I Found a New World Across the Sea                                                        —Topaz Winters


& in this world i am the good wolf in this 
world i am the good witch i am 
never fed & never hungry

i am soft in this world i am the
shelter not the reason to go searching
for it in this world when i worry too much
it is cute instead of pathological

in this world the first boy i kiss does
not run from me the moment he sees 
me for what i really am 

in this world the first girl i kiss
i do not call her god
i do not want so loud i become cannibal
i am the light without the hunger

in this world i am never so lonely that
i laugh just to have something 
to wrap my hands around

in this world i am no longer a list of
unasked questions & the answer to each 
is no longer the word blasphemy in 
this world when the parts of me that
are not made of water beg for mercy

i spare them

Topaz Winters

Topaz Winters (they/she) is a poet, essayist, editor, creative director, speaker, scholar, actress, & multidisciplinary artist. They are the author of four books (most recently Portrait of My Body As a Crime I’m Still Committing), writer & star of the short film SUPERNOVA (dir. Ishan Modi), creative director & editor-in-chief of the arts organisation Half Mystic, speaker of the TEDx talk Healing Is a Verb, & creator of the digital art installation Love Lives Bot. Their peer-reviewed research on poetry, identity, & the sociopolitical underpinnings of queerness in Singapore is published in the Journal of Homosexuality. They are the youngest Singaporean ever to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the youngest writer ever to be published by Math Paper Press, & the youngest scholar ever to be published in the Journal of Homosexuality. They were born in 1999, reside at topazwinters.com, & study art at Princeton University.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2019