No Apologies: 2022/23 Zine

15 Things To Do in Saskatoon

Leave. Go to Disneyland. Bring back a snow globe for Miranda.

Pretend to crush on a boy because nobody will ever believe you if you don’t have a crush so it’s better for you to spill the gossip rather than someone else.

Obsess over Winx Club.

Wear silly bands to fit in. Stand out anyways.

Kiss the greasy boy behind the playground because he said it’d be quick and then he’d leave me alone. Years later he never did. Not really.

Dye your hair purple. It’ll come out red. Try again later.

Grow up fast. Get used to being called “an old soul”. It’s an old saying for mental illness.

Pick up poetry instead of a knife. Buy a necklace and call it hope. Try veganism. Then heathenry.

Hold your breath when a girl wraps her arm around your waist.

Come out to your parents.

Bolt from the car before they realize.

Stop straightening your hair and let the curls run free. Actually dye your hair purple this time.

Buy your first pride flag. Throw it around your shoulders and imagine yourself in a parade.

Content Warning: Brief mentions of mental illness, self-harm, and sexual harassment.

Lorelei McEwen | They/She | Agender, Aromantic, Ace, Auti-Gender

Behold, the angry gay birb! This is a digital painting of my femme genderqueer original character named ‘ghost bird’. I think rage can be a positive anger, and I release these strong emotions cathartically through my art.

Sometimes, u just gotta be gay and do crime (aka art).

Dames Sequoia | He/Him | @damesequoia | Bisexual Transman

Kristy Kwok | She/Her | Bisexual

Hatch

I hatch from the Nest doors like a bluebird’s egg, sing a song of defiance to a sky of pink purple blue. I’m not sorry about the girl on the skateboard who caught my gaze in her wheels. She had a stranger’s magic and your homecoming eyes. I refuse to be sorry that a beautiful face leaves me wounded, whatever colour pennant it bears. Don’t you know that apologies used to shake me awake? I arose with their almond taste in my throat. Sorry is a twin flame’s ash. If you only knew the ghosts I fought to love you.

Look at me now. Look. These are a serpent’s wings, beating back the smell of smoke.

Carraugh | She/Her | Lesbian

Untitled

I’m crashing into the wall of your blank stare

My body is a battering ram clanging against your portcullis Will my blood and guts be a sufficient sacrifice That you would deign from your ivory tower

To witness the macabre spectacle of my organs at your doorstep And acknowledge my fleshy, raw humanness

Expose your sinewy heart strings So I can tear them out tooth and nail And tenderly graft them on to my own Tethering us both to the same rhythmic pulse

Let us turn to face one another and weep Our tears carrying off planks and sawdust alike in their current

Retrieve the white handkerchief from your pocket, a flag of truce

I’ll use it to gently mop up the water glistening on our cheeks Then look upon me with puffy, red-rimmed but clear eyes, brother Grasp your sister’s scarred hands in yours, welcome me in

Inside myself there are two gay raptors.. one wants to be out and flamboyant, and the other wants to be mysterious and dress like a Victorian maiden. If i don’t listen to either of them they will bite my head off! Made in Clip Studio Paint :3

Yasmin Burrows | She\They @horns_yellow | Asexual Panromantic\Hugromantic

Storm Chen | They/He | @rosestormclare Agender, Transmasculine, Pansexual, Demi-Romantic

See Me

I was always the sensitive girl

The lovely, helpful, hide-awayfrom-the-world girl

In the bedroom, under the covers, in the closet Locking myself away, shutting the world out

I was always the good child

The polite, quiet, no homework-help-needed child

Under wraps, underwater, never underfoot

Helpful, kind, always giving, never wanting

I’m not sure why you expected that child

To stay

The hardest words to say Are the ones that I’ve spoken before

Like the lines drawn in the sand Blown away Time and time again You never seem to, never want to See me hiding, see me hurting Maybe you never a Saw me at all

Your unseeing swept away my voice

My fears

My muffled sobs in the dark lonely

Till all there was, was silence, Compliance Despair

So I raged Raged against your smothering passive centrism Against your polite death Against the way you preach Taking the hurt and the hate and never throwing it back Against your denial, your selfish pain Against the “that’s just how it is” and “that’s just what family is” And I know this is just what you are And I know I will never be like you

I carry this name, not with pride But because it is mine

I will be a man In the way my father never was I will not be the woman He has always begged me to be Sweet, yielding, The sacrificial lamb Bound upon my bloodline’s altar The unspoken The unheard Just another in a long line of silent witnesses

I am our garden. Covered in the memories we’ve grown.

We watched each flower bloom together, Each a color of my life with you.

The black of my hair the first time you cut it for me. The gray backseat of the car where I used to sleep. The white school walls you passed with me every day.

But something’s wrong in our garden. You were away and new flowers grew. New colors I never saw before.

The gold of his hair. The green in her eyes. The rainbow that is the world I never saw.

I knew what you would say. So, I never spoke. I buried those flowers. So, when you looked at our garden

You’d say, “It is good.” But those flowers were mine to grow.

So, I do not owe you your perfect garden.

I used to hate the parts that grew with you. Our blacks and whites choking my golds and greens. And I couldn’t rip them out, leaving it a barren mess. And what would even be left? A child on the floor. Crying.

So, instead this is what I’ll do: I’ll regrow a new garden without you, filling it with life and colors anew.

The bright blue of my first nail polish. The shimmering silver of eyeshadow.

The white of the shaving cream on my legs.

This is the garden I have grown.

And I’ll love and protect it the way you never could. The way you should.

And I’ll lock the gates, but I’ll let you see. Just how much more I can be.

and Asian

I have struggled for so long with stereotypes and get- ting stereotyped without my permission.

How does a good person of my complexion and identity fit into this society with so many boxes and barriers?

I find myself getting stereotyped so often that I have lost track of how I can fit neatly into people’s boxes.

Growing up, getting compared to other people who looked like me and all the pretty girls in the world.

Getting compared to girls with blonde hair, girls who have curlier hair, darker hair, people with the preferred complexion and colour that I never found myself compet- ing against on my own free will.

Getting compared to other girls of this race, of that race, from across the ocean, from within my own neighbourhoods, while having no say in who gets to judge the competition and why we have been entered into a global competition of beauty and complexion.

Getting compared to a neighbour so “sweet and innocent” just because of the way she looks and a neigh- bour so “different and unusual” just because of the way

Getting compared to some- one with darker skin, someone with lighter skin, saying that my skin looks more beautiful with this lighting, this amount of shade.

I remember just standing there, with a friend of a friend and a cousin of another friend, while a mother and a father compared our skin tones and said “Why is your daughter so fair when my daughter is so”

[end scene just as he speaks a stereotypical phrase with many a cliche word]

“Why is your daughter so fair and so beautiful when my daughter is”

[ends scene here as he engages in a comparison that no one asked for]

I felt like all my life, I have been compared to other girls and forcibly entered into beauty competitions without my permission.

Just because I was a cis woman with a lighter complexion, I got all sorts of uncomfortable comments focused on my skin tone and how I fit into a forcible cultural definition of beauty.

Content Warning: traumatic personal experience with colourism.

Anonymous | She/Her | Queer

Who Am I Really? , Photography 2022

I begin looking at myself as if I am lost as a person, Who are you ash, Lost yet found, Found yet forgotten, the sound surrounds us yet the ground can’t hear. We see the place yet so known, the home we fall toward, Yet you’re alone here. Found yet unknown, Who do you call yourself really if you don’t actually know? Have you ever known?

Slow as it may be, you life carries freely, You and yourself and you take it so carelessly, Find yourself yet you still seem to get lost Who are you if you are not seen

We stride to find and know and show and grow yet we lose ourselves in what we dont know The stars and I go back far, I cry and see nothing in me Just a speck of dust floating free

Wake up knowingly Tears running, slowly Knowing me. When will I continue to cry I want to be held and shown someone cares about me Yet love is something I hold so dear to me It’s hard and cold to be so lonely

Ash Dennis | She/They/Nem | @asherupt | TransFemme