Sherrie Fernandez-Williams Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned her MFA from Hamline University. She is a 2021-2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2021 Black Voices in Children’s Literature winner. Author of Soft: A Memoir, Fernandez-Williams has published poems in journals including New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, and Duke University Press, among others. Her essays can be found in the anthologies including, We are Meant to Rise: Voices for
Justice from Minneapolis to the World, How Dare we Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse and The Poverty and Education Reader.
Goddess of the Integrated Lesbian You want to deal in salubrious ways. Listen to Pema Chodron on audio books as you fall asleep. Function out of the body. Name gratitudes. Go to a church. Not one that puts ache in your ligaments. Go to Gay Church/ Not Gay affirming Gay emodying aka: a group of queer writers who are not afraid to use mirth like witch-hazel for minor afflictions. Not afraid to use the word Lesbian. And certainly. Not afraid of the anima who lives over your right shoulder. You spend time thinking about how the word triumph is played out. You think of the term, played out. And remember that time you were at Debbie Isaac’s birthday party, and you heard her whispering loud enough to hear her talk about your played-outness– hairstyle, outfit, all-around essence. You don’t know why you believed another girl, was it Gina who persuaded you? Said, of course you were invited. No, you are conflating two prickly events that happened years apart, Debbie Issac’s birthday party when you were eleven, Gina Clark’s baby-shower when you were sixteen. Either way, Debbie Isaac was there for both and whispered sour nothings about you on both occasions. Had you wondering, both times, how to sneak out of a circle of girls who would have been afraid of the word Lesbian. For a moment, you contemplated trends and that only drained you, so you embraced her. Sometimes embraced her. 16
