Jennifer Parkhill

Jennifer Parkhill Instagram – Gay things – off a prompt from @lydiagranered
📷 @adamcolemandp
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In Austin, April is a magnificent surge. Greenery springing, as if from one of those children’s games involving linked arms, leaning back then catapulting forward at the help of sweaty teammates.
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Nature moves, as if with a mission to take itself back, as though we are but squatters on this land. And in truth, we are. Vines come back stronger for having survived winter. They wrap themselves around the inanimate — ladders, wood planks, metal, plastic — de-arranging components, elements, molecules. The teamwork of trees and mushrooms. The decay repurposed as fuel. As new life.
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I had never witnessed a plant growing before my eyes until Texas. Trumpet vines double in size as water hits them. It’s something out of Alice’s wonderland. Plants I’d thought dead return triumphant.
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I had chalked up the landscape being overgrown to the people here caring more about the quality of their lives than perfectly mown lawns. Charming. Part of me moved here for the sweet relief of imperfect lawns. I now understand that Austin’s deeply rooted nature will only come back harder, stronger, faster, the more it is cut back.
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So what really is the bloody point of quieting what is determined to be the loudest voice in the room? And why shouldn’t it be? Nature, Gaia, Mother Earth, what is for me, synonymous with equality, with truth, with life force, with God, and most recently, despite being a descendant of Cuban Catholics, the word gay.
Lydia and I chuckling as we bow our heads in earnest at my Texas dining table, “dear Gay….”
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Tonight I walk past a house where children play. Chalk in the well-loved lending library. And because I am a forever child, I pull the chalk from the library to use it. I contemplate writing the word gay.
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(Continue in comments or swipe –>)
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#Saygay #queerwriters #gaywriters #queerpoet #loveislove #writingcommunity #queerwriting #writeyourheartin #andreagibson #poet #poetsofinstagram #poems #poetrylovers #poemsofig #writtenword #written #writing #writingcommunity #writinglife #writinginspiration #queer #gay #filmphotographyisnotdead #portraitphotography | Posted on 05/Apr/2022 08:07:12