My Boyfriend is currently accepting submissions for Issue 2: My Boyfriend Is A Virgin.

Send us short stories and poems which interpret the theme of “virginity” either in the literal or abstract. We especially appreciate absurd, voicey, and experimental works. For this issue, we are not looking for pieces that explicitly reference the mag’s name or that contain a boyfriend character. 1500 word limit. Deadline April 15. Send to: myboyfriendmagazine@gmail.com.

The “boyfriend” of My Boyfriend Issue One is perpetually out of reach. Ten writers were asked to write stories and poems which share the title “my boyfriend,” but rarely does a boyfriend appear as a fully corporeal being. If he has a body at all, the boyfriend is sometimes reduced to one part– his beating heart under the tender care (she promises) of Mary Frances Gallagher’s narrator in her haunting, folkloric work, the “big beautiful eyelashes' ' of KB Lang’s boyfriend, which Burger’s narrator obsessively and tragically covets. In Yasi Mousavi’s piece, the boyfriend, John C Reilly, is rendered explicitly a handful of times– “Curly brown hair and eyes that shine like the first day of snow in Syracuse, New York''— but he primarily exists as a tuft of smoke wafting through her character’s apartment— “Golds, vetiver, bergamot.” Though Phoebe Phelps’ boyfriend appears as a literal character, an older man whom the narrator shares a passing interaction with in a bathroom line, he only becomes a boyfriend in fantasy. Phelps’ character draws up a life with the stranger in her head, the doors in front of her like two portals: “This possible future spreads out in front of me in between these two bathroom doors, connected with all the other possible futures or alternate pasts and makes me unsteady on my feet.”

In two cases, the boyfriend is wasting away, eaten by disease. Zack Dresher’s boyfriend feels amorphous initially. An early comparison to him as a “smudge in the mirror,” though it refers to his tendency to stick around like a stain, conjures an image of a boyfriend who is grey, slightly transparent. Dresher’s final, meticulously rendered image of the boyfriend’s sickly body is impactful and unexpected. Grace Wolfe’s absurd, hallucinatory work features a narrator’s conflicting accounts of her and her boyfriend’s first meeting. It too ends on the body, an expiring boyfriend cured only by Wolfe’s character’s “feminine touch.”

My Boyfriend Issue One contributors wrestle with convention thematically and formally. Cortez’s narrator, a play on Eve, “surpasses” her boyfriend, growing in size until she dwarfs him, but it’s a faux empowerment. Her character’s imagination remains limited, a world without him is “white and void and nothing,” she is still fundamentally an extension of him. Taylor Paydos’ genre-bending piece situates a chorus of boyfriends in a universe veering on the fantastical– their futile attempts to breed, their ability to fit in one seat of a two seater car. But their world is also populated by artifacts of the current zeitgeist– r/polyamory, The Ethical Slut.

In both Scout Hughes’ and Mark Alan Burger’s pieces, the boyfriend is gritty and masculine. Both call to mind the Americana tradition of life on the road, the “ramblin’ man.” Hughes’ narrator is reliant on her boyfriend to escape the Midwest, but knows that wherever the pair goes, they’ll take Nebraska with them: “my boyfriend and I are gonna get out of Nebraska, but I can’t seem to scratch it out of us.” Whereas the boyfriend in Burger’s story is always in motion in his “rusted old truck,” the narrator seems to be staying in place. Burger’s final line, which closes out the issue, suggests uncertainty: “my boyfriend will be back soon”

Though the interpretations of the initial “my boyfriend” prompt were diverse, one thing rings true in every piece. My boyfriend is not my boyfriend, but a vehicle to experiment with language, to discuss addiction, desperation, isolation, obsession.

- Cortez