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Fragment ( France ), gold and silk embroidery, 14th century.

Photo - Arte del Tessere

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living the world: an intimate evening with essex hemphill march 5th 1993 center for lgbtq studies

i hopped on the internet archive to read old vibe magazine issues and... stumbled on this. hyped is an understatement.

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Maya Angelou working on her bed with a Thesaurus, a Dictionary, and the Holy Bible, 1982

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After working on my summer project most of the day, I went to meet an internet acquaintance for the first time at the neighborhood gay bar where he bartends. I had two gin and tonics.

It is okay to appear in an essay. Don’t merely replicate what you have done in poetry in prose. 

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Derrick Austin

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Fontainebleau State Park, Louisiana by Lana Gramlich

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JOSH O'CONNOR Hide & Seek (2014)

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Sam Pasco

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The beauty of the world, Simone Weil wrote, is the mouth of a labyrinth. Find me there.

A Syriac manuscript showing the Jericho labyrinth, Library of Beirut, Lebanon.⁣

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“The Warmth of Hot Chocolate”

 by @forkergirl Thylias Moss

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other side leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His moustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from insisting he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God. I showed him where my wings had been recently trimmed. Everybody thinks they grow out of the back, some people even assume shoulder blades are all that man has left of past glory, but my wings actually grow from my scalp, a heavy hair that stiffens for flight by the release of chemical secretions activated whenever I jump off a bridge. Many angels are discovered when people trying to commit suicide ride and tame the air. I was just such an accident. We’re simply a different species, not intrinsically holy, just intrinsically airborne. Demons have practical reasons for not flying; it’s too hot in their home base to endure all the hair; besides, the heat makes the chemicals boil away so demons plummet when they jump and keep falling. Their home base isn’t solid. Demons fall perpetually, deeper and deeper into evil until they reach a level where even to ascend is to fall.

I think God covets my wings. He forgot to create some for himself when he was forging himself out of pure thoughts rambling through the universe on the backs of neutrons. Pure thoughts were the original cowboys. I suggested to God that he jump off a bridge to activate the wings he was sure to have, you never forget yourself when you divvy up the booty, but he didn’t have enough faith that his fall wouldn’t be endless. I suggested that he did in fact create wings for himself but had forgotten; his first godly act had been performed a long time ago, after all. I don’t believe in him; he’s just a comfortable acquaintance, a close associate with whom I can be myself. To believe in him would place him in the center of the universe when he’s more secure in the fringes, the farthest corner so that he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to nab the backstabbers who want promotions but are tired of waiting for him to die and set in motion the natural evolution. God doesn’t want to evolve. Has been against evolution from its creation. He doesn’t figure many possibilities are open to him. I think he’s wise to bide his time although he pales in the moonlight to just a glow, just the warmth of hot chocolate spreading through the body like a subcutaneous halo. But to trust him implicitly would be a mistake for he then would not have to maintain his worthiness to be God. Even the thinnest flyweight modicum of doubt gives God the necessity to prove he’s worthy of the implicit trust I can never give because I protect him from corruption, from the complacence that rises within him sometimes, a shadowy ever-descending brother.

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