My Country was Built on the Graves of Children
When I was in high school, we read a story in English class about residential schools. One of my best friends was Indigenous, and she told me that her mother was a residential school survivor.
My country was built on the graves of children.
We tore babies from their parents’ arms and beat them red and white. We smothered their words and erased their dances, writing over them with ours. We whited them out.
The blood of the children cries out from the ground.
Though this week we have found over 1000 graves, we have not found all the graves…
I am a disciple of Christ
It seems the voices around me are growing ever louder. From the one side, it’s “You can’t be LGBTQ+ and a Christian! Pride is a sin!” From the other side, it’s “Why would you want to associate yourself with a group that has caused so much pain and suffering? Christians are evil.”
More and more ex-evangelicals (exvangelicals) are dropping the “Christian” label altogether. They don’t want to be associated with a group that has fostered so much hatred and negativity. Honestly, I don’t blame them. But I’m still a Christian.
Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that…
If you stick your tongue in my mouth, I WILL gag
The first time my first boyfriend tried to shove his tongue in my mouth, I recoiled like he’d tried to stuff a damp frog down my throat. I repressed my gag reflex as he stared at me in shock and hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you gave me a signal.”
He was older and experienced, while I was a virgin who’d never kissed anyone on the lips before him. I didn’t know what the signals were, and I sure as hell wasn’t giving him one.
I had touched tongues with someone before, though.
I was just a kid…
Christian Post article claims love is hate and hate is love
An article went live today on the Christian Post that argues that affirming Christians like me think we “love LGBTQ people more than God does.” The author, Samuel Sey, claims that accepting and affirming LGBTQ+ people as fully equal imagebearers of God and siblings in Christ is actually hatred, that “we hate LGBTQ people when we encourage them to be what God hasn’t created or loved them to be.”
Sey argues that truly loving LGBTQ+ people would entail telling them that they’re going to Hell. No really:
If we refuse to tell LGBTQ people the truth, we’re refusing to love…
Of Dragons and Alchemy, Chapter 2
Pain is relative. And a person gets accustomed to it. When doctors asked John to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain he’d ever felt, his ten used to be the appendicitis he’d had as a kid. Then, his arm got torn off, and appendicitis moved down to about a six. Now, the raging fire in every cell of his body makes a joke of every one of those “tens” that came before. He can’t think, can’t move, can’t breathe.
All he knows is pain, and the…
A Triolet
I crave you in the summer heat.
I want you melting on my tongue,
To fall asleep to your heartbeat.
I crave you in the summer heat;
Like ice cream sundaes, you are sweet,
And everything with you is fun.
I crave you in the summer heat.
I want you melting on my tongue.
Esther learned to read when she was four years old, and began writing shortly thereafter. She is a queer Christian poet, crafting with words to create art and music.
Now, at midnight the soft moonlight
Cascaded o’er the bed,
And washed it all in silver fall:
Kissed each bright crimson head.
The roses’ potent spice afloat
Upon the nighttide air
Invaded me — I could not flee —
And caught me in their snare.
I turned my eyes toward the sky:
The stars were growing leaves.
And then the moon began to bloom,
And I felt so alive.
I curled my toes into the soil
And let myself submit.
My hair like wine, sleek silky fine,
Now petals rose moonlit.
And now we bend before the wind
And call to…
Of Dragons and Alchemy, Chapter 1
When the metal tube opened, bright lights and loud sounds assaulted Gabe’s eyes and ears, completely disorienting him. He was too busy blinking and squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head to notice how much more beautiful it all was — though, granted, he was in a warehouse-style lab that wasn’t exactly designed with beauty in mind. He stepped out of the tube that had been way too big for his puny, bony pre-procedure body, but barely held his new enhanced and much larger and more muscular form, and immediately lost his balance.
He would probably have fallen on…
