creation myth #29
SAM BEAL
A cloud of mosquitoes is much less likely to bite than a lone bug. Normally, only the males swarm and they lack the bitey bits. The female mosquito, on the other hand, is the world’s deadliest animal. Saws with six sharp needles through the meat of me, and you. Here’s the secret—some nights I think I’d like to be girl again. Miss sometimes the sweeter sweat, the smooth drip of it. Even the smell of iron if only for the way we’d sync up. Imagine birth—the horror of three hundred children poured into the gulf. Imagine larvae, wriggling starts, tiny and able to kill. Speculate all you want. I betray myself in ways more brutal than this desire daily. Slap my thighs in the swampest heat, smear plump constellations of red. All the water I’ve known to swallow transed inside my skin, my blood in the bug leaving a fresh boyhood and then—dead. What gender does the cell have? Who decides, and when? Try and every noun can be made into a question. The body. Certainty. I knew a man who offered to stab me every Sunday. This was another kind of love I could not accept.
Author's Statement: Having spent the first 28 years of my life living in the panhandle, trekking through swamps and slipping beneath the waves of the Gulf of Mexico, I’m really interested in exploring the inherent Queerness of the ecologies of Florida. Mosquitoes are hated little creatures that thrive in Florida’s humidity, but they are also devastatingly powerful in their capacity for violence and creation. In imagining them as a divine Queer mirror to transition, I wanted to directly question who constructs trans narratives and what it means to hold complex agency within the body (Sam Beal, Runner-Up).
Sam Beal (he/they) is a trans poet and community organizer born and raised in the Florida panhandle. He received his BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and is currently an educator and MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as FOLIO, Fruitslice, RFD, and Trans Tongues. Interested in finding the connection between art and revolutionary care, his poetics explore the body as a sight for vulnerable sincerity.
Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine, Issue no. 2: Mystics & Saints. 6x9 paperback, 196 pages.
Contributors:
2026 CLARION POETRY PRIZE
Kale Hensley (Grand Prize Winner), Syed Hashmi (Runner-Up), Sam Beal (Runner-Up)
POETRY
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, D.W. Baker, Kara Barlow, e.l. biddle, Cat Brogan, Linda Bryant-Davis, Joseph Byrd, Halliday Carpender, Sophie Cornwell, Stephan Crown-Weber, Tony DiCarlo, Jané Dowd, Bart Edelman, Elliot, Beatriz F. Fernandez, Gretchen Gale, Charisse Gendron, Z.H. Gill, Ewen Glass, Fernando Jerez, Victor Kamhazi, Justin Karcher, Kristin Lueke, Merlin June Mack, Pip McGough, Mark J. Mitchell, KG Newman, Lisa Perkins, Patrick T. Reardon, jw summerisle, Skye Tarshis, François Tristan L'Hermite, Hanna Webster, Payson Whitwell, Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri
FICTION
Jer Hayes, Allen Kesten, Jamie LeFort, Christina Rauh Fishburne & Charlie Rauh, Taylor Thornburg, Fiona Vigo Marshall
CREATIVE NONFICTION
JH Lucas, latrell "lala" novali, Gina Twardosz
VISUAL ART
Edena Alvarado, Julieta Beltrán Lazo, Aubrienne Bergeron, Arch Budzar, Ashley Czajkowski, Lattea Falco, Zander Fieschko, Sarah Goodermuth, Hannah Greteman, Catie Hernandez, Kaitlyn “Thu” Hettinger, Sophia Huang, Jowonder, Martina McAteer, Mina Mond, Brigid O'Neil, Diana Story, Sydney Strickland, Émile Sylvain, Angel Teeth
Issue no. 2 is expected to release in June 2026. Please note that copies are printed-to-order and can take up to one month to be delivered.