I Pull the Trigger and Lilies Fly Out

As a queer woman, the world is often not a place I feel I can live in authentically and without barriers. From the day I came out to my parents, there has always been an implication that I need to “sanitize” myself, to not be “too gay.” As I began to explore my poetics more in college, I kept finding myself attracted to this idea of identification, and of explicating and exploring the hardships I have gone through because of my identity. This project is that exploration of what it means to “be,” and an attempt to create something beautiful out of that pain. The poems here deal heavily with adolescence, sexuality, and pain in a multitude of forms, and are all inherently and intentionally creating a body of queer poetics. Through this project, I am looking myself in the eye, understanding and processing my trials, and painting them across the page. Poetry is the vehicle I use to transform those demons into art, and through which I can begin to reclaim this self that has for so long not been mine to claim