'My story is a cliché you say is best avoided' by Kathryn Reese

Pride month writing workshop, your hair in braids, your singlet-shirt revealing scents of sandalwood soap and saltwater. Queerness is not a thing you discover in the mud, it’s in you, it’s always been—

except that I’ve just spent three days in the scrub, cataloging frog calls and evading the thirst of terrestrial leeches. 

When I was 12, I caught chicken pox. I remember shivering in my grandmother’s bed, pedestal fan whirring, starched sheets scratching at calamine-bathed skin. Being sent to bathe, water tinted yellow with pine tar, the stench lingering in my hair for months. Not being allowed out, except to go to the park, as long as

I promise I won’t go near anyone. 

But there was something in the stopped-up creek, the wonga-vine’s embrace, or the way the strangler fig poured herself into another tree’s torso—

I promise I won’t go near anyone

because I was a church-girl then, believing that love is proportionate to purity, and purity a thing so easily undone. 

I promise I won’t—

This place won’t forget what she is told, even as she teaches me to kiss honey from fallen flowers. She would have loved me

but holiday love and quarantine end. At the bidding of god, my parents say, we relocate to some red-dust mining town. Make the best of it. I stick with the first boy to pick me. Love is

proportionate to purity after all. I play it safe. Lucky things worked out but there you are in sandalwood and a singlet-shirt saying I’ve always been whole and holy and I tell you no—

I’m three-days deep in the scrub by my grandmother’s house, leech-scarred, mud-stained and bearing the sap of wonga vine in my hair. And if you kiss me

you will taste another girl’s honey in my hair.