Throughout July, we invited submissions in response to our queer themed writing prompt below!
Submit a 250 word flash, either fiction, memoir or a poem that brings to life any LGBTQIA+ person or story from 50+ years ago.
The Winner
Titled Untitled and Double Lines by Kath Gifford – inspired by Marjorie Jewel ‘Marlow’ Moss (1889 – 1958)
Titled Untitled
Before the days of ‘they’,
constructing ‘her’ own identity
without the label gay,
the rainbow spectrum of androgyny.
Resistance to labels a factor in obscurity:
remissly neglected with no surrender
to experiments, and ethical debates on purity
of art, religion and gender.
Non-uniformly suited,
with abstract Parisian attitude,
crop-haired, riding booted,
indifferent to what you conclude.
Breaking the rules in France
for a woman to wear men’s clothing.
Dancing to their own dance,
surprises revealed in boxes for the trojans.
The Jewel in the drag King’s crown
gathering no Miss Moss.
A legend in her Cornish town,
in defiance of history’s loss.
Mondrian’s imitator, disciple,
or double line inspiration?
Not your archetypal
friendship foundation.
A garçonne of distinction,
using the diagonal line,
patriarchal parallels causing extinction,
although feted in her time.
The lines of two spirits
expressing space, movement and light,
Curved Cord didn’t prohibit,
giving room to the white.
A Jewish Atheist Existentialist, to whom did you pray?
A Jewel from Joel, meaning still unresolved,
from joie to jouer, joy to play:
this precious Jewel, set apart, unsolved.
Art forever Becoming
Live on thy confusion
Double Lines
Who created the parallel lines first?
Moss, so-called ‘disciple’ of Mondrian,
or were ‘they’ the double inspiration,
forgotten or erased by his-tory.
One set of lines perceived more radical
than the other due to anatomy.
Miss Moss’s modernist mathematics
calculatedly breaking gendered form
by spiralling into semantics.
Boxing clever with boxes in boxes
in ever constricting Paris circles
trending romantic surrealism,
escaping single line restriction,
vertical, and horizontal direction.
The Runners-up
Time Passes by JP Seabright – inspired by Virginia Woolf
It has always been you. From the beginning, you were my moment of being and my voyage out. I found you at sixteen, slipped betwixt covers, held in my hands, pressed against chest, fingers flicking. You were…much older. You were forty five; this was your third affair. You proclaimed it your greatest passion. I fell in love with you, head hard and heart first. With you and all your women. These unusual unconventional women, trying to find their place in the world. I knew then that I was one of them too.
On our first trip together, we rode the waves of consciousness – all the way out to the lighthouse. I peaked on the crest of your words. The way you captured my thoughts and laid them on paper like the contours of my body. A map of all those secret places. I felt seen and understood for the first time. I felt both written and read by you.
We were common readers, you and I, and I nearly followed you into the darkness and depths. Not the Ouse but the booze, and pills. I weighed my body down with them, like you filled your pockets with stones. But I came back up, coughing and spluttering. You did not.
I return to your words often. Your voice clear in my head, like our first voyage out to the lighthouse at the age of sixteen. Its beacon shining a light in our shared darkness.
It has always been you Virginia.
I married my wife by Laura Tisdall – inspired by Her Husband was a Woman! and Female Husbands: A Trans History
I married my wife in the Year of Our Lord 1927, in the local parish church. Two women standing up before the vicar, though I was in my suit, of course. My wife bloomed in her fresh-starched skirts.
At the Blyth shipyard I was a riveter. The rivets hold the ship together. If the Titanic had been made with stronger ones, she might never have sunk. My job was to smack each end with my hammer, keeping them in place.
The best worker he’d ever had, the gaffer said when it all came out. Bloody reliable man, except not.
The local newspaper called me a female husband. I didn’t dispute. Husband was what I wanted to be, its Friday wage-packet whiff. I’d been found out, they said, but they admired my daring.
Why were they never found out, those other men at work? Too weak to stand the heat from the brazier. One of them cried in a corner once because his dog had died. Many of them weren’t man enough to get a woman.
And when I come home to her that evening, my female wife, she’s beating starch into the white wash with the same dead precision I had at the yard. Each blow lands in the same place as the first. I take the dolly from her. My not-any-more wife blinks. I flip the sheets out of the copper tub and wring them. The grip of my hands. The job’s no longer hers.
Alan Turing by Lauryn Green – inspired by Alan Turing
I write words on the face of a dead man’s baby,
a restless spirit who gave his name to a test of humanity,
a force he never got to witness firsthand.
Our world war won with bullets made of his bones,
our victory cry drafted and rewritten
on the backs of his blueprints.
The cacophonous clack of acrylic nails on a keyboard haunts me,
an orchestra conducted by the blurry hands of a nurse
in a rainbow lanyard.
I wonder if her heart twists
with selfish shame like mine does
when she preps a blood-pressure cuff for an old war vet
and calls him up: “Alan,
we’re ready for you now, love.”