In my flesh, I must pass
for straight.
Play it safe and narrow,
as wife and mother
in a town where gay and groomer
are synonyms
and our local library bans books
where we exist.
My existence is a threat to their comfort,
my sexuality always inherently sexual.
Funny how it never works
the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in the digital world,
I can be me.
I make collages of women in love,
write their beauty in verse
and find safety in readers
that I will never meet or know:
a pseudo-anonymity,
an illusion, I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only from a web page
can I find refuge, community.
Can I wear a label in my bio
but can not cold open in person
with who I really am.
On my porch, I will hesitate
to put up a rainbow flag
but in the language of binary,
code of 1s and 0s,
I find renewal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in a real world
where your digital footprint
is scanned and scrutinized,
where can an artist create?
I suppose I could toil away,
lock my words behind passwords,
delete and burn after reading.
But to create and not share,
is to not create at all.
And to not create
is the inevitable death
of a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cover Image: Photo by rotekirsche20<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my flesh, I must pass
\n\tfor straight\u2026
\nBut in the digital world,
\n\tI can be me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":499,"featured_media":25920,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4212,3401],"tags":[390,2344,511,367,1867,1553,261,4314,1589,25,35,3063],"class_list":{"0":"post-25914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-digital-spaces-and-sexuality","8":"category-fiction-poetry","9":"tag-community","10":"tag-digital-spaces","11":"tag-freedom","12":"tag-identity","13":"tag-liberation","14":"tag-online-communities","15":"tag-queerness","16":"tag-refuge","17":"tag-self","18":"tag-sexualities","19":"tag-social-media","20":"tag-subversion"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/499"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25914"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26070,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25914\/revisions\/26070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}