Adrienne Rich: “As a lesbian/feminist, my nerves and my flesh, as well as my intellect, tell me that the connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
Carson McCullers: “Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.”
Andrea Dworkin: “For me, being a lesbian means. . . that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.”
Virginia Woolf, from her essay, “The Leaning Tower”: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.”
Joelle Taylor: “It’s an overwhelming feeling, and it goes back to that feeling of belonging I was talking about earlier. ‘Cause people like us, we don’t get things like this. It’s a really magnificent thing. It’s a really important moment for me, and for people like me, for women like me. So I’m very grateful to the judges, and to the TS Eliot prize, for making it possible.”
Eloise Klein Healy, the author of nine books of poetry, was named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2012. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her forthcoming book, A Brilliant Loss, will be published in 2022.
Nic Alea is a queer poet with fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Wheeler Centre. Nic has work featured in journals such as Muzzle Magazine,Paris American, decomP, BOAAT, Crab Fat and others. Originally from California, they currently live in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia) where they are a library worker and a small-scale quilter.
Aida Muratoglu is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY, whose poetry and criticism have been published in Hot Pink Mag, the Critical Flame, and pan-pan press.
E. I. is a college student currently finishing their BSN. They were born and raised in Nigeria and currently reside in Massachusetts where they have lived for six years. They are currently working on their first full-length chapbook in-between classes. They believe they are one of the bravest people they know because they constantly face their near deathly fear of airplanes.
Originally from Detroit, Amy Spade lives and writes in Oakland, California. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Her largely formal poems have appeared in many journals, including Nimrod, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cottonwood—and most recently Lesbians are Miracles. New poetry is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom.
Karen Poppy has work published in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her chapbooks CRACK OPEN/EMERGENCY (2020) and OUR OWN BEAUTIFUL BRUTALITY (2021) are both published by Finishing Line Press. Her chapbook, EVERY POSSIBLE THING, is published by Homestead Lighthouse Press (2020).
(Time, words, the joint in my hand still cherried).
What more can I write about longing?
Nemesis to my Narcissus,
my ashes to Athens
& ruinous Rome—
Greek to me is nothing
more than ego death and reflecting pools.
So tragedy goes
& so do I.
Aimless and untoward,
my compass wanton.
Lost as I am in the shapes of our togetherness,
the triangle of freckles on your chest.
I miss you more than I know you
and I know you more than I know myself
(these days, anyway).
Is poetry not the most self-flagellating form of confession,
kneeling in the temple of my own lexeme?
One cannot seek absolution in their own anxieties!
How foolish I am! How foolish I have always been!
So remember me as a fool.
Remember me as hopeless, as romantic, as goddess, as God.
But remember me, first, as a lesbian.
As carpetmuncher/fingerbanger/homo/dyke.
As other otherworldly, undone by pleasure,
pumping throbbing aching pulsing and
as girl on girl, fucked and fucking,
curve and breast and bush and knoll,
dripping howling sucking gasping.
Do not elegize me in ambiguity.
Do not take away my girl, my baby.
Do not make me suffer any more longing.
I am complete. Remember me as whole.
Hannah Fradkin is a cultural studies graduate student at Claremont Graduate University. She’s a dyke Jew feminist who lives in California with her fiancée, Becca, and their cat, Chloe.
A Pushcart-nominated poet, Ruth Lehrer is the author of the poetry chapbook, Tiger Laughs When You Push (Headmistress Press) and the young adult novel, BEING FISHKILL.
Evelyn Grace Quinlan was born much later than you would imagine, and fortunately, therefore, her juvenilia went unwritten. Her senilia, however, is in full flood. She previously published widely under a nom de plume (Philip Quinlan), but is now flying solo, wearing different feathers, and loving it. Hurrah for samsara! (S)he previously co-edited Angle Journal of Poetry in English, though said journal has sadly now departed to that bourne from which none returns.
Caroline Earleywine teaches high school English in Central Arkansas where she tries to convince teenagers that poetry is actually cool. She was a finalist for Nimrod’s 2021 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and has work in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Barrelhouse, NAILED Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte and lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs. Her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, is out now with Sibling Rivalry Press.
Elizabeth S. Gunn serves as the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Nevada State College. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, Nevada, where she lives with her wife and their three lively pups in the endless Mojave Desert.
Hailing from rural Western New York, Coral O’Leary (she/her) is a lake-effect snow ex-pat, current New Yorker, queer writer, cultural worker, and asexual aromantic-spectrum lesbian. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated work has appeared in Toho Journal, Minnow Literary Magazine, Baby Teeth Journal, and SORTES. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Impostor: A Poetry Journal. Instagram @ohcoralpoetry
i smoked on the porch while the leaves made ocean sounds
and you sat in bed reading darwin
we cried and laughed in the same wooden room
laying on the floor declaring
the beauty of the white ceiling
the beauty of tomatoes
couldn’t we grow old together?
moving shoeless into the open air
examining books in the summer light
taking sprigs of lavender from farmer’s markets
time pulls everything apart, like taffy
but I still see you
sitting by the water with your feet up
all around us, glistening,
I still see you
like you’re right here
Lee Fenyes studied poetry and English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan, where they received the Emerging Writers Award and the Virginia Voss Award for Academic Writing. Based in central New York, they are a researcher for the non-profit world. Lee spends their time thinking and writing on nature, memory, and identity.
