Aspen Writes Poetry

  She said I sharpen my teeth on her softness, but didn’t she offer her skin first? Held up her bruises like medals, then scolded me for staring. What do you want, love: silence or truth? Choose. In the house of words, we trade spit for salt. You criticised my bite, I criticised your mask. Both of us holding up glass, pretending it wasn’t a mirror. You see, it starts with one voice then echoes until it’s a scream no one owns. You said: You’re cruel as if I hadn’t learnt it from you. From every sigh behind a door, every almost-compliment curled at the edge of your lips like smoke from a burning letter. They call it “constructive,” as if we’re building something other than guilt. As if these fragile walls we patch won’t crack again by morning. I watched my reflection develop your voice, sharp, clever, cutting, like a surgeon who forgot they weren’t trying to heal. And now, look at me,  flinching at praise, measuring love with rulers marked in red ink. The voices are still in her...

  In the wake of decades of progress, the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights remains fraught with tension and division. As Pride celebrations grew, many marginalised voices, particularly transgender individuals, people of colour, and the poor, were too often sidelined, their struggles overshadowed by more mainstream, palatable narratives of queer identity.   The women who sparked the Stonewall Riots, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie, were at the forefront of a revolution, but over time, their roles in the movement were often forgotten or erased. The movement they helped ignite was built on inclusion, on lifting up the voices that were most vulnerable, yet today, many of those same groups remain excluded from the Pride parade, from its funding, from its visibility. If Marsha, Sylvia, and Stormé could see what Pride has become, what would they think? Would they feel pride in what has been achieved, or frustration at how their initial call for justice has been dilut...

  The Edges of Progress Here’s a wall. Here’s a fist on the wall.  Here’s the echo it makes, dull as bone.  Here’s the hand behind it: who built this?  Not me, not you. Yet here we are,  pacing the perimeter, shouting names  across a divide too old to remember.  Truth stands at the border, shrugging.  She’s seen it all before: the flags,  the fences, the careful way we stitch  ourselves into tribes. What’s new  is the silence after. The empty room.  The brittle edge of what’s unsaid.  Some things we call challenge,  the steep hill, the storm, the heavy stone, but this? This is theatre. A trick.  A scaffold for power to climb.  Listen. There’s a way through.  A gap where words might go,  if only we dared to speak them.  Let the wall be a page, the fist a pen,  the echo a voice that won’t be quiet.  Here’s the truth: struggle isn’t the wound.  It’s the scar. The mark of something ...