For You

I will wear my mittens for you.
At our age it's tacky, but
your heart is broken--

I can tell it in the way you
call me six times
so as not to get my voicemail
because it always makes you smile,
in the way you suggest we
meet under the bridge like we
used to,
in the way I can hear you
pacing over the phone, slow
in the way you learned from me
such a long time ago.

So for you I will wear my mittens.
I will take them out of the box
in my closet,
I will meet you under the bridge,
and I will let you pretend that we
are still the same people.



DISCLAIMER: I'm not a poet, guys. But I was looking for a way to talk about moving on from a person or idea and how you have to learn to deal with it after.

Allison

Homonormativity in the Media - Reverend Pussycat

The Gay Gene: a poem

I sat on it, heavily, for years:
from dreaming of rescuing Andrea, Kayla, Cati,
of wearing hero's armor-
to shrugging off osh kosh b'gosh and levi brand for
skirts that sparkled.
"Well, looks like she's straight after all," harmless mom jokes
to friends, partners, softball team,
yeah it was probably harmless but maybe I was listening from within my book, after all?
and god it sucks to be told that gays should keep their private lives to themselves,
when I knew, at twelve, already graduated from rose-tinted glasses to the 12th grade reading level,
that a lumpy girl-child with glasses and braces and two mommies needed to become someone boys noticed.
If you want to look at heteronormative look no further than my constructed, collaged walls, a reality cut from teen magazines.
I did genuinely like boys. I liked dogs, too.
I never lied. So, maybe all it took was for them to like me first, but people have built
far more of far less.
Dating, dating, dating, a high school joke, and when you get to college you hear the punchline and it's you. Making out in movie theatres, cars. If it had ended there I might still not know.
Three years of wondering why sex meant tears.
I sat up. I looked around. I breathed, and kissed a girl, and pierced my nose, and lo, it was good.

I do not know if my sexuality is a matter of brain chemistry or construction. I do not know if it came from my mother or my turkey baster dad or my vegetarianism and over consumption of Sylvia Plath's poems.

I do know that high school happiness can't touch the way it feels to lead you, when we dance.

-Eliot

"All Futile Requests:" A poem, by ALEXA

Background: I wrote this from the point of view of an closeted lesbian in her adolescence. She and her best friend fall in love, but that kind of love isn't supposed to exist at a high school in Georgia.

"All Futile Requests"

Don't perk at the sight of me

Don't look after me as I walk away

Don't jump at every chance to have me to yourself

Don't get lose yourself in my embrace

Don't let me so effortlessly become the center of your attention

Pretend I'm not always on your mind

Don't look so vain with me

And try not to stare

Let go of malice towards those who cause me pain

Don't ask me if I'm okay

Don't let my mood affect yours

Don't take everything I say to heart

Don't worry

Don't pry

Lose your faith in me

And take me off that goddamn pedestal

Don't let your eyes fall to my lips when I speak to you

Remember to breathe when our eyes meet

Don't let the slightest touch send your heart rate flying

Don't long for more

Don't smile at the thought of the last sweet thing I said to you

Forget what I told you yesterday

Only miss me in my absence

Put your guard back up

And let me down

hard

Don't need me

Don't love me

All futile requests, my love

Requiem: a poem by susiescorcher

Requiem

Sweet song, grant us rest grant

us rest that the magnets, which

attract and repel my eyes from

her eyes and her eyes from my

eyes release our eyes that they

are light on either side of our n

oses and not iron balls which c

hain our brains to the same mo

ments, disappeared, everlasting

Sweet song, grant us rest grant

us rest grant us mercy and etern

al rest that the iron bellows that

still lie in between my head and

my heels do not reawaken from

the dead stretch their fingers in

awakening blink open their hea

vy eyes look up out of their sac

red spaces, that they do not illu

minate my lungs where they hav

e lived and my throat where they

have been heard that my organs

and her organs stop rememberin

g stop that we be granted rest that

they finish dying, a full

and final death

Sweet song, oh grant us rest, gr

ant us rest, grant us rest grant u

s that her breath her breath her

breath rests and my breath rests

in separate bodies that she remains

in her body and I remain in my

body that we may both give up a

nd let our bodies sink separately

in separate seas that, sinking, our

bodies forget the touch of that

we find rest in the water of separate

ness that separates our breaths

O h Sweet Song Sweetest Song, th

at you grant us rest that we may be

granted rest that these things die an

d rest and that I no longer hear her

voice in every voice and she dies an

d rests and I rest and together we rest

"hearing things" micro essay by millertime

hearing things

__________________________________________

my hearing, as though i forever have a shawl wrapped around my head, twisted in the black of my hair and ballooning behind me, a translucent bit of fabric like the picket of fences.

my hearing, as though through the thick cold water of northeastern lakes, greeny browny and ice.

my hearing, under constant threat of attack, has curled in on itself, sleeping lazily.

the deep belly fright of drum broken through. my ear that has been sewn off and on again, twice, in attempts to reach the perforated gauze of my eardrum. trapdoor.

and after countless rounds of anesthesia, how afraid am i of the darkness?

my hearing, as though moving through one of the lower layers in a terrarium model of the earth’s sedimentary layers. my hearing, abandoning me to the deeper silt. taphophobia. fear of being buried alive.

and when outside with my lover, my hearing reveals to me sounds displaced and fragmented, coming as if from no direction, headless, bodiless floating stirrups of noise without context for existence. we sit on the back porch, and she explains these sounds to me, coming from two yards across the way.

and i am the atheist, terrified of ghosts, running spritely through dark hallways in my lover’s home.

Let There Be Light

For this project, I wanted to bring light to invisible disabilities. Invisible disabilities are disabilities that can not be seen, such as mental disabilities/illnesses or autoimmune diseases. Invisible disabilities can often be comorbid, meaning that more than one disability or illness is present.



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