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The cut lines my wrist like a port-wine stain; turning into bluets with the warring sun. The kitchen tile clings to my skin with the force of a thousand men. I spread my legs like butter for the officer who feeds me pancakes at 5am to keep me from coding. He fans my skirt out; peacocking, if you will. A broken tooth is my bargaining chip. Daddy says I mustn’t talk to strangers, except for those he brings to my bedroom door. I find their fingernails, upturned, in my cereal, and I tell Daddy nevermore. Cherry Earnshaw is a writer who lives underground.

I wear my sin like a sinner does, like I was born to it. I was never cast out, because I was never in the garden to begin with; I never repented my Original Sin. I saw Lucifer’s lipsticked grin and I told him, give me more. I told him, let’s have fun. Bite the apple. Kiss the snake. Signed my name in blood, sold my soul without a second glance. Mummy’s crying for you, he crooned, she’ll pray for you every night. But no number of prayers can save the damned, and I’ve damned myself willingly. There’s no me without him, anymore — we dance to the infernal percussion of crackling hellfire, and we kiss like the Ouroboros swallows his tail, no end and no beginning. When the Judgment comes, I’ll burn brighter than any of Heaven’s angels — me and my kin, carrying marks upon our skin, and they’ll call us monsters and predators. (They already do.) And we’ll set this world ablaze with our love, scorching the earth until all that’s left is children of fire and vengeance. As we paint the streets with furious music, we’ll chant in unison: We just wanted to be. A word from the author: An experimental endeavour into religious imagery surrounding LGBT+ themes. My mother is a devout Christian, and arguments with the Sunday school teachers were ubiquitous throughout my childhood.

1972 Did you know that in the summer of 1972 I ran the merry-go-round in Springbank Park and am really not too sure how I did not run it right into the ground or maybe even up on its side and roll it into the river, with its grinding gears and pounding eight-track, the thing relentlessly whirling, gyrating from early morning to the dark of night when I switched on the lights and if you came with your young daughter just before I started to roll the tarps down, for sure I would let you ride for free, there would be just the two of you in the twilight damp, you and she would be haloed there on your horses, high in the merry-go-round air, and me, resting there on the guardrail chains below you, every fourteen seconds, waving back. Poem about my concrete apartment building facing the one my wife now lives in and how we periodically meet in the expanse of parking lot between us to exchange boxes, as if they were prisoners. Boxes which soon emptied out onto counters, creating mounds of things which were then ignored and almost thrown out until I found it--what I had thought was a simple key ring made from one of our dead niece’s memorial wrist bands but, when I looked, discovered my wife had looped the band through my wedding ring and, in this way, returned the ring to me. Hard that it was almost an afterthought, without mention, just left there in the bottom of a box, no envelope, nothing from her hand to mine. The ring and the wrist band still are, and may always remain, intertwined like this-- two tragedies, one more than the other but, in the meantime, no warning to be aware, as put back together as you thought you were, that there was still one thing left to break you, hidden in a box. A note from the author: A handful of my recent work. Started writing back in the late eighties, had work in such journals as University of Windsor Review, Dandelion, The Antigonish Review, and others. A hiatus followed while raising two families, with work in recent years in Sledgehammer Lit, Synaeresis, High Shelf Press and Cathexis Northwest Press. Winner of the Antler River Poetry contest in 2020 and 2022.

three blocks I said I wanted to get away So you drove me Right into The lake You said we could go camping But we never did So I wrote 100 love poems And played in the dirt And flirted with the current How many times will we walk this circle How many times will I walk The three blocks to your apartment the first day of june (2022) An anxious achiness in my arms A longing in my teeth My fingers graze my scalp Trying to set the feeling loose I got home From my grandmother’s funeral A package Waiting for me in my apartment building’s stairwell My new ring Crafted by My ex lover’s ex lover The irony of it makes me smirk My secret Returning to Chicago Feels very unsophisticated today Staring at the green and orange 7 eleven sign Sometimes I romanticize these things But today, I take it at face value The old woman in the Thai restaurant smiles at me It’s getting hard to imagine a life Where I am Living for anyone other than myself bones playing you over and over in my head soaking up your voice notes like the sun this summer I want to tell you everything we met and switched places this sad song that sad song make me a song out of this thick hot air everybody’s looking for it but they can’t find it because we have it now am I you or are you me? I want to touch all your muscles and all your bones Morgan St Laurent is an American / Canadian poet and model. Her work focuses on the documentation of mundane life & human emotions. She currently lives in Chicago.

Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay Courtenay Schembri Gray is a writer from the North of England. She is 1/4 Maltese, and happened to find herself hit by a car when she was eleven. You’ll find her work in an array of journals such as A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Misery Tourism, Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Hobart, Bath Flash Fiction, and many more. She will often post on her blog: www.courtenayscorner.com Twitter: @courtenaywrites Instagram: @courtenaywrites

Traces The moon is a burnt orange goddess traversing the quay. Beads of rain arrive as shooting stars down a misty window on the starboard side, blurring city lights and memories old and new. Gold flecks adorn a velvet ceiling and silver candelabras stand to attention on circular tables, arms taut. The dance floor is a terpsichorean collage of sequins and twirls ─ your graceful steps an untethered voyage to a warmer place and time, like an Arctic Tern chasing the sun to the end of the earth; each summer an invitation to begin anew. Rebirth is running half-way to Athens, or letting go of the past in the divine heights of Bhutan. At the end of the Camino de Santiago trail, a pilgrim glimpses the boundless Atlantic, and sees traces of herself. Moments A lone paperbark on Noble Street weeps. Weary branches clutch the frayed rope of June’s dearest swing, flailing listless in the barely-there breeze. The picket fence is turning to ash — scene of longing and long goodbyes, where you said every death is the end of an untold story. Since you left, moments lie dormant. They stir on the wings of mundane cues like running through Hyde Park as swans convene in the autumn fog. I dreamt you planted a lemon tree beside a monument to the dead. I prefer the one where you tend flowers on the porch while bees mingle in the midday sun, and the village it takes to raise a child binds you — breaking any fall. David J. Kennedy is a poet and non-fiction writer from Sydney, Australia. Themes of aging, wonder, and mortality feature prominently in his writing, and he has work published, or forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Jupiter Review, Words & Whispers, and Boats Against The Current Poetry Magazine. Twitter: @DavidJKennedy_

I want to be a person who calls to the ocean Howls at it, really And hears a roar in response A crest, an invitation to dive into a riptide And be rebirthed with a tail of rainbowed silver to tease the moon and gills for breath I want to swallow thunder And spit typhoons so gently To toss the ships that crowd my whales steal their songs With drunken all-you-can-eat norovirus Have a tea party with a stonefish and when I come to surface Once every couple of years caught in some fishing net They’ll cut me loose And say, “Don’t touch her. It’s bad luck to trap an old Brooklyn mermaid.” Anne Perez is a lifelong New Yorker who explores the extraordinary of the ordinary through fiction and sporadic blogging. Recent fiction has been published in Lamplight, The Northwest Review, and Canned Magazine. She can usually be found blathering on Twitter @MrsFringe

When I think of you I am afraid I think of you Kinder than you were. What about you did I invent? Remembering you wrong feels like some kind of murder. Remembering you at all feels like I could never kick you out properly. You’re like a housecat, like some kind of mould- like asbestos in a character property, like a goddamn ghost. If you came back tomorrow you'd know the key is still in the hollowed out bit of the porch. I don't have a welcome mat to put it under, because that'd be too obvious. You are still welcome because I want to know how you are doing. This is what they call morbid curiosity. We may as well be dead, and this may as well be some kind of afterlife. But I don't know which afterlife and I don't know what that says about the both of us. Perhaps because we aren't religious. Perhaps because we're still alive. Perhaps this all means less than I think it does. My dishes and glasses out on the rack tell you I live alone. I ask about you but I don't know how to stop talking about myself. I want you to know how much better I am than I used to be. But that won't make us friends again. It won't do anything but remind you why you left if I keep being myself. Still, I might as well give you this memory of me- all grown up, all grown out. I can't remember how you knew me. I can't remember if you even actually liked me at all. All I can remember is the glare of the sun in the summer, the endless heat, the woods- in the winter, your bare hands, my pink gloves. I think you might have even been embarrassed by me, but I really don't know. I doubt you remember the gloves. Finally. I feel the need to say I'm sorry to you. I don't know what I'm sorry for. You were, I think, my first failure. My first ex-something. I keep bringing you out of the floorboards to say goodbye. You haven't seen my floorboards because I've redone my room since you saw it, but this photocopy persists. You are saying something kind in the kind of tone that made me wonder if you meant it. Just because we're not still friends doesn't mean you didn't mean it. Dear photocopy. Did you mean it? RJ Danvers is a British, queer, and transgender poet that started writing poetry in 2019. Their work is inspired mainly by Richard Siken and their experiences with intersectional queer identity- as w a love for ambiguous metaphors. You can find them at @rjdanvers on Twitter and @r.j.danvers on Instagram.

She is spirited, they say, a kind word for difficult. She is easily frustrated and prone to tantrums. Her preschool teacher once commented to me that “T is so funny, I always hear her growling under her breath.” It wasn’t funny to me. I knew this to be something that she would do to help calm herself in public spaces so that she wouldn’t blow a gasket. The teacher had no idea what an impressive tactic this was. As a child I was nothing like my daughter. I was a pleaser. She is a fighter, and she taught me how to be a fighter as well. To fight for her. ** The table in the conference room at Mason Middle School is made of blonde wood and is at least 12 feet long. It fills the entire room window to doors. I am the first one to arrive at the meeting because I am a punctual person and this is my job. I go to meetings about my child. Lots of meetings. I am rarely organized but always punctual. And since I am the first to arrive, I have my pick of where to sit. I want to sit at the head of the table on either end. The power position. I know from experience they will want me seated in the middle. I know because they have moved me there before. “Here you go, Mom. Why don’t you sit here in the center so we can all see you.” Which doesn’t make any sense because they can all see me perfectly fine. In the early years when I first started going to meetings, I was green and naive. When they called me “Mom” I thought it was endearing and friendly. I thought they want to help my child, they want her to thrive, they want her to blossom. It took me until the middle school years to figure out that by using the term “Mom” instead of calling me by my name they were keeping me in my place. I wanted to be liked. I wanted my daughter to be liked. Being liked served no one. ** The reason for this meeting is to discuss the results of a test that was administered to T to measure her cognitive abilities and intellectual abilities. The name of the test is The Woodcock-Johnson test. This is not a joke. It is also not a joke that the school principal’s name is Dick Seamen. After the hour long pelting of information that leaves me feeling drained and emotional, the school psychologist asks: “Does “Mom” have any questions or thoughts?” I have only one question for the group. One I don’t verbalize. “Did Mr. Seamen ever think of going by the name Richard on the days he delivers the results of a test named Woodcock-Johnson”? Instead, I respond, “No questions.” A word from the author: I am the mom, and this piece is about some comic relief while trying to navigate an otherwise treacherous educational system

After the third interruption, I lost my train of thought again. “It must have been a lie,” my mother quipped. Why the hell would I lie about this? And who came up with that stupid saying in the first place? (I do a quick Google check) Apparently, everyone’s uncle, bubbe, and mother, that’s who. “Ma, you know I hate when you say that! It's because you interrupted me again. Do you want to know what happened at the appointment or not?” “Jesus Maura, relax, it’s just an expression,” my mother said and rolled her eyes. “Just stop, ok?” “I’ll try, honey.” “The doctor ordered an MRI to confirm….” “Did you go to Dr. Gilbert, like Auntie Helen recommended?” “Yes, I did. The doctor is concerned….” “Did you remember to park a block away on Elm, so you wouldn’t have to pay for parking? The parking is very expensive. When your father was sick, I racked up a hundred and fifty dollars in parking fees in just the first week, until Auntie Helen told me about that shopping store lot. She was a savior!” “Yeah, Ma, I did. Listen, if you don’t want to hear what the doctor said, I will just go home. Bob wants to get over to his parents’ place by three o’clock anyway.” “NO! Don’t leave, Maura. I’m listening.” “They also scheduled a biopsy, but they wanted the MRI results beforehand, to see if there is anything else concerning.” “Concerning? What do you mean anything else concerning, Maura?” “Ma…” “But they haven’t even tested anything yet….” “Ma, let me finish. He said…” “You need a second opinion,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “The doctor said that he’s looking for signs of…there was a word he used, something about the liver. Jesus, Ma! I forget what I was saying!” “Well then,” she said as she pulled me into her arms, “it must have been a lie.”

Chicken Plant The line chief brags of smelling girls on the rag Thursday he says he dreams of eating me I don’t tell him my dream— hooks rip his neck as he swings toward me handling the blade Grief Daddy built biceps working for US Steel smelting iron in heat that humbled men Now I could break his arm brittle as kindling over my knee He used to let me walk up his body balancing my hands on his fingertips till I flew from his shoulders They began to sag after Mama fell no moon out and died while he slept Daddy saved the hair from her brush wrapped in Kleenex and stored in a wooden box beside their bed Every night he rubs strands against his cheek Mama’s Rug Is An Elegy I Cannot Write Lush red wool bordering blue hydrangeas her rug unfurls at night By morning loose strands scatter I weave into a mourning shawl pray for her return Chella Courington (she/her) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She was raised in the Appalachian south and now lives in California with another writer and two feline boys. Her recent microchaps of poetry are Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project; Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press; and Lynette’s War, Ghost City Press.

Are you thriving? The social pressure to flourish—to be living life to the full, to be happy with life and love and work, to be seizing every moment—seems to get stronger by the day. Perhaps that is just how it feels for someone in their mid-thirties, navigating a career path and relationships, but the expectation that one thrives is ever-present. In your thriving life, are you: eating five (or more) a day, drinking three litres of water, doing yoga and going to the gym, meditating first thing, reading the Booker Prize shortlist, hanging out with old friends and making new ones, doing Wordle every morning, finishing the newest Netflix show, going out on dates every weekend (if you’re single) or being spontaneous and buying sex toys (if you’re in a couple or throuple, or more)? Are you doing all of the things to make sure that you feel as though your life is full and that you are giving yourself permission and space to flourish, to take flight, to live—cringe—your best life? If you use the Harvard University Flourishing Measure(1), you can find out just how much you are. You provide personal scores to questions like, ‘How satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?’, or ‘In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?’ Then you are asked if you agree with the following: ‘I understand my purpose in life’. I am not sure about you, but these questions freak me out. I do not think I could begin to put a 0-10 number against them. ‘As a whole’ or ‘In general’ feel so vague as to be unhelpful in this context. In general, I am neither fully happy nor unhappy—I am an ongoing cluster of conflicting feelings and emotions. Depends on the day, on the minute, on how many Teams meetings I have been in that morning. To take the broad view demands a kind of reflexivity that I do --------------- 1 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/04/well/mind/languishing-definition-flourishing-quiz.html not have. Or, perhaps, it takes a kind of self-belief and certainly to say, ‘I know my purpose’ and carry on unimpeded. I also do not have this ability. I have been thinking about what it means to flourish after recently hearing the word and its synonyms used a few times in quick succession. First, my therapist mentioned it in relation to one of my friends. This person is incredibly close to me, even though they live far away. Perhaps, indeed, it is the distance that enables us to be so connected and (emotionally) proximate. My therapist said, offhandedly, as if this was something I already knew: the reason they are so important is because you enable each other to flourish. This took me aback in the moment, as do most of the things my therapist says. That was not how I had framed this friend in my head. Second, an ex-student of mine said on Twitter—apropos of my travels around Paris in the late autumn sunshine—that I looked as though I was ‘thriving’, even though my image caption was ‘sorry for being obnoxious’. Third, when I noticed that most of my houseplants were crawling with fungus gnats (who knew they existed?) I delved online to find out why my plants were not—and this was the word used frequently—flourishing. Was it over- or under-watering? Too much light, or too much shade? Not enough drainage? Or, worst of all, were gnats breeding beneath the surface of the damp soil, only to emerge in constellations like some alien spawn. My friend told me that the gnats in her plants ended up biting her and her housemate, so I guess I got away lightly when only a few avocado plants withered away. In a short space of time, I was confronted again and again with the idea that I might or might not be flourishing, in part because of the connections to others, to the spaces that we can move through, or the literal and metaphorical soil in which we take root. 2 ‘To flourish’ derives, of course, from ‘blossom or grow’ (Old French and Latin), where blooming and flowering morphed from the literal to the figurative: to prosper and thrive. Its transitive meaning—of brandishing a weapon, which is waved about—comes a little later, which in turn gives way to a sense of the ostentatious. Here, the sword also becomes the pen, with embellished handwriting and inky flourishes. And from there, other flourishes—musical, artistic—take hold, so that to flourish is to grow and blossom, but also sometimes in a camp or over-the-top way. Flourishing moves both up and out, then: as the growth of the flower stem, the opening of its petals, and then the swish of beauty in the bloom. To grow, here, means not simply growth toward upwardness and straightness(2), but also a lush unfurling, a bend towards the light. 3 What does it mean to flourish in an anti-queer world when we are told that ‘it gets better’, that equal marriage and adoption laws are passed, and Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race are watched around the world? What if it does not get better? What if, amidst the growing anti-queer sentiment and anti-queer legislation levelled against all people under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, not least trans people and queer people of colour, things get worse? Or simply feel like they’re getting worse, which is just as painful. I say this not to be negative or pessimistic, nor even realistic, but to state plainly that for some queer people in the world they do not see a way forward where things improve, or that they might, indeed, flourish. Queer flourishing, we might say, is the potential flourishing of queer people, spaces, and desires in an anti-queer world. It is the vitality of queerness, the possibility of thriving, --------------- 2 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009). even when the deck is stacked against you, and when the world which you inhabit is consciously and unconsciously designed for people other than you. To flourish queerly or to flourish as a queer person—they might not be identical—is, in some ways, to flounder amidst joy; to find momentary bliss or fragmentary breath; to see an open horizon with a gaudy sunset while realising that said horizon is just a photograph with edges and, thus, limitations. To grow and bloom and prosper as a queer person—and here I am not suggesting all queer people are the same or face hardships equally—might mean to flourish away from the sunlight, or only in private and safe spaces, or only after one’s work uniform has come off, or only on a dancefloor where no-one knows your name. Sure, anyone can feel this way, but the experience of queerness as a kind of social negativity, an otherness, an excess that is materially pushed aside, is I think quite singular. Yet even that singularity is differentiated by the intersections of race and gender and class and disability and so on. As a cis white gay with a good job—depending who you ask—I know that my experiences of curtailment are not the same as a trans person’s, or a Black drag king’s, or a young poor lesbian living far from a city. Yet. There is something in our shared or common fate of queerness, outside of the norms, that means when we flourish it might only be in fits and starts. To think of flourishing outside of heteronormativity and white capitalist heteropatriarchy is almost oxymoronic. How does one get outside of those toxic waters, as many queer critics and critics of colour have argued, when those limiting normative forces are the water and not merely in it? 4 The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes about the ‘brown commons’, which is that nebulous non-hierarchical gathering of browned people and places and nonhuman objects. By ‘brown’ and ‘browned’, Muñoz is talking about the processes of racialization, the general ways in which certain populations are rendered brown and other. Brownness, for Muñoz, is partly defined by the way that these subjects and objects ‘suffer and strive together’, the ‘commonality of their ability to flourish under duress and pressure’. Muñoz is talking about the ways that brownness emerges both in its relation to normative society’s devaluation of anything outside of whiteness, but also in its resistance to that devaluation. While brown people and things withstand attempts to ‘degrade their value and diminish their worth’, brownness nonetheless ‘smolder[s] with a life and persistence’. I want to think about this idea in relation to queerness more broadly (though of course Muñoz is writing about brownness as, and with, a kind of queerness). What might it mean to see queers of all kinds—those outside of heteronormativity—as flourishing under duress? How might we even attend to and celebrate flourishing when it is curtailed so thoroughly and violently? Does degradation (or attempts at it) hinder flourishing from taking place in certain ways? 5 Contrary to the maxim ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, the eponymous character in James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) says ‘maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, and so you can stand less and less’. Giovanni is slowly losing the meaning that he has had in his life—ushered in primarily through the love and attention of the American, David—and thus frames existence as a slow depletion. In his mind, when bad things happen, they gradually wear us down to the point of no resistance. And that is what happens in the novel. From the very first scene, David is looking back on the past, and on Giovanni’s life, as Giovanni is about to be killed at the guillotine. The spectre of that death lingers over the rest of the novel, especially those heady and tense moments when David and Giovanni first meet and talk into the early hours, and something like love or lust takes hold. We see them flirt and have sex, knowing what horrors are about to snub out their flourishing flame. In my darker moments, Giovanni’s statement rings vaguely true. I try to resist the feelgood and (oftentimes) religiously inflected notion that we only get what we can stand in life; that everything happens for a reason; that we can never take on too much. I do not necessarily believe that. Sometimes people are worn down—by life, by others, by institutions, by the very command to live life to the full, to pull yourself up—so much so that they cannot stand it. Standing up becomes less and less viable. What happens when we take Giovanni’s point seriously: that when bad things happen, they can stop us from standing, from withstanding so much? If things do not get better—even if you come out, or meet your ‘person’, or find the job to end all jobs—and in fact sometimes get worse—because your coming out is met with rejection, or your person leaves you, or you do not feel comfortable being ‘out’ in the office—then flourishing is a kind of sick fantasy, an unachievable goal. Again, this is not pessimism or needless negativity, but instead a queer skewer in the side of social injunctions to feel good and thrive. Read this way, we have to look after ourselves and each other in more specific and attentive ways. Not in the framework of the good-life-as-ideal, but in the sense that flourishing can only happen from a position or grounding of honesty and, perhaps, instability. What would happen if we helped each other thrive without the necessity to thrive always, and only in recognisable ways? 6 As a young person entering adolescence, I did not see many versions of flourishing for gay or other queer people. There were moments of happiness when a gay couple kissed on Eastenders or Corrie but it never felt fully liberatory. Plus, there was always someone in the background looking on with disdain, or, indeed, members of the public writing in to Points of View to complain about the liberals ‘shoving sexuality down their throats’ (people who, in using that phrase, highlighted their own sexual frustrations). There was Queer as Folk, for sure, but I did not get to see that show until way later. It was near-impossible to find moments to watch TV like that at home. Something like Will and Grace—tame, problematic, and often not very queer at all—did show the difficulties of flourishing but I was not allowed to watch it as my mother found it off-putting (she’s different now). A show like that, which I could occasionally grab moments of when my parents were out, offered a view of thriving and curtailed gayness—just look at Jack, who is carefree, sexually confident, and living his best life; and Will, forever frustrated by his dependency on Grace, his best friend. On Sunday nights on BBC Radio 1, though, the show Sunday Surgery aired, where young people wrote or called in with their emotional and sexual problems. The two hosts—in between the latest hits—would offer advice and solutions to these dilemmas. It was the first time, I think, that I heard queer people like me (i.e., young people, not necessarily living in London) speak aloud out their fears and anxieties. They talked about dating and kissing and sex and STIs and fitting in. It was on so late that I could not listen to it live—for fear of waking my parents—so I recorded it onto my Minidisk player (dated reference) and listened the next day as I walked to school or did my paper-round. This show was a rare moment that I glimpsed something like a flourishing queer life that might, at some point, be available to me. The people calling in asked how they might lead a life that was authentic, or, if not in those words, a life that would not be stalked by sadness and bullying and that gut-level fear of standing out. I still have that fear sometimes. To flourish, we are told, is to let go of those fears and be you, live your life. But what if, as a queer person, your ‘life’ is scripted ahead of time, by people who do not recognise your life as one worthy of living? 7 He grabbed my hand this one time and would not let go until we reached the train station, even when groups of men, who would otherwise have caused me panic, by virtue of their massing, walked past. I do not even remember if people clocked that we were two men holding hands, or if they cared, because I did not care in that moment, and that was such a new experience for me. For sure, I was thinking about the fact that we were holding hands and marching down the street drunk on wine and horniness, but the experience of touching his cold fingers and showing the world that I was locked in step with him (queer? happy? flourishing?) was transformative. I do not mean that flippantly. It was not something I had done with men before this, because of fear, because of shame, because of an inability perhaps to see beyond the limitations placed upon my identity. Handholding was the thing that other people did: straight people, people in love, people who did not mind PDAs, people who wanted to flaunt what they had. But in this moment, on a cold winter night in London, as we swayed (gayly) down Tottenham Court Road, not knowing what was ahead of us—in all the senses—I felt like I was temporarily flourishing. I would not have called it that in the moment, but that was the feeling: of blooming, awkwardly, in the knowledge that someone could throw insults or bottles at us at any moment and that I did not really care. 8 We might think that flourishing happens when we have what we want—a stable job, a friendship circle—and we then use that platform to lift off and bloom, to mix metaphors. Of all the critical discourses, psychoanalysis has helped us most to ask better questions about who we are, where we came from, who we might want to be, and, indeed, what we want. As Freud and many writers after him have suggested, we might not know what we want in life, even if we think we do(3). That is the first thing: acknowledging that what we think we want might not be what we really want (whatever ‘really’ means here). Or, noticing that we might not know what we want altogether. But the second problem, if it is a problem, is that our desires outstrip our objects. In other words, what we want always exceeds the possibility of getting it—our wants and our wanted objects are not fully compatible. The things that we desire (people, objects, fantasies) cannot completely satisfy us, not only because they might not be the thing we truly desire, but also because even if they were what we desired, our desires would always overshoot those things. Psychoanalysis, put another way, tells us that flourishing might be possible if only we gave up on the idea of tying that flourishing to particular states of being, or people, or ideas of living. For example, whatever our visions of ‘the good life’ are, i.e., whether those involve kids or family or life in the suburbs or weekends of hedonism, there is something about the idea of the good life which will always slip from our grasp. Think about Olivia Pope in Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal (if that’s not too dated a reference): Olivia’s vision of the good life shifts often in this series, even within an episode, so that in one moment she wants to make jam with Fitz in Vermont, and in the next she wants to ‘stand in the sun’ with Jake on a desert island. (To even backtrack and explain these scenes of the good life would take many --------------- 3 Adam Phillips, On Getting Better (2021). thousands of words). Though, all the while, we know that her other version of the good life is one in which she dons the ‘white hat’ of moral clarity and helps others, because that’s who Olivia Pope is and that is what she does best. Providing a service to help others get out of trouble, or secure justice, or just to get back that which was taken from them—that is Olivia’s real good life, but she does not always want to confront it because that version of life is one in which she is alone, not tied to a tall white hunk, and thrives merely through her job/role and co-workers. It is the good life curtailed. To flourish might be to give up on certain ideas about ourselves and others altogether. 9 ‘A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. That is the opening line of cultural critic Lauren Berlant’s 2011 book Cruel Optimism. Berlant, in one swift sentence, destroys our conventional ideas of optimism—as happily wedded to good objects—by suggesting that these relations can go awry. Whether the thing you desire is ‘food, or a kind of love’, or ‘a fantasy of the good life, or a political project’, the relation becomes cruel when ‘the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’. In Olivia Pope’s case, the men who sustain her desires and the fantasies of living that accompany them (jam, the sun) are simultaneously those unavailable objects that actually impede her flourishing. How can she flourish with men who are not viable love interests? The fantasies and stories about the future, about love, are just that—stories. But they also sustain Olivia’s desires even though she knows that such optimism might be her undoing. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant is thinking not simply about the objects we become attached to—people, political projects, fantasies of living—but also the ‘conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings’. The relation of cruel optimism exists in context; we desire the fantasies of the good life, of properly flourishing, in light of the dominant fantasies of our age and culture. Ideas of the good life today are not the same as those of our grandparents or their grandparents, of course, though sometimes we might pretend that they are. Put differently, what if the fantasies of flourishing that sustained previous generations are cruelly optimistic because they no longer function in our contemporary world? What if, too, these fantasies are cruel because they are heteronormative? What if, after all, to flourish is the domain of only certain people who are able to traverse social scenes in particular ways? An obstacle to our flourishing: a description of queerness curtailed. 10 Are you thriving? Do you have a sense of what it might mean to thrive? As a queer person, I cannot have faith that the society in which I move is also signed up for my flourishing, whatever that could look like. When homosexuality is criminalised in over 70 countries, and Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill is signed into law, and anti-trans laws around the United States proliferate, and LGBTQ+ hate crimes have tripled in the UK since 2015, and ‘gender critical’ ideology is working to undo equality law—how are we meant to go on, other than haltingly, or in fear? To flourish under duress is still flourishing, but nonetheless amidst confinement and curtailment. To flourish as someone attempts to degrade you (directly or indirectly) is to flourish with the mark of negativity. These are not bad things. This is not a critique. Queer folks have always flourished in dire circumstances; they, we, continue. Flourishing, to take the flower metaphor further, is not a single state or even simply a progressive one. A flower grows, sure, but it also dies off and comes back another year; it opens and closes depending on sunlight; it arches its stem as light moves across its field of vision; it helps with pollination and allows bees to flourish, but the pollen also gets in my eyes and nose and stops me in my tracks. Flourishing queerly, amidst violence and trauma and history and shame and subjection and subjugation and slurs and nonnormativity, is perhaps a set of positions, a non-linear process, rather than some fixed trajectory. But really, I guess, what else is there? Christopher Lloyd (he/him) is a writer and academic, teaching in the UK. He is the author of two books, a micro-chap, as well as poems and stories that have appeared in Fruit Journal, Queerlings, The Cardiff Review, and elsewhere.