FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

The Forest of Humanity’s Variety

I was walking through the forest of humanity’s variety,

my emulsifying footsteps were thickening the floor.

There were drifting conversations dripping from the canopy.

I was heading for the ocean and the glistening shore.

The concentrating eucalypts were housing insecurity,

bravado ran with jealousy along their ghost grey arms.

An incandescent gossamer, the down of human purity,

hung purring from the fingers of the elegant palms.

I saw bigots swinging spineless from the swinging spineless vines

and there were signs, put up by rangers, which were warning of the dangers,

(if one got too near, were queer, were black or disregarded lines)

for the bigots spat in sweating fear of understanding strangers.

Where the rocks were looking cranial sat humans looking brainy, all

they did was sit and think and sit and think and sit, intense.

And in their furrowed brows these ineffectual intellectuals

sowed weeds that lacked the promise of a thought outside the fence.

I walked among the tribes, among the cultures and the creeds.

I lit a flame and crept along their tight sewn seams.

I found myself entangled in a swampy clump of swaying reeds

that shared with fish their oxygen and shared with me their dreams.

When obstructions blocked my trusting eyes I simply followed butterflies,

ubiquitous professionals of transforming ways.

Their iridescent magic eyes would lead me on with winging sighs

and leave me in a clearing under hue renewing rays.

The vapours of stupidity, in tropical humidity,

are dissipated, damp, into a blanket green sky.

Where opalescent molecules discover their liquidity

returning them to fig leaves for their early morning cry.

Occasionally a red burlesque of human sexuality

would rise in blooms, and purple scents would stain the sticky air.

Since morals have no place in me (I cultivate debauchery!)

when pinky petals parted I learned what was growing there.

The mosses singing silently to soothe the rocks were violently

assaulted by the boots of those blood-stained with bellicosity.

Their gripping soles soon slipped in holes when boulders shifted silently

and, once encased in stone, a tyrant loses their ferocity.

After weeks of watchful ambling I finally stopped my rambling

and felt beneath my feet the subtle tremble of the sand.

As I looked across the beach I saw a million others scrambling

toward the same horizon.

Revolution’s best unplanned.

Renée McAlister, Brighton

Flava

I knew it was going to be awful but living a lie had become too much of a burden. They were nervous too. Ours was a family of loud, simultaneous conversations. We didn’t do ‘sit downs’ for ‘talks’. I could smell the liver and onions cooking on the hob as I shepherded my parents to sit together on the sofa. I had refused coffee, tea, water and cordial. Mam went quiet when the list of possible drink options was exhausted. I could see that she was already pulling on defensive armor by the stiffness of her body language. Dad asked me again if he could get me a drink, or maybe a sausage roll.

‘Mam, Dad, I need to tell you that I have..’

I took a deep breath and straightened my own spine. The words caught a little in my dry throat

‘…become a vegan’.

A Bermuda Triangle calm enveloped the three of us. There is an expression in the north that goes something like ‘she looked like a slapped arse’. I could have told them I was a serial killer and they would have been less weirded out. Dad protested drawing upon my historical love of cod whilst Mam tackled the barely comprehendable possibilities of a life without bacon. Eventually though, Mam got to grips…

‘Well, I suppose it could have been worse, I thought you were going to tell us you are queer!’

‘Ah yes, well about that Mam…’

Lel Meleyal

* Note, this is entirely fiction. My own lovely parents are hugely supportive of me being queer and vegan although they are anxious that I will starve to death and thus continue to offer sausage rolls at every possible opportunity.

At 16, everything was a protest. We protested the inequality of women with our wardrobes, dresses made of old curtains and charity-shop finds, hair cut with a Stanley knife, shaved our heads instead of our legs, disdained make-up and wore hand-knitted socks. Because it’s better to take control of your own weird, than be stuck with the weird people think you are, right?

At artschool, we wore our weirdness like a badge, alongside “Nuclear Power No Thanks” , “A Woman’s Right to Choose”, and “Paolozzi is God”. We protested enforced conformity, the dull limits of a predetermined future; you can’t trust a policeman, you can’t trust a journalist, you can’t trust anyone over 30. We thought we could change the world by painting it. We reinvented ourselves monthly.

Later, after reality kicked in, we marched, singing, handcrafted banners aloft and Bovril sandwiches in the backpack. We cycled round London protesting the bomb, dressed in radiation suits and Maggie Thatcher masks…

We delivered gigantic valentine cards to MPs, protesting section 28 and demanding the right to love whomever we chose…

We Funked the royal wedding at Clissold Park, in Demolition Decorators Tshirts and the blissful expressions of those who saw no hypocrisy in the street-party beanfeast we had just eaten. We hung red, white and blue underwear, Doc Martens boots and Che Guevara bandanas as bunting, and threw wet sponges at our neighbours, with their heads through holes cut into a seaside-photographer portrait of Charles and Di. Because every good protest is an excuse for performance art, right?

We partied at Pride, marching, whistling, hamming it up for the straight media, Bovril sandwiches replaced now by flasks of Pimms. We morris danced in Michelle Shocked hats and rainbow tshirts, falling down drunk in the women’s tent, falling in love as a statement. We thought we could change the world by making it happy…Party as Protest…

which , somewhere along the line, became party instead of protest. Because we have equality now, right?

Meanwhile: online, in the global village, the village people are asking for our help. But will petitions, rants, angry tweets and satirical videos, memes, and cryptic status updates with secret messages of support do the job? Will Cassette Boy save the world by laughing at it? Can we harness the power of the skateboarding goat and the Polish roadrage man to make us free? Because until we are all free, until every woman, every gay, black, disenfranchised, abused, unregarded…every person is free, then none of us is free.

I miss the marches, the bike rides, the publicity stunts, the grand gestures, the thousands of faces shining with zealous joy, the sense of family. I miss the here-and-nowness, the face-to-faceness of dynamically sharing all that creativity and harnessing it to some social good; I miss the stamina I had. I’m going back out there and take my protest off social media and into the streets. Join me…Because protest is important, but we also need to get our daily exercise, right?

Fin McMorran / Gateshead

The Mermaid’s Sea. By MajIkle

Your call has dragged me into this inky swell with my clothes torn away, breath ragged, swimming for my life towards a mythical blue tail.

The penetrating moon fluoresces pink onto the mirror of sea when finally I crawl beside your incredible body. Begging you with foolish promises.

Your scales, softened by their immersion still shimmer unearthly hypnotic electric blue even this close to you. Silk skin of belly, breast and arms and face are the colour of human ochre but your eyes are vast pools of spellbinding dark light. Your beauty engulfs me till I cannot remember a time when I did not love you.

Waterfalls of hair seaweed curl around us both as you pull me close, bidding me look to the stars to see our story being told but below the water you are insinuating yourself between my slick legs.

My eyes ache from staring, unable to believe you are real even when I can smell the salty tang of my strong secretions but you urge me to let you continue to explore the space inside me.

You are fascinated with my treasure cave. You tell me nothing can stop you from slipping inside the opening into my heart. Beguiled I willingly let you further and further in until you fill me entirely.

Your hands encounter no resistance in my boneless body, as they orchestrate their storm, my voice bellows a tempest wind as your urgency heaves wave upon wave of sea out from me. Splashing like babbling streams, some hidden iceburg has melted finally.

Then before you push me off your rock to play with my newly formed iridescent tail, you whisper deep inside my shell that all of our sea is made from secretors like me.

White out walls over panel of old words

New canvas for letters of love and protest.

In the look out spots of higher ground,

Your colours of rebellion

Flags of recognition and voice.

We were here to rise above,

Ascent to say

We were here.

JJ

A FROZEN FEBRUARY IN WALES

Yesterday in Brecon a barn owl, screeching out her hunger to the ink black night,   landed on a frozen line,

And, as four hundred volts passed through her undetected,

she released

a veil of icy particles, that floated down

to a frozen ground

already white and dusted with fine snow.

Following this line some 85 miles, – this line

That generates a billion plus of sterling corporate profit,

This same line

beneath the same frozen sky of leaden snow,

Two men, in an abandoned Cardiff depot, lean against a pole

Furtively sharing a pipe

of crack cocaine;

seeking a comfort, that hungers still for more.

Settling, they soak in what love and heat their bodies offer the other

Under a blanket and tarp, that even in this frozen air, emanates the slightest odor of stale piss.

And in their sleep they hope their night will pass, for once, unmolested.

Two miles away retail outlets burn and blaze their profligate profits into the empty night.

I.M.                             Jan 18

PROTEST

Back when I was a shiny youth

I marched upon a rainy street

 A wild sea of women talking with their feet

 I heard the thunder of a thousand voices shout

In righteous anger for our right

‘Reclaim the night’

‘Reclaim the night’.

Then in my burnished middle years,

I saw a million women rise,

For an end to domestic violence,

 we chanted at the skies,

 And again a tumultuous sea of women,

In their anger roared,

NO MORE, NO MORE, NO MORE!

Now in my tarnished age

I hear a million, million voices soar

An insistent susurration along a thousand shores.

ME TOO, ME TOO, ME TOO.

And when a million, million voices speak,

THEY ROAR!

This time let no mean no forever

And let forever mean forever more.

Meg Williams

out in the city

by

Jane campbell

Two women: both dykes.

One/ primped up pretty/ giving it the bleached blonde/ lip-sticked/ feather bowered girlie.

The other a man-she/ a him-her/ the butch.

Nobody stares at us because there is nothing to see/ we are looking like them/camouflaged

Me and B/ my B/ broad in the coat/ gorgeous tall/ working class enough/ to be proper tough/ and we need to be because it is 1987 and every single day/ one of us dies from Aids.

We die but they do nothing/ because we die from ignorance/ apparently.

Anarchy in the UK is getting soft/its going off the boiling stage/ leaving us at the mercy of tepid ballads/ that focus our eyes on the guise of/ just wanting to dance with somebody/ or fill our pockets with loads a money.

Except we can’t because/ we are the three million unemployed

With nothing to do but watch/ Jim’ll fix it on telly to learn about love

or

Blankety Blank to hear jokes about/ the blacks and the poofters/ lesbians’ though/

we are alone when we are together/ making do/ just us two/ waiting for a real man to give us a proper seeing to.

Seriously?

If we’d collected a ‘naff tax’ on just that/ we could have bought us an island by now

/to escape to.

Bee and I are glad we don’t look gay/ we are homophobia free happy this way/ passing for strait we become more and more/ blatantly sexual so…

Strange as it sounds

Debenhams becomes the site of our/ DIY porno/ leaving our clothes in the changing rooms/ like Mr Benn we wander about for hours/ dressed like old ladies in corsets/ wigs and hats/ or don dog collars and drop to all fours/ playing puppy who’ll fetch/ along shop corridors/ nobody is paid enough to bother us/ nobody cares/ if we go Rocky three in sportswear/ or if B orders a milky coffee in a silk suit/ from menswear first floor/ with me laid across her lap/ the worst example of a St Trinian’s child whore/ till the women’s toilets call

or

We lock ourselves/ into British library reading rooms/ refusing when asked to come out quietly/ until the fetch the key/ and we storm out imperious/ shouting where’s the loo?

But the truth is every gap between parked cars/ is our personal pissoir.

The scrawls on the dyke toilet walls tell us/ ‘Lesbians are fucking everywhere,’/ so Bee and me/ we go there/ no graveyard or alley escapes our lewdliness/ and not just fingers wet/ we are whole hand fisting/ throat clenching some/ pushing heads between legs/ learning how only women come.

Suddenly we capture the camera’s stare/‘Love Bites,’ by Della Grace/is our pretend family album/ we become a gang in there/ sexing each other up/ in fake weddings with whips/ rattling our big fat bike chains/ and sticking out mucky rubber dicks.

Somehow now we are on TV/ in the nations living rooms/ where the country eat their tea/ so now even Margaret Thatcher can see us frigging in the rigging/ there was fuck all else to do.

Pop stars like Madonna and Sinead O’Connor/ want people to think they might be dykey/ we have made the zeitgeist/ they look more like us than we do/ as lesbian chic floods the mainstream.

Cheek more than chic though/ prostituting us worse than pimps do/ never give us a single penny/ of the money / do you?

I lie.

Truth is they do pay in a way/ kept us poor like a reservoir/ you could say I lived off

the wages I was due/ my fortnightly dole/ all I had to do was queue/ but you better not be late/ because they could make you worse than wait.

So

Unlike my foreign girl sisters/ I didn’t have to do hand jobs/ in the peeps shows of Soho/ still it was not enough to keep us out/ of toe curling second hand shoes/ and that shit don’t go.

Finally

Bee and me belong/ to Chain Reaction our dyke sex family/ and we start spreading the love we feel/ financially, socially, sexually/ by showing each other our cunts/ lips, clits, skin colour/ as we spread our legs widely

Pleasing ourselves and one another

All of us the same and different

All of us ‘proud of it’ queens

All of us resisting the shame regime

By coming fucking together.