😥Please Watch The Video Until The End Look What Happens To Us We Don't Know What Comfort Is We Are

The Trans Agenda is to Keep My F*cking Friends Alive — sol rios

published as part of the Citizen Trans* {Project} by New Words Press

this poem is about being nonbinary.

When someone you love offers a bid for connection, you say yes every time. When someone sends you an article, a video, a funny post, it’s a bid for connection. They are trying to connect with you. When someone shares details about their day, their life, their thoughts, or their feelings with you, that is a bid for connection. They want to connect with you on a deeper level. They are trying to pull you into their world. If you love them, you say yes every time. Yes, even if the article they send is not particularly interesting to you. Yes, even if it means listening to them ramble about a game you don’t care about and think is stupid. Yes yes yes. And let’s hope they always say yes to your bids, too.

#1,200 hermit

when i leave this tight fit of an exoskeleton

i wonder what will be found from those times

when something was lost to the tide

rather than gathered and disposed of

there are some things

you just cannot rid the world of

corn cob husks

used-up push-pop tabs

empty of disinfection tablets

all the library books i could never return

paperbacks so worn down

with indentations and water damage

you can barely decipher the original text

neon orange, made to eat

inside-out wrappers, forgotten sweets

saved for never, piano sheets

shucking

prying

always denying

hoarding away contrabands

collecting what’s left for the next finding in the sand-

but even hermit crabs

in their ever adapting, tenacious habits

leave behind something worth remembering

A four page comic about drawing, drawn for the Portland Public Library's newest exhibit, "Why We Make Comics: Reflections on Storytelling".

If you live in Portland ME, you can see this comic, as well as three others drawn by Isabella Rotman, Caroline Hu, and Liz Prince, on display from October 6th to December 31 at the library!

you spent hours in libraries and in art supply stores trying to absorb the artist tips from books your parents didn't want to buy you. on each page of every "how to draw" is a version of the same four things: this is how you shade a sphere. this is how you shade a cone.

this is what a man looks like. he is hard and angular and jutting. his chest narrows a triangle down to his sharp hip and long legs. his jawbone is a square. he is powerful, imposing, his hands are big and meaty. he is a leader.

this is what a woman looks like. she is soft and her hands tuck her long hair back behind a delicate ear. she is big-eyed and round (but not too round, she is skinny, here is the faint sketch of her abs showing), she is smaller and lighter and pretty. she has thick black lashes and her tits do not come with a massive ribcage to offset the weight we put on her - she has curves, but they are impossibly slim without giving her backache trouble. there is a large red hourglass outlined on top of her figure, the way there is a triangle outlined on top of the man. her face is a heart-shape, and her lips are pouting.

here is how you draw the woman and the man together. the man should be in action shots. the woman's ass should be in action shots. she should fit against the man to compliment his negative space - she should slot into his shadow so when they hug, they become one uniform space. here is how all the other artists have done it, see how good it looks when the man (angles, fire, passion, action) and the woman (roundness, water, emotion, supplication) complement each other? he begins the sentence, she is his ending.

do you want to kiss another girl? that is round-to-round. that is fitting the wire into the wrong socket! how would the faces look together? a single silhouette you sketch and then hide, scribbling over it.

do you want to look like a girl? by sheer genetic happenstance, you absolutely don't look like that, and you never have. you don't look like a man, either, though, do you. you don't feel like you truly belong to either gender, but there is not a "neutral/fluid" drawing in the book. there is male (triangle) or female (hourglass).

but you have a square jaw and square hands and "masculine" proportions. but you have curves and roundness and full lips and "feminine" features. someone online says, definitively, that any form of gender noncompliance is "a mental illness." this comment has over one thousand likes from people who agree.

here is how you shade a square. none of the clothes at the store look good on you, you always somehow feel like you're wearing a weird kind of costume. here is how you shade a sphere. your friend's mother calls the school because she's horrified you're in the same changing room. here is the neutral body figure: it is a wooden man. technically the wooden man is genderless, but that is because masculinity is the default, and everyone calls the figure "a wooden man." you must be small and posable and skinny and featureless, then you can be masculine enough to not have gender.

here is how to draw a person. begin with some shapes. choose the right shapes to get that person's gender correct. do not kiss her. shade in short, sharp lines.

when she laughs, look away.

To make a prairie (1755) - Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

#1,336

I’m not creating as much as I’d like.

Because I’m trying to predict my future mistakes.

My inner critic believes themself to be prophetic

“You’ve written about this person too many times,

Who in the world would want to keep a sculpture of a dumb cat?

If I were to attempt some editing,

Not a line would be worth keeping.”

If I’m not going to make anything,

I might as well smack myself upside the head.

Death of the author is meant to be metaphorical.

Just because it’s put out into the world doesn’t mean it’s meant to be published.

I could be completely wrong.

But it shuts my inner critic up when I think this,

So maybe it’s worth something.

Maybe when Van Gogh painted “Starry Night” he wasn’t thinking about anything.

Just taking in the view from his asylum and his paintbrush.

IN 150 CHARACTERS OR LESS - Nikita Gill