It means so many things to be a part of the queer community. By some, we are feared for the way we experience love and rarely celebrated for our expressions of it—oftentimes forcing us to keep so much of who we are to ourselves. One of my favorite lines of poetry states that “it is the voices that make me pull at / my skin this way already stretched / and scarred too many voices on the / inside trying to get out and only / one mouth.”* To me, this is what it feels like to be queer within too many of our communities. It is therefore vital for us to encourage acts of creative expression, so that our mouths become only one of many vehicles used to communicate with the world outside of our bodies.
Read the full guest editor letter from Alesha J Dawson
Guest Editor’s Spotlight:
Lineage by Jay Douglas
And Then With a Spin I Am Boy Again by Ari Burford
Neo by Tyrek Greene
The Endless, Pressing Night by Holden Wright
Instructions for Those Who have Learned Not to Cry by Alex Vigue
Fernweh by Tamzin Mitchell
Aubade with Pin by Robert Carr
Lesser Erotic Incantations by Ava Hofmann
My Sweet Little Friends by Cover Artist David Andersson
Rachel Nix Interviews Sam Singleton
Rachel Nix Interviews Alesha J Dawson
About Our Guest Editor
Alesha J Dawson is the editor-in-chief of Screen Door Review—Literary Voices of the Queer South. She has a Master’s in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and has worked as an adjunct English professor at the University of Montevallo and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She currently works as a case manager at a life insurance company during the day to allow for her editing and writing by night. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her two cats, Pushkin and Bede.
