This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Girlhood x A Haunting by Jessica Rae Bergamino (Driftwood Press, 2025).
Strange Instructions
Nancy has faced many mysteries, but her body remains the biggest one. She draws off her sweater, ignoring the shivers that trample her through. She examines her breasts in the mirror, holding them up and out, wondering at their weight in her small hands. How strange, she thinks coolly, how unlike herself! She bends down to watch them hang, presses her fingers into the crease of her stomach. She still isn’t what her father wants her to be, is still covered in soft dark fur. She drops her skirt to the floor and studies the way her thighs give rise to her hips, how bird-pecked they are, how frightening. How strange to see clearly where she ends and begins, to understand where she opens and how she closes. To feel that even this can be solved. She lets out a long, high wail that shakes the windows in their sills.
Jessica Rae Bergamino (she/her) is an award-winning queer femme writer and teaching artist who makes her home on the lands of the Coast Salish and Duwamish peoples, known by settlers as Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Girlhood x a Haunting (Driftwood Press, 2025), UNMANNED (Noemi Books, 2018) and chapbooks from Sundress Publications and dancing girl press. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Utah, where she held Steffenson-Cannon and Francis Camoin fellowships. Her writing has received support from Hedgebrook, Mineral School, The Community of Writers, and the Taft-NIcholson Center for the Humanities.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality,BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.