The sound of television chatter finds you in the hall, its walls inundated with portraits of people you haven’t seen since you were a small child. You stand, correct your posture, and exit your room. Really pay attention to the texture of the echoes. It sounds like a piano key, no wire to tap, pressed hard. You will have to show your mother, who never found the art to be as enthralling as you did. You feel confident you have managed to create something entirely novel, but your stomach gurgles with nerves. Lean into this screaming for eight seconds.Ĭhoreography taps in your mind’s floor. You place your arms behind your head and reach down your back. You notice a new blister forming on the arch of your foot and think about yesterday’s rehearsal. Your fingers begin to sweat as you wrap them around your bare and scabbed feet. You are seated on the hot, beige carpet, stretching your thighs, your calves. You are in your room, neat and white, bed made, in front of your dance mirror, as your mother calls it. Take a deep breath in, tense all of your body for four seconds, and let out an exhale while letting the tension evaporate from your mind. Take a deep breath in, hold for five seconds, and exhale for six seconds. Take a deep breath in, hold for four seconds, and exhale for seven seconds. She has published a children’s book and short story collection with Literati Press in Oklahoma City, and in her downtime, she reads.įind a comfortable place to rest. Kristen Grace is a journalist for the 405 Magazine, a freelance copyeditor for Callisto Media, and a graduate student at Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA program for poetry. They band together as a family,īecause they chose to care about one another. I love that your art and storiesĪre peopled with characters more than human, who are not defined by gender,īut by more interesting characteristics. You have inspired me with your courage and wit. You have gently taught me how addicted I am to the lens of gender. My sister’s teenage child, non-binary, they/them. The beauty standards and changed the game for us all. You painted Michelle Obama, and no one elseĬould have captured all her grace, strength, and power. You created images of them in their Power and beauty, standing alone and strong. You believed, correctly, we needed to see ourselves in museums. There were domestic workers, wives, slaves, but not the women you knew. You couldn’t find the Black women you knew in museums. To create beauty from pain, bleeding light from every one of our wounds. In grief and celebration, the way you did. We write ourselves love poems, as you taught us. You taught us that our lives could be one gorgeous, flamingįuck you to anyone who chose to misunderstand our holy work. Were you ever happier than when you were in the arms of women? That was ready and waiting to heal our wounds. Only to be attentive to the beauty in the world You never asked us to prove ourselves, or to be good. Later, you invited all of us to go with you. You went to the woods and into the sacred house of written wordsĪnd created your own church. When they kicked you out of church for being gay, Moth Moth Moth is a drag queen, writer and visual artist from Memphis, TN where they host drag shows, contract for museums and secretly write short stories about mastodons while cuddling with four cats. Much of her work focuses on the unique joys and struggles faced by southerners from marginalized communities as they untangle the threads of cultural identity. Coming of age in the Bible Belt as a Hispanic lesbian drove them to pursue poetry as both a form of solace and self-expression. Olivia Roman is a writer and an undergraduate student in the English Honors program at the University of Memphis. Now unseen, mask stretched over a face growing lean, no groceries toĬlean because store’s shelves are bare, clock into work Our old world slipping away, cherry smoke curling to the stars through lips Of late nights, of the ebb and flow of Beale’s crowds caught in neon lights, of The men who exploded onstage like supernovas, moved quietlyĪway to the coast for treatment, reprisal of a viral nightmare Of riverside redbud trees bursting into bloom, like the skin of Here is the first installment, which debuted in our March/April 2022 issue. We are excited to introduce The Prism Pages, a literary project that we have been enthusiastically planning for some time now, which features original works of poetry and prose from up-and-coming LGBTQ writers in our community.
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