’s already closing. She’s still asleep in the tree line, would take too long to reach. I know she won’t forgive me, but in my mind, a wave slams over rocks. I’m drenched to the bone. And it’s great, the cold, the hurt, the mistake of it all. I get up and run.

I am slipping over sea moss, kicking rocks, breath torn away, falling over a log, getting up, trailing blood. They are in the air like it is nothing, one and another and more, always more. They go throwing themselves against the water again and again. I’m in the water too, struggling against the weight of my clothes, throwing my shoes to the sand, jettisoning my windbreaker. I move under their long shadows, prickled by their misting breaths, shuddering when waves hit against me. There is some explanation for why they do this, but I don’t need one. They keep falling and rising like the pain cannot tell them anything. They are trying to get free.

***

The whales are in the distance when Helen finds me. I don’t know who’s on who first, if I reach for her or she grabs me. We are both on the ground, hands tearing at hair, rough meeting rough, screaming and thrashing, and it’s fun until it deepens and we are trying to hurt each other. I can feel it, the rush of all that cannot be taken back, the adrenaline like a bunch of pills melting in a sweaty hand in a song in a room in the dark in the second just before everyone hits the ceiling, and I’m there, in it, alive with want.

You pull your arm back before it can knock the air out of my chest but I’m on you, crashing together to the beat. The music is loud and bad. The music could be anything. We came to dance. Our shirts are sticky with sweat and we are never not being touched but we make sure to be gentle about our shoves. It’s something like miraculous, having found you again, in the basements of late youth.

Fuck you, I shout.

Fuck you first. You’re smiling, wiping smeared makeup from your eyes. Your hair is wild and long, hitting at me when you move. I only give back what you give me.

You raise your forearms and come hurtling toward me. Both of us knock into a group of guys. They try to bump around with us, wanting in on what we have. We won’t let them close.

A stray hand cracks against my face, and blood gushes from my nose. Someone’s apologizing, but you pull me out and away, the screen door slamming behind us. You take your shirt off and scoop ice into it. Your bra is lacy with small silver stars. I don’t recognize it.

I sit on the porch, and you help me smoke a cigarette as I hold the compress to the bridge of my nose, moaning as the pain pounds my skull. It’s broken.

It’s not broken, you reassure me, patting my shoulder with an awkward, sweet approximation of comfort. I know what a broken bone sounds like.

I laugh, first hesitantly, then with my whole body. You are dumb. You are so smart. You are the best thing that’s happened to me, and it hurts to look at you. You have a degree in marine biology and work in a cafe. I am a school recess monitor with hair and piercings and tattoos done by an unsteady hand. We look like everyone else. But you don’t belong in this moment. You are whatever I left behind. You’re looking at me funny, and still I can’t stop. Forgive me. I am not quite here. I am back there, with them.

Your left eye is swollen shut. My mouth spits blood when I speak. I want to keep going, but it’s over.

I start walking. You follow, silent as we come down off the mountain and into the valley, where the group is camping. They bring us to a van on the service road. We have been kicked out. Rain pounds the car roof. Wind blows through an ash tree, and leaves blanket the windshield. Like it is fall already.

Robin Savannah Carver Griffin (she/her/it) is a DC-based transexual apostate and heretic who was raised in the US on military installations. Find Robin on Instagram and Substack at @robinscgriffin.

Jennie Mathewson (she/they) was born in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn. Find Jennie at bucktooth.neocities.com.