Tag: LGBTQ

Two Poems by Laura Foley

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Coming Out to My Sister

My sister—
the aloof one—
wasn’t, that day.
She took my arm,
led me through Georgetown,
sunlight on brick sidewalks,
into a small boutique
where we found clothes
soft as permission.

I chose a black silk cape,
delicate women stitched
across the back—
a garment that felt
like stepping into myself.

For a little while
she smiled at me,
held clothes to my shoulders,
wanting to see
who I might become.

Many years now
she hasn’t called,
doesn’t answer emails—
has slipped again
into distance, into silence.

But the cape still hangs
in my closet,
light as breath,
reminding me
of the one day
we were gentle
with each other.

*

Tea and Sympathy

She drives all the way to my house,
up a steep hill in the woods of Vermont.

“I understand—this is someone’s life,”
she offers, as she stamps and signs,
as I sign and sign, blue pen looping my name.

We sit at the kitchen table.
She pats our dog,
explaining how, in her free time,
she takes in elderly Labradors
at the end of their lives.

“Give them a year or two of happiness.
One just passed, last week.
I still wake at night to take him out.”

We share spiced cookies,
Earl Grey tea,
as she tells me about her health,
a difficult teenage son,
how she loves to work on her own.

Meanwhile, I’m signing page after page—
tax documents, a deed—
as I sell my sister’s townhouse in Texas,
the one she flooded
as she was dying in her tub.

Sheila places her cup in the sink,
scans the documents into her phone,
beams them off across the country.

As she leaves, I feel lighter,
freer of a sister
I hadn’t known well—hadn’t seen in forty years;

thankful for the sympathy—
a notary
whose stamp feels like kindness.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. Sister in a Different Movie (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) is due out later this spring. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Two Poems by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

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Knowing

I’m looking for something non-binary
for my eldest for Valentine’s Day,
I tell the Ulta sales associate.
She/they seems like a safe bet
with her/their pierced eyebrows
and 3D sparkly things adorning
bright green eyeshadow.

We settle on M.A.C.’s Turquatic,
with notes of anemone, cottonwood,
and Coriscan blue cedar, and I don’t know
what any of that means, but it smells
crisp and fresh as advertised.

One Christmas, my husband and I
sniffed sample fragrance cards
until we both had headaches,
looking for something woodsy
and masculine. A rite of passage,
we thought, our son’s first cologne.
We didn’t know that it would sit
unopened in the drawer,
eventually disappear altogether.

The shop-person says, You’re a good mom,
and I tear up, accepting that gift
during this first year of missteps,
an entire adolescence of missed cues
and misunderstandings. I secure
the pretty bottle in bubble wrap
and send it to my son daughter in the mail,
no pressure on her/them to be appreciative.
But they call me later, not a text,
and say the scent is perfect, they love it.

Soon, we are both crying
with the understanding that something
has shifted, not kidding ourselves
that we don’t both have a long way to go,
but embracing the moment, the possibilities
now open to us through knowing.

* 

Deadname

I need to tell you, I wasn’t listening
the night you told me your new name;
with your slipping grades, my own shortcomings,
I was too wrapped up in our family’s rage.

The night you first told me your new name,
I didn’t understand what you were saying.
I was too depressed by our family’s rage,
don’t remember the angry words I said.

I didn’t embrace what you were saying,
pushed you further into that space so alone,
didn’t know those angry words would pave
such a crooked road between you and home.

After pushing you into a space all your own,
when I was ready to hear you, endure your cry,
the road was so crooked between you and home,
I had already lost you; you wanted to die.

When I was ready to hear you, we both cried,
as you expressed your truth—authentic self,
an entire adolescence spent wanting to die,
when I had no idea you needed help.

Although I now accept your truer self,
as a mother so sure of her choice of naming,
I admit, I too, have needed help—
it’s true, at first there’s loss, a kind of grieving.

As a mother so sure of her choice of naming,
I thought I knew who you would always be;
it takes a year to work through all that grieving.
Habit sometimes calls you that deadname, but see,

I always thought I knew who you would be.
I am slipping past my own shortcomings,
lifting you up—setting that deadname free.
I have to tell you. Now, I am listening.

*

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a Professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag is her first full-length poetry collection, and her firsr chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press. Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.