Tag: transphobia

Two Poems by Nancy Squires

As the Waters Rise

 

O God, look down
On all our drowned.
Hear us, we beg—
We’re on our knees.
Sorry, so sorry
About the trees,

The polar bears, the birds,
The bees; the icebergs
Gone, the thirsty lawns,
Plastic gyres, redwood
Pyres and all the many,
many cars. The eclipsed stars

We never see. Our Father
In Heaven, we pray
To Thee: Give us
This day.
We promise, oh we swear
On a stack of extinctions

We will repair
Our awful ways
And lead us not into oblivion
Although we can’t pretend
We had no clue. Save us
Now—before
Amen.

 

It’s No Use, Ron DeSantis

 

Before Marie Kondo-ing
I had a pile of beads
in a drawer, cheap baubles
from Gay Prides past:
Chicago, where the crowd spilled
into Halsted, slowing the procession
to a crawl; New York,
where drag queens rode the floats
in headdresses three feet tall
just like Carnival; and Boston,
many years—the one
where Kevin was The Little Mermaid
on the Disney float—his costume
(which he stitched himself),
perfection and his makeup,
animated glam. That woman on the Harley
who dyed her mohawk rainbow
every year, and the time
Sally spotted her coworker
coming down the route—
she was surprised to see him
in a wine-colored corset.
No beads
from Lansing, Michigan,
my first Pride—not
a parade but a march
and what got thrown
at us were insults, curses, glares
from people holding signs
that said God hated us.
So let’s say gay
and everything else
there is to say.
I should’ve kept that pile
of shiny plastic beads—
not sure if it was joy
they sparked but something—
Kevin reclining up there
amongst the other Disney folk
his shimmery mermaid tail
sparkling in the morning sun.
Say it: gay.
All the livelong day.
She and he and them
and they: we
aren’t going back
inside the boxes.

 

Nancy Squires is a writer, lawyer, and freelance copy editor. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Dunes Review, Split Rock Review, and Blueline Magazine. She grew up, and currently resides, in Michigan.

Photo credit: Linda De Volder via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

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Montana

By Jeremy Nathan Marks

For Zooey Zephyr

 

The big sky fifty-mile
vistas where the Greasy Grass runs
willowed valleys sweeping memory
from the water to the sky an arrow long
ago fired but whose arc is heard
surely this land can contain one woman
who says of our laws that while we pray
to remain humbled that blood in our palms
is a great glacier melting as though we were
the sun.

 

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. He is the author of the collection, Of Fat Dogs & Amorous Insects (Alien Buddha, 2021). He holds two passports and does not maintain a social media presence.

Photo credit: Michael Bourgault on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Birthday Wishes

By Phoenix Ning

 

Sixteen-year-old person of color desires escape from this inferno
where dark-skinned individuals burn, and alabaster spectators
cheer from the sidelines, popping confetti guns and feeding
oil to ancient flames while claiming to be long-awaited saviors.

Eighteen-year-old student desires world history classes with curriculums
that celebrate African kingdoms, Indigenous empires, and South Asian cultures;
textbooks that condemn armor-clad imperialists stripping gowns of freedom;
articles that honor revolutionaries whose empty pockets did not silence their shouting.

Twenty-three-year-old woman desires to shatter the chains created
by men who think all girls are moons trapped by their gravity,
males who believe themselves to be suns instilling life into
fragile females who must offer their bodies as tokens of gratitude.

Twenty-year-old lesbian desires to taste the sweet wine of love
and cavort in inebriated glory with the woman whose gentle touch
sparks wildfires in her heart frozen by acerbic remarks fired by toxic relatives
when she turns her head away from men and smiles at her rough-hewn ladylove.

 

Phoenix Ning is a twenty-year-old Chinese writer of sapphic antiheroines and queer found families. She is currently a senior studying human-computer interaction. When not writing, she can be found watching C-Dramas and penning raps. A fierce advocate of diversity in media, she hopes that her audience will feel empowered after reading her words or listening to her songs. Learn more at ladyphoenixning.com.

Image credit: Jennifer Rakoczy via a Creative Common license.

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Vile Affections

By Soon Jones

 

I grow up in a Florida church being warned about
god-hating bull dykes and sissy fairy fags
leaving the natural use of the woman,
which is sex, because
all a woman is good for
is sex and tempting men.

Yet when a woman tempts another woman
somehow that is not about sex,
though I’m pretty sure it is:
I want Crystal instead of Stephen,
the hottest boy in youth group,
apparently.

At a sleepover with church girls
I panic when they throw
down a copy of J-14 magazine
with *NSync on the cover,
and interrogate me on who
I want to marry.
This is a trap:
there have been rumors about me
and they’re all true.

I pick Lance Bass for his friendly face.
This is not the wrong answer,
but it is still not the right answer.
I should have said Justin Timberlake or JC Chasez,
apparently, but I’ve made my bed

so now I have to buy Lance Bass stickers
and say how hot Lance Bass is at youth group
and now everything I own is covered
in Lance Bass. I even write about him
in my diary, in case someone reads it.

I doodle in my Lance Bass notebook
while my pastor rants about an “it”
with “hips of a woman, but a face like a man”
who served him coffee in some roadside diner.
He shares his fantasy of renting a room
in a Miami hotel close to the gay bars
on Memorial Day weekend, and how,

God willing,

he would hide in the air ducts
and descend on the bull dykes and sissy fags
with an AK-47 and a Bowie knife, for
they which commit such things
are worthy of death.
He throws his head back in ecstasy,
licks his lips at the thought
of all those queers he would sacrifice
on the altar before the Lord.

I hold Lance Bass to my chest
as the men shout “Amen!”
tossing hymnals at the pulpit
like panties.

 

Soon Jones is a Korean lesbian poet from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work has been published in Juke Joint, Westerly, beestung, and Moon City Review, among others. They can be found at soonjones.com, on Twitter, and on Instagram.

Poet’s note: Passages in italics are taken from Romans 1:27 and 1:32.

Photo Credit: “Ungodly Hate” by K-B Gressitt.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.