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I remember the first time someone explained to me what the word gay meant.
We were in middle school
Playing on the swing set behind Stoy Elementary
"He’s so gay," she said
Bitter disgust poured out of her mouth with every syllable
I could not think as to why being happy could be such a horrible thing
And so I asked
My exact words being
“Whats so wrong with being happy?”
Now both my friends looked at me weird
“Don’t you know what gay means?”
“Doesn’t it mean to be happy?”
“You’re such a little kid, gay does not mean happy. Gay is a boy who likes another boy”
I stood there wondering why it mattered so much that a boy liked another boy;
why it was such a distasteful thing.
And why it meant gay couldn’t still mean happy.
 Feb 2015 Chante Benjamin
M
Algebra
Women like me do not fall gracefully,
we stumble over our spines, trip over
our vowels, and collapse into your arms.

Our hearts are open books,
Russian novels containing fifty pages
on the way your voice drifts across
the telephone wires each night.
Our hearts are first drafts,
unedited verses about each and every
person we have ever loved: the stranger
on the subway, the girl who gave us a balloon,
the boy who stole our virginity
but not our heart.

Women like me will love you from a distance
of a thousand syllables while laying in your bed,
we will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible,
and when we leave you will finally understand
why storms are named after people.

- Katrina M.K

— The End —