Southern Gothic for the Rest of Us

Transformations is a collection of poems exploring the transmasculine relationship to religion, love, and the body. It is Ellis Billington

Set in a snowy midwestern suburb on Christmas Eve, “O Night Divine” is the story of a choir director who refuses to let a knee injury keep her from directing her singers at the annual holiday church service. Darlene For me, the feeling of creation is one of love, a building rush of euphoria that …

“An Odyssey of Touch” is a small collection of haiku about E.M. Billington’s journey with physical touch, from being deprived of it, to gaining and losing it, to finding it again. i. cold hands and dry eyes my family does not hug unless saying bye ii. staple remover pinch my skin under the desk …

“Miss,” a new poem from E.M. Billington, about gender euphoria — that feeling when at last being recognized as who you truly are. she would not normally go out wearing the olive-green dress and red lipstick she dreamed about when she was young, mistakenly being raised as a boy with bruised knees and cropped …

Set in the same world as the short story, “Bridges,” Billington writes again of what it means to exist as a queer person in a small southern town, illustrating the conflicting senses of isolation and community this can bring. The day Police Chief Blair Blackmore and I found the ninety-nine year-old woman dead in the …