Spaces between our queerness

208. Spaces between our queerness

22nd April 2025

Born between the same hush of sky

Just in different spaces within its expanse

I've loved women

Since before I knew how to name it

Fell into that love like a secret

Folding into the creases

Of my notebooks

Wrote poems for girls who

Didn’t know they were for them

Carrying that ache like a promise

A soft defiance

A home I had to build with

My own hands

Because no one else would

Give it to me

Growing with a world teaching

Love was only ‘right’

If fitting the ‘hetero’ box.

That family and children were

Created following one script

But that box never held me

That script caging

Yet, ‘out’ as ‘Bi’ but

My heart always sapphic

But when the world whispered

Loving women was wrongness

I believed, unknowingly internalised

Until I did Not.

Lost with no purpose

Accept the desire to create a family

I followed the only script I knew

When I stumbled upon a man

Existing outside the box of masculinity

Learning and unlearning as we

Created a family

I’ve stood quietly

In rooms where tension crackled

Barbed wire words dressed as defence

Where fear carved chasms

Between those who once

Marched in solidarity

I have seen the harm,

Not mine,

But harm I can't unsee

And carried its weight

Not in guilt

But in grief

Because I know we are

FRAGMENTED

Loosing each other

In battles none of us truly win

My children walk in this world

With gender unfixed,

Pronouns tender.

They teach me daily

That the heart has no borders

When love is permitted to breathe

Wasn’t till the days of middle age

That my layers finally shed

To my truest identity

Facing prejudice I held

And fears I carried

A created family beside me

I stepped, then leaped

Into my full self

Polyamorous

Lesbian

Demisexual

Panromantic.

Merging old paths of

A queer comradely marriage

Grounded in love

And mutual understanding.

Carved in respect,

With new paths seeking

The softness of sapphic love

SO, I CAN’T LOOK AWAY

I won't pretend the lines are clear

Or healing easy

But I believe in a future

Where coexistence isn’t

Compromised, it's choosing.

I believe in Spaces

Where no one must shrink

To fit the box of

Someone else's understanding

Of women

Of queer

Of REAL!

Maybe I'm still learning

The language of solidarity

But my soul already speaks it

In quiet gestures

In fierce protection

In hearing without defence.

We are not threats to each other

We are branches

On the same storm-weathered tree

Learning

Aching

Still reaching for the light

Let's not forget

Who held our hands

Who claimed space for our voice

When the world abandoned us

Let us not be the ones

Who turn our backs now

We were all born

Under the same

Hush of Sky.

[written in response to the recent Supreme Court rulings defining ‘women’ in the Equality Act as biological and excluding trans people, and conversations about the consequences that will follow.]