I wear my fingers out into the cold
Bare, pleading winter air to cool the stabs of heat
To calm the thin acid between my finger bones
Yesterday
Inside a friend’s dining room
I gripped frozen cubes of ice
One in each hand
And fought back tears
Humiliated by the surprise attack
At home
I clutched more ice, and more, as it melted
Giving into the urge to open the floodgates
Sobbing over the phone to my lover
The hot shame of my glass body fingers
Steaming against the pooling remedy in my palms
Today, mercifully, it is 28 degrees outside
Bundled high (save my little sticks of pain)
I set out in the morning hours
Bathing my fingers
In the frozen, forgiving air
Gwynn Fulcher
Gwynn V. Fulcher is a queer writer/performer living in Chicago. She's a staff writer for the award-winning podcast PleasureTown, and an Artistic Associate with the Neo-Futurists. Gwynn is a veteran live satire/pop-culture essayist since 2011, a regular ranter contributor at the live magazine show The Paper Machete, and a multi-champion of the live persuasive essay competition WRITE CLUB. She can be heard as Omie Heck on the serial actual-play RPG comedy podcast Shuffle Quest. She has appeared in Chicago Magazine and Voyage Chicago Magazine, and been published by Chicago Literati, Video Game Heart (RIP), The Skewer and Good Little Girls.
Scout Roll
Scout is a third generation artist from Baltimore who’s approach to making can be best summed up as, ‘Don’t be scared of art, make friends with it.’ After moving to DC for college, Scout has since completed three permanent murals, and opened her studio practice: Repeopled. If Scout could do anything, she would give everyone in the world a portrait, because everyone’s face is fascinating.
