Fiction & Poetry
It’s clear Ms. Nisha is not here to shame them or lecture them. She’s here to give them words when they have none.
I smell the judgement
and the disappointment
of my parents as I enter the hall;
it stinks of their silence on my sexuality.
Like some perverted Pavlovian desire,
the wafting smell of fresh soap
that fills up the air in the bath
has my pupils dilate when walking out.
1. A Certain Type of Life since the age of 16 I idealised a certain type of life involving certain…
tender lips that had forgotten, momentarily, the taste of mother’s milk and couldn’t tell the silence of the womb from…
The thing about crushes, is that eventually they stop being that. I’m not saying love dies or anything, I’m just saying, that Love never was and sometimes it takes a few months of tumbling across perfumed bedsheets
All I have known of loving men is emotional labour, And by that, I mean back-breaking, soul-sucking toil, Oh, the relief of carrying nothing but yourself, Oh, the relief of taking nothing but pleasure from their sex
That’s all the big roles and ethics
All there to fulfil.
Another task,
Another box to tick
Another concrete path to rush
Quick, simple and straight.
I would once again be theirs, in memory, on the day my lover would die.
Aria walked into her school’s auditorium, giggling with the rest of the girls, because they were about to have their very first Sex Ed workshop.