You Inside Me

by Tori Curtis

It'll be fun, he'd said. Everyone's doing it. You don't have to be looking for romance, it's just a good way to meet people.

"I don't think it's about romance at all," Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. "I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he'd have to resign."

"That's 'cause we've never had a vampire congressman," Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. "Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light."

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 57 for May 21st, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you.

GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service.

If you're looking for more queer science fiction to listen to, there's a full audio book available of the Lightspeed Magazine "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" special issue, featuring stories by a large number of queer authors, including  John Chu, Chaz Brenchley, Rose Lemberg, and many others.

To download a free audiobook today, go to http://www.audibletrial.com/GlitterShip and choose an excellent book to listen to, whether that’s "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" or something else entirely.

Today I have a story and a poem for you. The poem is "Dionysus in London" by Tristan Beiter.

Tristan Beiter is a student at Swarthmore College studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He loves reading poetry and speculative fiction, some of his favorite books being The Waste Land, HD’s Trilogy, Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found crafting absurdities with his boyfriend or yelling about literary theory.

Dionysus in London

by Tristan Beiter

The day exploded, you know.

Last night a woman
with big bouffant hair told
me, “Show me a story
where the daughter runs into a stop
sign and it literally turns into a white flower.”

I fail to describe
a total eclipse and the throne
of petrified wood sank
into the lakebed.

James made love to Buckingham
while I pulled the honeysuckle
to me, made a flower crown for
the leopards flanking me
while I watched red
and white invert themselves, white
petals pushing from the center of the sign
as the post wilted until all
that remained was a giant lotus
on the storm grate waiting
to rot or wash away.

I let it stay there while the Scottish
king hid behind the Scottish play
and walked behind me, one eye out
for the mark left when locked in.
You go witchy in there—or at least
you—or he, or I—learn to be afraid
of the big coats and brass
buttons, like the ones in every hall
closet; you never know if they will turn,
like yours, into bats and bugs and giant
tarantulas made from wire hangers.

The woman showed me
our reflections in the shop window
while one or the other
man in the palace polished
the silver for his lover’s table
and asked me who
I loved; I decided
on the cream
linen, since the wool
was too close to the pea coat
that hung