You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home, “I think your daughter likes girls,” which of course is true in this world too, so perhaps our worlds are not so far apart, and when you speak this secret, something unspools inside me, I feel you reaching out across generations and geography, I remember the names you’ve called people like me and wonder if you’ve forgotten them now, my mum says you must be psychic, my girlfriend says I must look gayer than I thought, does this closeness to death bring us closer to love.
Devon Rae is a queer writer from Montreal, QC who now lives in Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, SAD Magazine, Room, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Thirteen Conversations with My Body, is forthcoming in 2024 with Anstruther Press.
