a boy named venus

By: Dan Aries

to the future diva in me,

keep sashaying through the world.

they might break your heart,

but you will always be a glitter shining

i.

I sometimes think that the world is asleep, but in the darkness of my attic room, the grunge in my head is loud. The punk rock music is pulsating and nestled with rib-rot-stain within the crevice of my chest. My heart is a mansion with a mouth of an ogre, feasting on half-exhausted and half-genuine ballad. It twitches in the masochist hammer of somber love letters deluded into smirking booty calls. My capillaries are thinned from the heavy flow of grinding school sovereign, and

ii.

the boys have pitchfork for tongues, always undulating with the flare of venomous queer insults. They say faggot with a hard glottal sound, metallic with a melted twang, and they scald my skin like a mini-Salem trial; I am a witch misfit betwixt the blue-locker hallways of dopamine dogs. School is kindness repented; it is false niceties compromised with rifle words and silver-knuckled angst.

iii.

In the classrooms, my hair is velvety, strawberry-cherished when the sunlight hits its knotted mane. The windows are my spotlight, and the blackboard is my cinema for a queer-diverse cast. A sprinkle of my mousse freckles dazzles the universe’s constellations; it’s a scattered rivalry against the star-map on my nose-bridge and chin.

My cheeks are rotund apples with ember glow. My eyes are Ferrero Rocher orbs: golden flecks blinding like film strobes and paparazzi’s flash. In my daydreams, I am a honey concoction for the pop girls and queen bees. I am singing in their royalty hive.

iv.

In the continuum of my other world, I don’t have to hide my pageant jeans with their rips, I don’t have to bundle up the cropped shirts with their apocalyptic politics. I don’t have to shove my kitten heels, my denim skirts with its acid bleach that look like my father’s gleaming baldness, and my rainbow flag with its proud fem brand beneath the secret floorboards under my bed, and

v.

in the ballet of my imagination splice, I am in the city with new platform boots. My eyes are not the after doused version of a dead fire. There are no fist imprints just below my cheekbones. My lips are protruding and thorny and scathing - not a territory ballooned with crack.

vi.

I am a beautiful human, a queer faggot with unfaded glow. My light is a 3d space that will splatter you into a Technicolor. It’s full-on shimmer. I am not just a peekaboo fetish that the boys love to pass around like football trophy - a conquest for temporal victory pawed with lionglory.

vii.

And in the backyard that tastes like Antarctica, my mother is not dead. Probably, that’s why my father has grown cold, it’s the dawn’s wake behind the house. Father calls the spot haunted with Mom’s ghost and her rose garden. Her soul so voluptuous that a chunk of her, so big, so universal, was left on this cruel Earth with the shape of an unfurled fauna. Father says it’s her ghost that’s left crystallizing the backyard, but I know it’s grief with its gigantic thighs. It’s grief with its hip dips and bones and teeth and void.

viii.

Father clucks at me for the jutted notes in my walk; a flair of gay, a feminine window to what my mother has bestowed. In the morning, he leaves with his alcohol beers and heavy-inflated belly. He is an ellipsis tracing the possibility of misery, always expectant to the edging emptiness and rue.

ix.

And I take the chance to slip my ballerina feet to my sequined heels – it’s a simple rebellion against the hetero-awn of patriarchal mansion. I kiss myself a lip gloss for shine, draw an eyeliner for gothic stark, and dab a bit of concealer right on the surface of violent incarceration.

x.

Father is a genocide of soul.

xi.

Mother always said my shadow is pink, and together, in her days without the cancer and tumors and chemohealing, we weaved our fingers to the ground. The dust of earth tattooed underneath our nailbeds. Our hearts were tentacles of roses that couldn’t be breached apart. We snipped the green stems with their loveable thorns, sniffed the scent of something beautiful against the cage of grime, and in our duo, we recognized each other’s iridescence - flailing bright, wanting to gasp for freedom.

xii.

I sometimes envy her ghost. Death became her savior against the crushing stage of darkness.

xiii.

And as the metal doors of high school clang open, the air of courtyard is sewn with eyerolls and silent applause. The bubblegum Heathers chew their contempt, the boys with their sharkegos bite their bark. The insults melt and mellow like foundation flesh. It’s a second skin against gravel sunlight. Their words carry welded brunt, they shoot like arrow with assaulting somer- stories that mirror the same tragic fate of Icarus. They are immortalized in the form of dents on my scarlet-boxed metal heart, but their projectile of insecurities misshapes like wax wings from the nuclear-potent of my sun.

xiv.

From the strobes of my gaze, I am a film star with glittering halter dresses. I am a faggot written in the font of blocky surrealism. I am Vogue-sque imprinted like a glossy brand on my collarbone. It is proud, tinted a spectrum of shades, and it glows like solar storms. My mother is in heaven with her clasped hand over her chest, smiling and mouthing the same words of wisdom and reminders of authenticity. The memory hits me with a gleam of sepia. We were weaving roses in the backyard, the sunlight tipped down on our backs, and she says, ‘You will always be my son. I love you even if you are different.’

xv.

The wooden house, with its gaping doors and windows that didn’t trouble themselves for warmth, disassembles into a noir grain. The picture slips like glitter sands within the folds of my memory.

xvi.

In my future, I see metamorphosis, clandestine love, and illicit fire. My elements finally being permitted to burn in all its ferociousness. I have no purple skies under my eyes, I have no obsidian tattoo of aggression on my cheekbones.

I am shining, I am blinding the whole world with my effervescence. I am a star of my own queerness. My hair is a tangled knot of aquamarine waves, dotted with wreath of flowers that accentuate my brown skin. I am queer, I am kissing a boy under mirrorball lights, and I am a beautiful mutation.

But for now, I am gonna pay my rent of hellscape. But soon, and soon is near, I am gonna be

lavishing in queer haven, with glitter and stardust in my eyes.

Love,

Venus, a femboy goddess.

Dan Aries (she/they) is a transnonbinary Filipino artist and writer. Born and raised in a shoebox town, she longs for the city at heart. Having been published in numerous litzines, she writes about queer experience in the gaze of surrealism, gender revolution, and dynamite flamboyancy. Young as she may be, she has a fierce heart for advocating intersectional feminism. Wrapped into the colorful specter of pop culture, precolonial Filipino narratives, and diverse queer icons, she plans to write more about the rainbow community in its refracted beauty and harrowing hardships. If she is not writing or making art, Aries is probably just holed up in her room watching drag makeup tutorials while feeling the fantasy with a mink coat. If you want to reach out, you can find her Instagram @heatherishz.