Krysten Hill teaches and writes poetry in Boston. Her first book, How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions), gives us a whole batch of poems as rich with family as this one, with its wrecked pie and found tenderness. You can feel the burn here as it happens: it feels like your own “wrist catches / on the metal lip of the rack.” I think that sudden physical vulnerability opens us up to what happens next, what has happened before, and all the tragedies big and small that we move through “like it’s no big thing.”
In this poem, as in so much of her work, Hill helps us feel the rich texture of real life—its hot stoves, fresh pies, and grieving. If we look carefully, we might even learn by example how to let our own minds “go into another room where it can be / unbothered.”

FEAST

Never felt like my hands belonged anywhere
near my aunt’s kitchen unless
the food was already made
and I was fixing myself a plate.
When she trusts me with a job
as important as the sweet potato pie,
of course my hand shakes pulling it out
the oven, trying to make it look as easy
as she does, and my wrist catches
on the metal lip of the rack and I drop
what took me too long to peel
and boil and season in the first place.
There are worst things to fall to your knees for,
but I don’t know, in a black woman’s kitchen
this feels like a sin. Instead of casting me out,
she steps over the mess on her floor
and sets her eyes on my injury,
turning the puckering skin of my wrist
over in her hands, saying it don’t look that bad
like she’s done all my life when I broke
my face on the sidewalk or cut my own hair.

She starts over on another pie like it’s no big thing,
like she did when my uncle went into a bedroom closet,
and bit down on the barrel of his revolver. After
the funeral she stayed in the kitchen
even when company came and tried
to take over her grief. She just kept making
her own mourning feast, pulling heavy
pans out the oven. Like then, I watch her
mind go into another room where it can be
unbothered. While I nurse my burn with
the aloe she grows on the windowsill, she hums,
blending brown sugar and butter
to the soft boiled bodies of sweet potato,
her brisk cinnamon hand turning orbits
of gold in the cracked clay bowl
that stays steady on her hip.

Illustration by Kevin Alves

The post A Poem by Krysten Hill appeared first on Take Magazine.

Nancy won’t let me take her picture. She says she doesn’t look cute enough. I tell her no one has ever been cuter in the history of the world, and she laughs her particular laugh that is too hard to describe because words like “barking” don’t sound ladylike or pretty but her laugh is so loud and sudden and earned that it fills me with tenderness and makes me happy all at once.

There are chainsaw-carved bears on a bench outside, where people smoke. Linda painted their eyes gold. She tells me sometimes she talks to them. She is one of the owners, has a gold necklace that says DRINKING FOUNTAIN. I take a photo of the necklace, say “It’s lopsided.” “Like the owner,” she says. She doesn’t want me to take pictures of her face. I reach out to straighten the necklace, pretending I am pulling her shirt open. She laughs and goes to unbutton her blouse, tilts her head to say “that’s extra.”

photo by Josey Packard

Lala takes your food order. Her hair always looks beautiful. It makes her happy to see you eat. She brings enormous grilled chicken salads out in a take-out container, because there’s no way you can eat the whole thing. The burgers are like the ones your gramma made but bigger. After you order them, you start rolling up your sleeves, because the burger is going to run down your arms, drip to the bar off your elbows. They will give you extra napkins. You don’t have to ask.

The Drinking Fountain, photo by Robert Maloney

In the afternoon the bar is open and the TVs are on. People watching westerns or Family Feud, calling out the answers together. In the early evening it’s local news, a black lady subway driver and a older white guy plumber hanging out together talking about crime or traffic. A woman named Isabella taught me to salsa dance with her on St. Patrick’s Day. Nobody cares that we are gay, nobody asks us what we do in bed. Everybody wants to talk about taxes, cable bills, shout at the TV: “SHUT UP! JESUS CHRIST!”

The author with Patricia Adams and John Demeter

The other night we meet a black guy with blonde dreds, Jacob, who says he’s in town from Connecticut to fetch his girlfriend from Amsterdam when she arrives at Logan. He buys us shots of Jameson and introduces us to the white lesbians who he is staying with. They live on the street. Then a white biker gang comes in and starts fighting with each other until Nancy, wearing the sparkle butterfly hair clips from The Christmas Tree shop, says “THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF BAR. TAKE IT OUTSIDE AND SOLVE IT AND THEN I’LL SERVE YOU.”

So the bad element leaves and the sweet leather-vested bikers that are left take selfies with the laughing black regulars.

It’s always like that—people sharing pizza or wings or dancing or singing along or giving each other a ration of shit. Patti cashes out the scratch tickets, hugs us sometimes, made us corned beef sandwiches for St. Patrick’s Day, shakes her head when she sees us, saying, “There’s Trouble and Trouble.” We loaned Albert our shop lights so he could see to re-tile his bathroom.

Rosie, photo by Jill McDonough

Gina knew my book got reviewed in the New York Times Book Review because we went in there to celebrate, take pictures of the print copy. And she remembers, asks the next time we see her, “How you doing with your book published?” “Good! Yeah! People are saying nice things.” She nods, shrugs: “Well, you got the brains.” Which is the nicest thing anybody has ever said to anybody. Thank you, Gina.

Gina, photo by Jill McDonough

We all feel ownership of the bar, feel like it belongs to us, which is hard for Linda, who is sick of people asking can I have the fire hydrant, can I have the ladder now that the place is closing down, taking it apart piece by piece. I told her that we all love the place so much we feel like it’s ours. The way you see a famous person on TV and feel like you know each other, like you’re friends.

The photos fall short, like any photo of the Grand Canyon or the moon. But I’m still glad I have them.

Top image by Robert Maloney

The post Drinking at the Fountain appeared first on Take Magazine.

For the month of June, LGBTQIA* folks and allies across New England come together in thoughtful reflection and celebration of Pride, which highlights progress since the Stonewall Riots. While much progress has been made, it is also an important time to reflect on what work our LGBTQIA* communities need to do in order to promote inclusivity, safety, and basic civil rights in the face of a hostile political system. We at Take want to acknowledge this important month by highlighting the artists whose work engages with LGBTQIA* themes and issues, as well as the creatives who claim these sexuality, minority, and gender non-conforming identities. All the folks featured on this list enlivened our editorial by challenging normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity in general through their unique work.

The following stories are about all kinds artists: previously pregnant butch dykes, rural drag queens of color, cis gay Asian-Americans, trans femmes, lesbian separatists, non-binary babes, and many individuals and groups of people whose identities aren’t as easily summarized. This diversity in our editorial exists because that is the diversity of our region. Though it’s true that we live in a society that constantly works to erase and delegitimize the existence of LGBTQIA* people, we’re still finding artists and cultural leaders who boldly embrace this sometimes fraught, yet always beautiful, spectrum of existence.

While we are proud to present our highlighted list of artists we’ve covered since January 2015, we’re not so naive to think that these are the only LGBTQIA* folks we’ve featured. While some artists openly share their identities with our staff and contributors, other artists have asked us to keep their identities off the record, or choose to never disclose for privacy and safety concerns.

Take is proud to feature these artists and our team will work harder to bring you more creative voices from the LGBTQIA* community as we expand our web edition and return to print this fall.

Massachusetts

Car Wash

Wading In

This Ain’t No Game

Comfort & Discomfort

Catastrophe in Provincetown

The Insider’s Take: Eternal Slumber Party

Come Closer

Tender, Forever

Becoming The Gold Dust Orphans

Facebook-to-Face

The Kids Are Alright

Cave and the Art of Community

Connecticut

Women of Abstraction

Gender Bender

Feminine Mystique

BL&D Interview – Arien Wilkerson

From Clay to Catastasis

Life is Gross

Sacred Stones

Crossing Equators with Arien Wilkerson

Maine

Portland’s Cherry Lemonade

Notes from an Expat: Where Are You From

Not-so-Little Women

Take Q&A: Crystal Williams—Writer, Advocate, Advisor

Slow Boat to Iceland

The Simple Power of the Cup

New Hampshire

Manchester’s “Sexy Industrialist”

Hood is Downtown…For Now

Rhode Island

Kitty Eyes & Spandex

Taken: Todd Oldham at RISD

Rachel Blumberg Sees And Hears More Than You

Hustler of Providence

Aurora Catalyzes Variety and Community in Providence

ART/Crush: J.R. Uretsky

Meet Rhode Island’s Newest City Boy

Nine Months in Drag

Vermont

The Rainbow Cattle Co.

Make Some Time for Angus McCullough

What Happened Before Homosexuals?

New England

Artists to Watch 2017

10 New England Tattooers You Need to Follow on Instagram

7 New England Niche Film Festivals You Can’t Miss

The post Take Magazine Pride Month Round-up appeared first on Take Magazine.