How to Love the Word “Lesbian”

We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings,
gripped on to the cowboy hat
trying to fly from your curls in July’s breeze.
In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow
companies waltzed by & we rolled
our eyes, couldn’t see past tall men,

– Lara Mae Simpson (they/she)

On nights I am

a girl again
I am unemployable as
woman don’t do the
work beg  at corner
of ends on leg
too short for the cripwalk

-Noah Jacob

dreaming of the velvet goldmines

i want to be a skinny pretty boy rockstar
without the height or the coke habit
or needing to strictly be a boy at all

-Siobhan Dunlop (they/them)

The Conversation

It’s been quite a while now and…
You know we get on like a house…
August twelfth, a year ago, can you…
I bet you thank your lucky…
Things have evolved, haven’t…
Can you believe we’re both still …

She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.

I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words

throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me

Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.

You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,

See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks

Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .

. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.

I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here

Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”