Pretty Handsome

Separated by five decades, excommunication and death; your image resembles me. The way

your frown, your mouth and mine hold our truth in photos because we know no masks, we wear

our truth like mad mugs in disgust for costumes poorly placed over our masculinity. Yours an

early 1900’s corset black, mine, a faux battle dress and garrison to merino wool raspberry beret,

not airborne but property of an airborne battalion in Fayette-nam, Fort Bragg, First in Flight,

North Carolina, Home of Delta Force and Robin Sage—green beret training grounds and I

wonder if you ever travelled outside our home state to see for yourself what the textbooks

neglect to mention. I wonder if you even found out there were others like us all along, hiding

under a vast array of masks and costumes, marriages and kids, or hung as witches and burned or worked to death as faggots or enemies of the state, that’s what the nazis call us but I

hope you found a way to love who you loved and that special one who loved you back knew

exactly who you were and loved you because of that who you were. Did you find a way to love yourself even when the family refused to love you back? Was your husband, father, brother an alcoholic too, were you like my living aunts, Deborah and Tracey who were too afraid to acquire

a taste for fermented hops. Somehow I doubt it. I think you drank it like I had to just to survive

the reflection of yourself—a person forced into cis-drag—a brutal conversion therapy. Did you

let your girlfriends paint your face and pull your eyebrows out at their follicles just so you could become more becoming? I hope you became what you wanted and not only what they made you.

t love smith (they/them) is a queer, trans/non-binary poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land. They are a Stonecoast MFA Candidate and Assistant Development Director at WMPG. t is the founder of Trans Poetics Archive. The archive published Maine’s First Transgender Poetry Anthology, Monster Beauties, in May 2025. t’s poetry has been published in new words press, Island Ink, and presented on local radio shows and podcasts.

First Date

In a tucked away corner in St. Boniface Cemetery, under the deep shade of the maples,

two boys, young men, on a date, I assume, two boys sit so close that their leg hairs touch.

Next to them, on the grass, a bottle, a paper plate, and a knife, the guys have been cutting

up a melon, the flesh is in their mouths, the juice remains, sticky on their fingers, and it

runs off the plate, and into the grass, and down into the soldier’s grave where they sit.

Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in 2 Rivers View, Action/Spectacle, I-70 Review, The San Pedro River Review, The Madrid Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.

Self-portrait as Postage Stamp

I had purpose once. For a small price,

affixed and franked, I sailed

the world, gave wing to words,

knowing not wherefrom or to,

nor the intent or how I’d be received.

That was for others, the tongue

that applied me and the hand

that would unfold some meaning

from whatever message I had

tucked inside. Humble emissary,

though I bear the face of my nation,

mostly I lived duffled in darkness,

shuttled between a here and there,

scrutinized, sorted, then slipped

through a tight slot in a door.

Say what you will. I adhered.

Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (Littoral Books, 2023), received a Gold Medal at the 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. Other honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and The New England Review. He lives in Eliot, Maine.