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Editorial Note by Max Wallis

David Tait’s Taxi and Serum sit inside that charged space where queer life is both ordinary and illicit; tender and edged with risk. These are not grand declarations. They are moments: a hand resting too long in the back of a cab, the smell of tissues in a bin bag, a text sent at 3am when sleep isn’t happening.

What I love about these poems is their restraint. The city flashes by; a boyfriend snores in the next room. Nothing explodes. And yet everything is happening. Desire here is threaded through secrecy, through glances at the driver’s eyes, through the knowledge that intimacy is both hidden and loud.

This section of Issue One gathers poems that ask what we carry forward from queer histories — the codes, the caution, the thrill — and what we refuse. Tait’s work reminds us that sometimes the inheritance is not a manifesto but a touch, a tunnel, a text message we shouldn’t send and send anyway.

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