Photo by Eli Sleepless
TRIGGER WARNING:
Throughout April, Rest for Resistance is proud to feature writing by LGBTQ+ people of color for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The following content discusses surviving abuse.
Guinevere
I believe in haunted places,
and I believe in you.
I believe that one day
this world will ache, and shuddering—
open, a hungering maw
swallowing itself from the inside.
It will probably hurt— and I know,
we've all hurt enough.
But there are only so many ways
you can pick at a scab, and our
cords are all worn thin
by our own screaming—
because sometimes, there are stories without
princesses at all, only sad girls in small rooms.
A haunting
is what happens when the world
decides to slowly devour someone,
one finger, one word, one blink at a time.
The body remains, the tower smoldering, but
the person becomes the place.
I believe in haunted places, because I
am one of them. I have always been
a mouth with a thousand teeth,
this body a million sharp stars.
I have always been a kind of evil,
scratching my eyes out at night.
And every morning, I grimace, wicked
and alone, shivering, trying
to forget—
"I won't look", I tell myself,
"I won't look."
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Image description:
A yellow dirt path is surrounded by bare trees, with fallen sticks lining either side. The sky is a pale blue fading to white. The trees in the foreground are large and looming, but there are no trees off in the distance, just the sharp line of the horizon where the earth meets the sky.
About Eli Sleepless:
Eli Sleepless is a self-taught latinx film photographer. Their genderqueerness and nyc upbringing is important to their work. Find more from Eli on on tumblr, instagram, facebook, and our main page.
About Elle Wong:
Elle Wong is a Taiwanese American trans woman from Lexington, KY. A graduate of Lexington's School for Creative and Performing Arts, and a Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts alumnus, she has been published in Still, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, and Bigger Than They Appear: A Collection of Very Short Poems. She has also been a featured poet at the Holler Poets Series in Lexington, KY, and the Treehouse Poets Series in Hazard, KY.
More of her work can be found on Instagram @officialskypiglet.
Whether you have a little privilege or a lot, it’s easy to feel helpless when considering the scope of systemic oppression. Growth is always possible, so once we accept the need to change, the only question is how.