The idea for Kink and Culture came to me through a certain embodied friction: a ghazal layered over electronic basslines on a warm Nashville night, a Bombay sandwich served in a café thousands of miles from where it was born. Both moments were translations—familiar yet not quite. That’s what kink and culture share, they thrive in the spaces where memory collides with invention, where desire remakes tradition into something subversive and new.

The ask was simple. To write about Kink. Kink is more than a fantasy or fetish. Kink is intimate, radical, subversive. It’s culture. It’s ritual. It’s resistance. It’s storytelling. From the coded language of desire in religious texts and folklore, to the queer spaces that reimagine pleasure as protest. Kink defies the aesthetics of perfection and curation. Kink is permission. I want the readers to not just think about kink as a private act but kink as a cultural mirror—revealing what we repress, what we celebrate, and what we’re still learning to name.

To write about Culture. The longing for it. The appropriation of it. The restraints and freedom of it. Is there an aspect of your culture that is forgotten? A remnant that you want to resuscitate? That resuscitated you?

To write about Kink and Culture. Invite hybridity as the moment of negotiation and translation between cultures, between identities, between histories. Allow new identities and new meanings to emerge.

Submissions considered this issue pushed against boundaries—of genre, of length,. This in issue, we have fiction with tension and truth, non-fiction that unpacks the historical, political, and personal, poetry that seduces, surprises, and stings, and translations that make the unfamiliar, familiar.