Volume I, no. 4, mid-July 2026

Except it’s fruit ice cream, so it’s colder and sharper and more concentrated on the tongue. While reading Harper’s poem, you should probably chill. Or bask in the hot glow, until the edge of lightheadedness. Then, stand at the threshold with MJ’s Jess, and relish. Dykes are very good at being rude. We drive long distances and kick the can and then what? Tongues touch. Laughters tumble into each other, and it’s all messy, dyke messy, dyke spitting contest, dyke something-like-love. So yeah, guava ice cream and pumpkin seeds, sweaty sex and the edge between glory and disappointment. Is it hotter when it’s toxic? It’s hotter when we write about it.

xo,

Lillian

A reader wrote in to respond to Jennie Mathewson’s inaugural short story, “Memory Work,” published in our early June 2026 issue.

Another reader wrote in about Steph’s story, “Not in my League,” published in our mid-June 2026 issue.

And yet another reader wrote in to respond to Mave Goren’s story, “The Strings Attached to the Marionette of Friendship,” published in our early July 2026 issue.

mave!

my family was visiting this week and i was feeling super down and out and then i read your story and it really brightened my day. i lived in new york a couple years ago and your characters just so capture the exact state of life there. i laughed and i cringed and all around felt so in sasha and echo's story. rly brought sunshine to a very sucky day, and so thank you!!

nova

Now, on to this edition of your favorite twice-a-month dyke literary magazine…

Flesh sits
like      shining
flecks of fire        flies;
each
has been pinched
by its     delicately
green wings,
and then dipped
in a pool of rising morning.
Their thoracic light
is swallowed
by the looming sun’s.
They’re left invisible, bug-eyed,         and waiting—
then, waiting.
Then, waiting.
Then, waiting.
Then, crack of moon!
Then sliver of sun. Then dark! Then light of fire, then roar, then spark, then singe, then yawn. Then cool, then calm; then corpse. Now, charcoal, then dirt, then oil. Then leaf, then heat, then fig, then apple. Now, guava! Now, palm! Now, mouth! Now, name! Now, buckle! Now, spit! Now, sound! Now, sound! Now, sound!

I knocked on her front door twice. It was a row house at the top of a big hill, with a big wooden door and a Cafe Bustelo can full of cigarette butts next to the welcome mat. I always hated this part the most, the part when you have to stand around and wait for the other person to walk into the bar or open the door, that terrible minute when you remember you’re about to be face-to-face with a real woman and not a blue bubble or notification. No matter how many times I’d lived something like it, this type of moment always inspired a slight sickness in me.

Esther opened the door with a big, dumb grin.

She wasn’t all that tall, but you couldn’t tell by talking to her. Her hair was short and shagged and easy. She wore a tank top that showed off her body, which was tight, packed-in, strong. Her pants were baggy and linen and cinched at the waist. Maybe this was her fucking a girl at my house look, unlike the Dickies and other tank top she’d been wearing two nights ago. I guess that had been her hitting on a girl at the dyke night pregame look. Both worked for me.

“Hey! Did you find parking okay?” She was smiling like we’d known each other forever, and she brushed her fingertips against my waist as she moved out of the way for me. Her eyes grazed me up and down. She looked at me like I was already in her bed, and I looked back like she was right.

“Oh, yeah, uh, it was fine!”

I stepped into the entryway and started kicking off my shoes, looking at her plants and stacks of books and the road bike that hung on a hook. The place was nice, all renovated, with exposed brick on the walls. She’d moved here for a job, I was pretty sure. I tried to remember our initial conversation, which conjured the words engineer, my ex, San Francisco, and indoor bouldering through a sort of horny fog. The entryway shoes were all lined up against the door by color, my Mary Janes the only thing out of place among them.

Then, a dog ran up to me. A Frenchie, a really fat one with a leather collar that squeezed tight around his neck.

“This is Basil…” Esther said, giving him a once-over with her eyes. “I know, it’s kind of a lame-ass name. He was my grandma’s dog, I wouldn’t have chosen one so…inbred, if I had the choice.”

When we’d met two nights ago—somewhere on my friend Naya’s couch, between Esther opening seltzers with her belt buckle and cracking gum bubbles with her back teeth—I thought maybe I remembered her mentioning a dog. I hadn’t been paying much attention to what she said, since my interest had been purely directed into when I was going to see her with her clothes off. Her reputation preceded her, a swirling cloud of gossip. She was at the pregame, but she didn’t come with us to the Dyke Night at Captain Arlo because, supposedly, she had fucked and then subsequently fucked over one of the bartenders. Lily was the bartender’s name, a friend of a friend of mine, and she had gone around and told everyone who’d listen.

As we walked deeper into the house, Basil followed us, snuffling and snorting and getting his wet mouth all over my ankles. Esther looked wary. She told me that, this morning, she and her roommate had been carving pumpkins. A few seeds had fallen on the ground, and Basil had eaten them before she could pick them up.

“The vet says that dogs can have pumpkin seeds. I called this morning ’cause I was freaking the fuck out,” she said, “but you’ve gotta understand that these kinds of dogs are always on the fucking brink of death. I know I need to let it go, but I keep watching him to make sure he doesn’t fuckin’…I don’t know, start throwing up or stop breathing or something.”

She chuckled, but she wasn’t really laughing, just awkwardly filling the space.

“Do you want something to drink?” she said after a beat. “I got this, like, natural wine from my coworker. Though I don’t really know the difference between regular and natural.”

“It’s additive-free,” I said. “Normal wine has commercial additives and yeast and shit. The natural is…I guess it’s natural, that’s why they call it that.” I was being a bit too monotone, like I didn’t care. But then again, I really didn’t care. I was there to fuck her, hopefully in a timely manner.

“You’re smart, Jess,” she said. “Let’s go sit on the couch, shall we? You can try it and identify the notes. The fullness of the body. Or whatever they call it.”

Things between Esther and I weren’t exactly electric, and they hadn’t been the other night either. But here was a masc I hadn’t conquered, and that was enough for me to be at her house, standing in her wood-paneled kitchen, while she yanked the cork out of the bottle. She held two wine glass stems between her fingers on one hand. She did so with ease, sexy and in-control, the bottle in her other hand as she led me to the living room.

I’d been invited over to watch a movie, something I remembered only as we sat facing each other on the leather sectional. The remote stayed, untouched, on the coffee table. The wine was cloudy and orange and better than it looked. Soon enough, her face was flushed dark from half the bottle. She scooted over, looped her leg over mine, and brushed her foot down the inside of my calf while she went on and on about her mom making her wear a dress to eighth grade graduation.

Esther talked a lot—about bars, about climbing and the difference between single-speed and fixed-gear bikes, about her friends from college, about puking up Goldschläger during her freshman orientation seven years ago. I nodded along, staring up into her eyes and then down at her lips, trying to give her the hint. There was only so much small talk I felt like entertaining on a Sunday night. When she saw my gaze lingering on her lips, her sentence trailed off, and she leaned in and kissed me.

It was a perfectly fine kiss, the normal kind that you get from some girl you don’t really know, who probably does this all the time. We stayed upright. She took her time as she warmed her hands up under my shirt, ran her fingers down my rib cage and back up from my hips. I shifted onto my back, trying to rest my head on the armrest at the least painful angle. Just as she was swinging her leg over my waist and pulling her thighs against my sides, just as she was letting her weight settle on me, Basil started coughing.

“Fuck, does that sound wet to you?” Esther asked, panicked, looking at the dog. “That’s not normal. He doesn’t usually cough like that. Hey, buddy. Buddy, what’s wrong?”

She abandoned the kiss, though still remained sitting on top of me. I didn’t know what his coughing normally sounded like, but this episode sounded pretty par for the course to me. I sat with my back propped against the armrest, frozen as a wax figure, my mouth still covered in her spit, while she slapped him on the back like he was a CPR dummy. Eventually, he quit coughing.

“I’m sorry, Jess,” she said, a pleading look in her eyes. “It’s the fucking pumpkin seed. I just can’t stop worrying about him. Anyways…uh…do you want to see my room?”

I was glad to go up there if it meant no more couch armrest and dog interruptions.

Esther’s bedroom was big and at the end of the hallway, with a weird step up to its door and a pull-up bar above it. She had hardly any furniture, except an Ikea bed, a warm lamp, and a milk-crate nightstand with a likely-performative copy of The Body Keeps the Score. The book was dogeared and battered and rested under a jar of Tiger Balm and a Bluetooth speaker. I sat tentatively on the corner of her bed while she put on some shoegaze-y playlist.

Then, I had a moment of doubt. Was the pursuit of sexual success really worth this? It’s not that she wasn’t sexy—she was—but I couldn’t imagine her bumbling her way into the upper hand on me like she’d done to Bartender Lily. These masculine girls were much easier to get ahead of than they seemed; red lipstick, blunt bangs, and a skirt could always get me in the door, and I was always able to get out the door when these other girls found themselves hung up. Still, I wanted to say I’d done the deed with her, underwhelming as it might be, for my own pride. Esther tumbled down next to me, curled up like a pillbug, and rolled over to rest her head in my lap.

I brushed my fingers across her lips and down the bridge of her nose. I found myself caught up in something that mimicked tenderness, but I was just stalling at making a move for real, trying to make her break the standoff. She was going to get what she wanted, and I was going to make her think I was going along with it. She reached up and hooked her finger in my necklace chain, before gently urging me down to kiss her. It was hard to kiss from that angle, and soon enough, I found myself on my back again, her on top of me. She squeezed my hips with her thighs like I was a horse that she was trying to push into a gallop, and I raised them up off the bed a little without thinking. Her thighs were warm, solid, and the pressure of her on top of me was satisfying, to a degree.

She definitely seemed into it. “Baby…agh…oh, god, baby…”

I had never been called “baby” before, especially not by someone I hardly knew, but things were already damp against the front of my pants and the crotch of hers. Esther peeled off her tank top, tossed it aside, and sat back on her heels so I could get a good look at her. She had a tattoo of a vine wrapping down her ribcage and disappearing into the cinch waist of her trousers. A black-and-white tiger crawled over her shoulder. Her hands were already under the hem of my t-shirt, itching to tug it off, so I did it for her.

She lit up like a Christmas tree when she saw my bare chest. Then, she leaned down and paused to press her cheek against the warm skin before she started kissing me. There it was, the best part: the part where there was no question of whether or not she wanted me terribly. And now, no dog or interruption was going to stop her.

She went lower and lower and lower until she reached my skirt. I tried to keep my composure, twisting my fingers up in her sheets, as she pushed the fabric of my skirt up around my hips and started pulling my panties off. Her breath was hot against the soft places between my thighs. I felt the pressure of her lips and her tongue, tentative at first and then a little harder, a little faster. She could’ve moved down a little, but she was so confidently going at it that it felt wrong to suggest anything else. I tangled my hands in her hair and arched my back, moaning like it was the best feeling in the world. I said “oh my god” and “fuck, baby.” And then, I heard a noise outside the door.

It was coughing. It was loud, wet coughing. Esther sighed, long and low, and left me fully exposed, laying there. When she opened her bedroom door, she found Basil, looking perfectly well.

“Sorry, I think he’s okay now,” she said, sheepishly wiping me off her mouth with the back of her hand. “But I’m just going to let him stay in my room while we’re in here, just in case. God, I’m sorry, this is so unsexy.”

I told her I didn’t care, but I did feel a little like I was in the stirrups at my gynecologist. I was debating just calling it quits until she climbed back on top of me and began to apologize between kisses, promising we were good to go. We were almost there anyway. I could leave now and say it happened. Still, I let her go back to trying to give me head like before. I scratched my nails against her broad shoulders and caught her looking up at me every so often with dark, pleading eyes.

After Esther got the job done, we lay there side by side, kissing again. I let my hand find its way around her arms. My knee rubbed slow circles between her legs. Despite her best attempts at minimalist masculine nonchalance, the occasional breathy sigh escaped her.

“Take care of me, baby,” she said at last. “Oh, I want you to take care of me, please, baby.”

I made some sort of affirmative noise through my tongue in her mouth and nudged my knee in deeper. I held it there for a second, which made her grit her teeth and bend her neck back, a tear streaming down the side of her face, hot. It turned out that her underwear was just like the rest of her possessions: clean, minimal, dark green. A seamless, genderless brief, already soaked through.

As I pushed the wet fabric to the side with an attempt at gentle grace, I realized that I smelled something. Not incense, not sweat and sex, not Esther’s aquatic-bergamot perfume. It smelled like…well, it smelled like someone had shit their pants.

Esther smelled it too. She sat up on her elbows, her face shifting into horror.

“Oh my god, Basil!” she yelled. “Basil, what the fuck. He shit all over the fucking floor!”

She sprung to her feet, and he scuttled out of the room, shit trailing down his legs as his tail tucked between them. I felt a horror of my own as she squatted down next to it and examined the pile from all sides.

“There aren’t any pumpkin seeds in here, dude,” she said. “Like, it’s totally smooth, there’s nothing in it. He can’t digest the seeds, and they didn’t come out. Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”

The seduction had evaporated from the room completely. The suave, androgynous temptress was gone. Now, she crouched like a frog in her crotch-soaked underwear, next to a pile of steaming dog shit. She was in too vulnerable a position for me to say anything about how she was being insane, how her dog was fine. Her eyes were pleading, but not in the same way they’d just been. I saw where this was going before she even said it.

“Dude, I’m so sorry, but I think he has to go to the emergency vet,” she said. “Would you…I’m sorry, this is so fucked up, but the only bus that goes to the vet on Kruger and Park is the 73, and it isn’t running this late. Would you mind driving? I can’t take him on my bike. I’ll pay you for gas, and I’ll make it up to you, I just don’t want him to croak on me…fuck…”

God damn it. I wanted to say no so badly, but now that she’d given me head, I felt like I owed her one. After all, I’d only just started teasing her when her grandma’s Frenchie had taken a dump on her floor. I should be grateful, I decided, that I was just the feminine object with the car, not the one with blue balls, who also had to clean poop off my rug.

So, Basil got settled in the back seat of my Civic, on a towel. He looked fine and a little confused as Esther debated buckling the seatbelt over him. As we drove, she twisted her rings around on her fingers and tried to make conversation but kept faltering into apologies. When we finally got there, the waiting room was full to the brim. The lady at the table said they could x-ray him, that they could take him back right then, but she asked if we would wait in the car for an hour or two because there was nowhere for us to sit. Supposedly, they would page us when there was space. I was in it for the long haul, with no way out.

In the mostly-filled parking lot, Esther was silent but wouldn’t look away from me. I could tell she was humiliated. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I leaned over and started working my fingers under her waistband. She didn’t protest. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all, just slid her pants and underwear down around her knees and reclined her seat.

It didn’t work. We were quiet again.

“You know, I’m sure I’m going to have to be here for a long time,” she said eventually. She seemed to feel that she’d let me down, maybe because she hadn’t gotten off and thought I had. “It could literally be all night. I guess…like, I guess I could probably get an Uber, if you have to go. I understand if you want to leave.”

Fucking of course I wanted to leave. I asked her if she was sure while she tugged her pants back up. She said it was okay, and I told her she could text me in the morning, to let me know if the dog was okay. She lingered getting out of the car, glancing over at me like she wanted to say something else, checking her pockets for her phone and keys.

“Thanks for all your help, dude,” she said, from outside my driver’s side window.

Then, she meandered, defeated, back into the emergency vet. I kind of felt bad, watching her walk away like that.

***

At nine o’clock the next morning, I felt bizarre. Did I like her? Surely not. Well, surely maybe. I wanted to see her again. I’d had a dream about her that night, and it was normal, and there were no dogs or pumpkin seeds. In my dream, I was so happy to hear her voice. I woke up in a haze, too early, the fog broken up by construction noise on my sidewalk. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I went out to get a coffee and wander the South Davison farmer’s market.

I’d spent all night wanting it to be over, not desiring the idea of her once she was there, and now I was back to wanting her. She was hot. She was so hot that girls went around crying about her to their friends, and I was the one who had driven her to the animal hospital and sat there while she fidgeted around in my passenger seat.

Just past the stand that sold the jalapeño bread, I turned the corner, my latte sweating in my hand. I looked toward a booth that sold jam and canned goods at the end of the row. And there she was.

There were dark circles under her eyes, but she still looked good, her worn-out jeans half-hanging off her hips, a braless cropped t-shirt up top. The other girl was nothing special, some curly-haired, plain femme, wearing those stupid patchwork hippie pants and sandals in October. I watched as Esther lightly brushed the girl’s lower back with her fingertips and leaned forward to laugh with her. Esther’s figure felt blurry in the light, different from how she’d looked standing in the vet hospital parking lot.

It was like a ringing in my ears that hummed down my whole body. My empty plastic cup crinkled in my fingers, the condensation rolling down to the ground. Why was there a pit in my stomach, looking at her now, her one hand around a bag of gala apples and the other so far down that girl’s waist that she may as well be fucking her, right there, right out between the parking spot lines on the ground? Who was this bitch? No one special, or at least I thought so. But maybe none of us were special to her. Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d take this girl home too, tousle her hair just right, and get ready to tell another sob story about her dead grandma’s dog for some pussy. Maybe Basil would eat something else poisonous and die this time, so he didn’t have to sit in the hallway while mommy went down on another girl.

I wanted to get mad and get even. I could let myself become another hysterical femme. But had I finally been bested? She’d managed it right under my nose. As I turned around to go home, I started looking at Captain Arlo’s Instagram account for info on the next Dyke Night. Maybe Lily would be working.

Harper Mimosa (she/her) writes poetry in Salt Lake City and adores her girlfriend, Lucinda. Find Harper at harpermimosa.com.

MJ Beach (she/her) is the co-host of Green Burial, a monthly reading for the strange in Pittsburgh, and her writing can be found in Bullshit Lit, Avant Appalachia, and YNST Magazine. Find MJ at @mjbeach_xo on Instagram.