American Nesting Doll
poems by
Ayden Massey
~40 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: October/November 2025
An Advance Sale Discount price of $7.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
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Ayden Massey is a queer filmmaker and poet from North Carolina, currently based in New York City. A Mary Turner Lane Chancellor’s Award nominee, Ayden holds a dual BA in English and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At 23, Ayden’s thematic exploration of epigenetic trauma, survivorship, and queer temporality has been celebrated across the literary and visual arts, including features in All Existing, Apricity, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Idiosyncrazy Magazine, The Kollection, and a finalist mention in The New York Times Found Poem Contest. Committed to trauma advocacy and multimedia experimentalism, Ayden will pursue their Master’s degree at Harvard Medical School, using narrative research to address medical disenfranchisement.
Massey lends nuanced exploration of form and bold embrace of visceral image to a new, queer divinity: American Nesting Doll investigates the violence of gender and the interiority of embodiment with a narrative temporality all its own. These poems make a home for memory and futurity—neither of which are steadfast—and accumulate in revelation under Massey’s curation. I am excited that this collection is merely an introduction of what’s to come for this poet. ~ Meg Day
American Nesting Doll unfolds as an intricate filigree of language shaped by poetic invention. Like Bernini’s marble, it reads as an exploding bouquet or murmuring monument—radiant, baroque, always reaching for the epiphany of intimacy through precise words. This epiphany bleeds through the pages, transforming meaning into texture, tension, and sound: “a house so blood-thick / I mistake it for my mother so loud / her body becomes dense / and hieroglyphic as braille.” (“Nesting Doll”) ~Pedro Lopes de Almeida, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Yoke
after Kim Addonizio
Around my neck there are shackles singing,
or screaming, rather. It repeats and repeats
until it rings like tinnitus in the deep cylinder of my ear.
My horns curl back toward my temples,
thinned at their tips, not yet brittled,
reaching out past my eye like mother hands.
Crafted of keratin and blood,
stinging anvil in my stressed nostrils —
I want to return to the lee of her
placenta. Not next to my mother, harnessed,
yielding this wagon forward.
Shoulders raped by hot metal. Not anticipating
my own blood shed as bursting scalp carves
pathways to my myringa. Anything to escape
this clinking, this awful sound.
Monstrum
From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
She likes to vanish
under the haze of perfume, tequila,
and sweat in the gay club, dizzying
her eyes into a single portal
at the center of her slick forehead.
Cascading over her backside,
I become twice the girl I ever wanted to be,
doubling over her ribcage,
so the vertebrae would remember
her wings. Annexed in her glittering skin,
my nails mar the horizon line
between us, the strobe gliding
off our shared silhouette,
unsexing us into Pegasus.
We swap saliva and clumsy nicotine
between our painted lips,
fill our lungs
with lyrics like a ventilator.
You can find us girls
air-light as a wraith. A bokeh
too kaleidoscopic and cognate to bottle.
Our dancing ghosts will corrode here,
or wash away with the closing lights,
blurring us into a morning contusion.
I can’t seem to remember when I began hating my body
Perhaps it was noticing the print of my flattened breast
Stained into Uncle’s raw floorboard
When I first felt the splinters, now
Earthwormed below years of intricate and layering bone.
I pretend that my only discomfort stems from the wire lining of my bra,
Plucking my rib like a wicked harpist, so that I don’t have to
Speak about why I now scratch at phantom hands
And sometimes grope myself, publicly,
Just so I can say that I wanted it first —
That my body invited him. Willed this, even.
