SPILL QUEER ARTS MAGAZINE SPRING 2017
letter from editor the
Hello again friends, First, I’d like to thank everyone who has supported this magazine throughout its two year life. This is my second issue as Editor-in-Chief, and I’d like to thank our brilliant contributors for everything you’re holding. We couldn’t do any of this without our submitters, so thank you thank you thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Some of the writing and art in this Spring Issue absolutely blows me away, but I won’t spoil it for you. For those who don’t know, Spill is a magazine founded in 2015 in order to be a platform for people, especially students, in the LGBTQAI+ community. This issue is focused on the themes of defiance and resistance.
Standing up for our community, not forgetting intersection and facing the fray. Mindful activism and radical resistance are crucial to our survival. I personally am so grateful for the chance to help elevate some of the great artists we have showcased here, and anything this magazine can do, I feel lucky for being a small part of bringing it to fruition. As I step down, I’d like to thank the amazing people I’ve worked with over these years, specifically, the members of Spills inaugural staff that have supported the magazine through so many trials and the people who have joined us in the past year, who I’ve relied on so heavily this past few months. Thank you, everyone. I hope you share the pride we have in this issue,
Zoey McShane
2
Editor-In-Chief
Zoey McShane Managing Editor
SPRING ‘17
Theresa Chapman Marketing Director
Raina Barnett Print Editor
Vincent M Layout Director
Lauren Johnson Art Director
Oswaldo Jimenez Web Designer
Lissandra Dyer Social Media Manager
Gabrielle Bautista Copy Editor
Tristan Czarnecki-Verner
3
By: Salem Commander
Hurricane Annie
By the time she’d had me, my mother had begun to slow down. Like a hurricane, building strength before the shore, hammering the coast. Inland had the best of it. It became no more than a heavy, gray sky. No one got to see the sun, but thank God it didn’t rain anymore. Now maybe the floodwater can be rerouted. The debris can be picked up, hauled away, destroyed into chippings. But no one came to do any of that. The trees rotted where they fell. All kinds of bugs bred in the stale water. Glass was shattered in the streets. My mother was a devastating hurricane, killing everyone in her wake who had been unfortunate enough to stay. Years later, what the earth had not reclaimed laid exactly where it fell. I am the only one here. A rain came every now and again, but what else was there to do other than to pick myself up? I had thrown myself to the wind many times, hoping to be whisked away, to drown in the waters. It never happened like in Plath’s poems. I was just alone and scared. I was tired. Everyone else seemed to be just as tired. My aunt, her brain and her memories nothing more than rot, peacefully dipped under the swollen sea. Other aunts and uncles and cousins did the same. Some seas were shallow bathtubs, while others were deep and narrow bottlenecks. The story ends in exactly the same way. Everything that is not eaten will eventually decay. Their bones will whittle away until they are indistinguishable from the chippings underfoot. There will be nothing left to remember of them.
4
Ocean Eyes Art By:Britney Jenkins
When I whisper Close, So close, And feel what it is To be the hours in your hair To know when they rose into their curl As you sleep and get hot Sharp against me, your starry skin Your breath deepens, I press my lips into your hair.
lips
The slight whistle of your snore peaks I move your curls from my nose And lean to sleep against them in peace Into the night, I say what the day lets me not complete Evaporating my speech away I love you. And I know, You may never love me. I press my lips into your hair.
5
By: Quin Severo
Maple syrup sunlight drips across the city, coating every glass house in the oozing substance, sweet at first, but sticky and messy over time. Glowing pink, orange, and red, the colors appear to be animated, directed to dance across the sky. Sitting on the hood of my car, I feel at one with what’s above me, glass castles around me towering high. A small hand reaches out to wave to me, I blow back a cherry kiss and wave excitedly. Oh what I’d give to be small again, Unaware of the glass people in the glass town of food that I live in. Artificial Christmas trees, roses, and clothes, the funny thing is, the people are artificial, too. Sitting here, on the hood of my car, I realize that darkness is not far. I close my eyes, and breathe it in: the world, the beauty, the nature, the reality. I breathe it all in until I feel it reach my toes, before I slide off the hood, and into the car. Shoving my keys into the ignition, I take my last glance, at the sickly sweet scene of people with phones, watching the sunset on their screens. What has happened to reality? What has happened to chasing dreams? Everything available, at the touch of a finger, we’ve forgotten how to live, but what do I know? I’m only a kid.
6
By: Katrina Grosskop
7
By: Madalyn Rose Danielak
8
9
By: Aleksandr Wilde
10
11
By: Leah Brand
what the Dyke inhe Water
Lavender
In my dreams I’m alone in the middle of the midnight ocean, my naked back cold against the rock of the black waves. I’m looking at the moon with the stars glittering by my fingers.
My knees take the toll of the rolling hills and I land to feel the petals tickle my neck. The orange sun wading in the horizon ignites golden specks of pollen in the air, and they dance with the dusk.
A sudden hand grips at each of my ankles and I am swallowed by the surface, salt brines my lungs and I’m inhaling stars as the current takes me under in a cloud of pearled bubbles.
The little lights freckle her cheeks and eyelashes, and she rests her sleeping head on the rows of lavender, with hair coiling over her eyes for me to tuck behind her ear.
I can still see the hazy moon’s pitying light dropping lazy kisses onto the water’s cheek, the ocean’s arms holding me to her sand belly, washing me thrice of my impurity; hands, then feet, then stomach. Hands Her short fingernails, with their chipped polish and bitten cuticles, belong to thin brown fingers, long and soft, and dewy palms that she rubs on the sides of her jeans, but never dry. There are cracks over each knuckle, valleys in each palm, that twist and curl into each other, with callouses between her middle and forefinger and bite marks on her right thumb that never fade.
12
Teeth Biting words spat through a clenched jaw are caught in spittle on my nose. I don’t wipe them off or move. I let the offending gob ooze viscous as it scales down to my chin, let it scar me with its acid, let it burn holes into my lips to save me from her kiss. Now, they hold my tongue between a thumb and forefinger, and pull until the seams rip and it threatens to come loose, the pink flesh turning copper. They’re saving me from my words. I gnaw, and finish the job myself. Dirt There is six feet of ground covering her chest.
erents
13
By: BobbyFoxx.com
14
15
By: Joyia Limorin
16
By: Andras Peltier
I am used to feeling unsafe. The only life I know is one full of the dread and unease that comes with early childhood sexual trauma, and I now know the fear that comes with being two-spirit. I am well aware of the specific pain white men love to inflict on bodies like mine. My own trauma connects me to the generations and generations of suffering my people have endured in the wake of colonialism. Everything I experience connects me to the moment my ancestors lost their land and began their fight hundreds of years ago — including my interactions with white LGBT people here on campus. I had hoped I would finally find a community to connect to, the famed “safe space” we all dream of, but I quickly learned that there is none . As I navigate predominantly white spaces, white LGBT people continue to dig their fingers into the open wounds of colonialism, ripping and tearing until my skin is left the bright red they always imagined a Native would be. I can expend all my emotional and intellectual labor educating until I faint, but there will always be whites who do not care to learn or take accountability for their role in the suffering of the colonized. White LGBT people refuse to accept their role as both oppressed and oppressor, and instead brush off the lasting effects of colonialism, genocide, and white supremacy. LGBT spaces end up like all others, where they would rather project an image of diversity and engage in performative “allyship” than truly support and uplift QTPOC. Whites do not understand just how isolating and tiring it is to be a person of color in a majority white space. We aren’t clocking you for fun — it is a heavy burden knowing that we cannot relax no matter where we are, even among other LGBT people. Many whites misinterpret the lasting effects of colonialism and the sexual domination inherent to white supremacy as something as simple as a “sexually charged society.” Or they make me hear words like “allosexual,” as if a colonized childhood sexual assault survivor like me could ever have the same relationship with sex as the white man that first victimized me. Beyond that, they imply I have privilege over white settlers who benefit from the systems that put me such great risk of early childhood sexual assault in the first place. Our culture isn’t a sexually charged one, it is one based on white supremacy in a settler-colonial state, which manifests in many forms, including sex and sexuality. Indigenous people are hypersexualized in order to dehumanize us and excuse sexual violence against us. My suffering and the suffering of other colonized survivors is not up for discussion, yet these issues are often brushed aside as differing opinions in a debate over “discourse.” Colonialism isn’t a buzzword. Colonialism is the reality we all live in that only white people, regardless of sexuality or
gender, benefit from. My people face the highest rates of sexual assault in this country, most at the hands of whites: the direct result of a society that sexualizes brown bodies for white consumption. Even white non-binary trans people, who I’m supposed to relate to, couldn’t feel more foreign to me when they complain about binary trans people. They insist that there’s some sort of antagonistic dichotomy between completely invisible, forgotten NBs and hypervisible binary people, but they forget that visibility is not a privilege, or a sign of acceptance. They say this as if the binary itself hasn’t always been a tool of colonialism and white supremacy, or that white trans people don’t benefit from the structures that instilled the binary in the first place. I have found that most whites do not care to learn our histories or understand our oppression. They are comfortable with the dominant, homonationalist narrative that tells them all identities are valid — even identities that ignore colonial, white supremacist history — and all violence is not the answer, but remember, all people of color are inherently violent. Engaging with these white spaces has not helped me recover from the dehumanization of racialized sexual trauma. I feel more lost than ever given my struggles are only met with white indifference at best and white hostility at worst. There is no real way for me to ever have a so called “safe space” when I am surrounded by people who ignore the colonial realities that shape my life. I want the whites in LGBT spaces to understand that I am a person who sat down to write this out for you; I have to write out hundreds of carefully crafted words to convince you of my humanity and that of other people of color. But most of all, I am a person who will spend the rest of their life dealing with the aftermath of their trauma and everything that comes with being colonized, body and soul. Everything is colonial. Especially sexuality. I know I deserve to feel safe at some point, but I fear I never will when so many people maliciously discount the destructive impact of colonialism when I am living, breathing proof of how potent it is. I hope by sharing my pain in so public a forum, white people who claim to support us, yet carelessly disregard our lived experiences, will learn some compassion. Maybe then I will finally find a safe space to heal from all the wounds of generational suffering. True support and healing will only come once white LGBT people take accountability for their role in colonialism and upholding white supremacy, and when that accountability is reflected in all their words and actions in the spaces they share with the colonized.
17
By: Anonymous
America, release your apocalyptic tongue and show me your harvest of the bodies you ate then buried to make trees no one pays attention to anymore. Show me those hands you carved bruises into the women with; the fleshy pink stains on their chests. Please, show me the gun you put into his hand that made him count to three before shooting into a body different from his. I look at my feet and notice they aren’t my feet because America, you took that away from me along with other people’s feet, their dialect, their name. You picked at us like figs: a bulbous, savory opportunity you thrashed with your chipped teeth. America, you taught me to brush my hair at 6 years old and at 20, I am teaching myself to wring the blood out of your mouth.
18
By:RK Luna
Notes on Men
this poem can be about fisting a man in the face, shouting go fuck yourself when he dribbles over his work shirt after gaping at my tits. this poem can be about the white man who said I should like it the morning after staying too long at his house. when I think of men, I think of them doing it together. and at night, sleeping next to him, i know he isn’t touching me with fingers but with bullets. Art By: Brianna Vandale
19
By: Wesley Allure
20
21
By: T.R. Icarus
train tracks whistles in the distance a boy faces his Goliath he stands resolute for all of his sisters & brothers, takes another step forward for he will not be swayed.
The Shoulders of Giants
from his mother he learned solidarity from his motherland, from the demonstrations and her bedtime stories never has oppression fed the hungry she would always say with pursed lips, porcelain in hand and he remembers. the boy will not build that wall he will not falter before adversity and he recalls her chamomile as the supposedly democratic Monolith comes for him too
22
By:Indira Bustamante
23