In a climate of persistent attacks against LGBTQ+ people, this deeply personal poem highlights the daily onslaught of microaggressions and seemingly innocuous, albeit invalidating questions which distort, demand, and misunderstand. Women whose intimacy doesn’t fit into recognized categories must be sisters. Women with children are subsumed into heteronormative presumptions (1+1 = 0). The mathematics of the poem illustrates who is allowed to exist and who is rendered societally invisible.
Tracy Artson is a Bay Area poet and licensed psychologist in California. Her poems explore intersectional themes of social justice, climate crises, the human capacity for transformation, grief and yearning. Professionally, she works with complex and single-incident trauma. Poems published in The Passionfruit Review, Colossus Press, The Los Angeles Press (Fall, 2023).
