In These Worlds, Our Colors Bend

In These Worlds, Our Colors Blend

I learned the color wheel in art class, tumbled through shades of evergreen and mahogany in video games, and improved the reading comprehension of my own identity. When I took up my first flag, I did so unwittingly. This space, this null, is not an absence but a rock carving, a redirected art form of care and companionship swirling around what once was considered colorless, opaque. In time, I welcomed more colors, learning how to see in sapphic pink and queer joy. I learned it from all of you, and all that is in me. Ours is a world building praxis of queer collaboration, radical care, and mismatched emojis combined into the pixelated yellows and blues that thread our virtual lives. In these worlds, our colors blend on some days like soft yarn, on others like ceramic glazes brilliantly bursting into light in the kiln. For you have taught not just color theory, but the art of queer presence.

Angela Acosta (she/her) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Rhysling finalist. Her Rhysling nominated writing has appeared in Copihue Poetry, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). You can find her on her website at https://www.chillsubs.com/user/a314acosta

Copyright © 2024 by Angela Acosta

Published by Orion's Beau