Comfort Queens

“As usual, we are joined today by about nine or ten gay men
who follow me, and a legion of young queer women with anxiety
who find me comforting.”
Trixie Mattel, via a Livestream

Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.

At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.

Two queens stand before me, one Dolly Parton in a Barbie box, the other
a bloodsucker cartwheeling into the splits, wearing Russia like a mink stole.

I watch queens watching reality TV because if I watch reality TV alone
I’ll cry. They talk about whatever they want: beauty and money and

getting fired. An education in love and friendship, intended as comedy
and devoured as gospel. These videos I have projected onto my retinas

since I was sixteen, when I refashioned my face every week into the reptilian
naiad I’d designed to be. For in my mind I am the star of a thousand film

trailers. For I should get out of the house more. For I am the most
glamorous person alive. For I am maddening again in day-old lashes, overslept,

this duvet my cocoon. Be not concerned for me, for this is not my fate.
I will peel myself from my bedroom in a month’s time, move to a city

where life is happening. I will stand before a pub crowd, read a poem
awkwardly and be comforted that this is a step in the right direction.

Perhaps I’ll buy spinach and make it wilt via frying pan, not neglect.
Wake up, paint my eyes green and step outside, the prettiest alien

you’ve ever seen. My comfort queens will emerge from the wings at
intervals, and I will remember that womanhood is a dance, a mask

put on each day, that I am a marionette of politeness. For I play
the part well of a nice sensible girl. My adoring fans will send roses

to my dressing room, where I sit transfixed by a YouTube dissection
of a vintage doll collection. The roses come with handwritten notes

expressing hopes that I like roses the shade of lipstick and dried blood
and Valentine’s Day. oooooooooooooooo Oh honey, I do….

Sylvie Jane Lewis‘s poetry has placed in the Bridport Prize, and been published in The London Magazine, Acumen, and fourteen poems. She is pursuing an AHRC-funded Literature and Film PhD at the University of Brighton. Instagram: @sylviejanelewis. Website: sylviejanelewis.wordpress.com.