issue #1: musical golden shovels

cocoa hooves

29 April 2026

i stopped playing rough, so why don’t beasts follow my lead? i don’t

know where exactly i lost you, nor the precise moment i became a toy.

an accessory. how have you sat with every page of me, known how fraught sex

has become, and still dried up and decided the answer was more violence?

Notes

After “Cocoa Hooves” by Glass Animals.

about the author

nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, editor, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Split Lip Magazine, Poetry.onl, Baltimore Beat, Poet Lore, beestung, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.