Helena Silva-Nichols

Leland Quarterly | Summer 2020

Helena Silva-Nichols

last night i dreamt my sisters body had a gash the size offour fists

within, just behind purple ribs and across from her wild heart an implanted monitor sat beeping like cracked knuckles flashing read-outs in jeringonza i hadn’t bothered to learn

so i added to the list of secrets we keep on blood-thinners and woke up to find mourning precluded, cauterized mid-vivisection

Leland Quarterly | Summer 2020

Untitled Elena Miller

Leland Quarterly | Summer 2020

Darnell Carson

My body has never felt like anything but target practice, but bug under microscope, but porch light to every moth of a man that’s ever mouthed a slur in the silence, that’s ever parted his lips to show the venom frothing underneath, that’s ever lifted his voice to the song of my destruction, be it of my black or my queer, hate finds no difference in the tune.

If my body be a home, it has never been a safe one. I have never been good at sharing space with my trauma.

My mind be a mess I am never able to manage: one bedroom and crammed floor plan. all walls and no windows to let the light in. sink piling with dishes I don’t have the energy to clean.

This body code-switches for survival, knows that it is only as safe as I am invisible, spends each day deciding how to make itself absent, if it will bury the Blackness for the white gays or quiet the queer in front of family

Someone Told Me Once | Darnell Carson

The issue with intersectionality is that every road leads to a dead end. You are always too much or not enough for anybody — always a threat to someone else’s ignorance. always a silhouette someone is scared to pass on the sidewalk

There are no safe spaces for brown rainbows so I have learned to make them

in the palm at the sight at the base a billion of my partner’s hand of my sister’s smile of my friends’ laughter good things in the sound of their voices

Like maybe the whole world has gone to shit, and every night I make it through is a bittersweet blessing, and every morning comes with a million things still trying to kill me,

I know I still have this: The warm glow of a candle lit on my partner’s altar. The way he whispers my name like the strongest prayer he knows. The way the silence settles on us like a blanket, every affirmation I could ask for held in the weight ofhis stare.

How queer it is for pain and joy to coexist in this body. for my mind to find nothing but peace.