When I miss America, when I miss the heady American cycle of extremity and shame— glutting and then repenting with such extremity the penitence is itself a kind of glutting, abstaining until the abstinence is as voluptuous as excess—I look at r/gooncaves.

A few definitions. Gooning refers to entering a state of trance-like, porn-fueled masturbation. It’s edging plus: the idea is to hold off orgasm essentially indefinitely and fall into a sort of a drooling state of ecstasy. Consuming a profound amount of porn is integral to this.

Autumn/Winter 2024
Guest Art Editor: Enuma Okoro
Artists: Loie Hollowell, Firelei Báez, Ana Prvački and Yulia Mahr
Writers: Geoffrey Mak, Frankie Barnet, Hanna Nordenhök (trans. Saskia Vogel), Can Xue (trans. Karen Gernant), John Burnside, Sulaiman Addonia, Claudia Cravens, Kira Josefsson, Jacqui Cornetta, Agri Ismaïl, Emily Waddell, Jessica Stoya, Liara Roux and Brian Lin
Poets: Juliana Huxtable, Marie Howe, Margaret Ross and Carmen Sánchez Ramos (trans. Judith Kerman)
Cover: Loie Hollowell

There was a big purity politics hubbub recently about how sex scenes in movies are unnecessary and gratuitous. This is some tenderqueer “no-kink-at-pride”-but-still-has-a-day-job-with-Lockheed-Martin bullshit.

Attenuations of ginger fray to ahistorical glia, as
Stretching chest from which brief tresses are pulled,
And Areolis discs of freshly bathed plume
Shimmy aria coos among scents of the,
Still elsewhen, lingering drift of
Parasentient chiffon adown
The bankless radiating slopes
Of my epigenetic allelochemical aura.

Tortula muralis. Does that feel too formal to you? Wall screw-moss, then. I’ve seen you every day that I’ve lived in this flat, your green cushion gently hooked onto the garden’s brick wall. I could have so easily pulled you away whole, brought you inside. Instead, I brushed my hands against your tender body. Tapped my fingers along the sporophytes you extend into the air above you. And I have thought only of your softness.

“I’m not going to die yet, and a strange guy with horns is determined to give me oral pleasure. It’s just that... out of all the worst-case scenarios I’ve come up with since being abducted by aliens, being licked until I come isn’t anywhere on the list.”

My unshaven legs dangle out of the fourth-floor window of my apartment in Berlin as I flick through the latest adventure in the Ice Planet Barbarians universe. The erotic sci-fi series with seven-foot blue males with horns, tails and cocks the size of baseball bats has become my life. Thirty books into the series, I have given up all pretence of reading the serious prose stacked on my nightstand. The set-up of each book is similar and comforting. There may be quirks and twists in the world-building but, at heart, a girl is abducted, meets a monstrous-but-handsome alien, hijinks ensue, and fucking abounds.