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invisiBle - Kathleen Brien
by Bayan Atari
With this power no one can take, May we proudly take up space. It’s more than fantasy: it is achieved and realized, envisioned and actualized in life, more than fluid lucid dreams and more than reverie: It’s in the little girl with chestnut eyes glowing burnt ochre embers in the morning sun stretching her young limbs skyward and gracing the floor with the touch of her toes and struts out of bed with a royally earnest gait. She knows when she faces the morning that daring to live voraciously, spaciously, is her proclamation of dedication to flourishing in a glass tomb world that screams at her to shrink.
May we proudly speak as we wish. Every voice—from the cautiously whispered soprano letting powerful calculated words that bubble behind that unlabeled mouth spill when willed to do so, and sit quiet when she chooses—to be fearless mid-pitched blossom filling the room with fury as ample as her softly powerful calves and round unstoppable lightning heat thigh—to the trembling tenor who will let the tense world see her true identity shrugging off the sheaths of shame clenched around her rain-straight waist.
May we proudly travel as we please. Each of us will take her own strides into the warm neon light at her own pace, at her own tone, at her own will; smiling in vulnerable whimsicality or tight-lipped in vehement silence or bearing her teeth in proud lioness anger for every injustice: we will be heard through the cold soundproof walls, sisters holding hands through the tidal wave of the end of days.
