This Route Includes A Fairy
I don’t know what precisely I expected to encounter in Salt Lake City, maybe more of the white youth in white shirts and ties, marching from a big temple, but in between visits to the surprising variety of craft breweries and hipster coffee shops we found the 2025 pride parade and I wasn’t ready for how huge, how hours long, how chock full of furries faithfully masked and tailed in the blazing heat, how fully throttled the Dykes on Bikes, how crisply flown the defiant, newly queered official city flags, how jolly and many the bears and the sleek speedo-d queer swim club, how yellow-brick-road endless and rainbow-promising the massive, blocks-long trans flag, how Mormon-earnest the seething, joy-drunk church of the sidewalk extravaganza, and how strikingly transcendent this one ethereal fairy, rollerblading like a river past the ecstatic crowds, past gender shackles, past fear, past our sweaty cheers, trailing a thrilling excess of taffeta and glitter down the most unlikely, most necessary avenue, the last place, I confess, I’d ever have hoped to receive such a benediction.
Audio: Liz Ahl reads “This Route Includes A Fairy”
Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (2017) and A Case for Solace (2022), which received the 2023 NH Literary Award in poetry. Her most recent of several chapbooks, A Stanza is a Place to Stand, was published in 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press. Her work has appeared recently in Cherry Tree, Rhino, Sinister Wisdom, Moon City Review, South 85 Journal, Rogue Agent, and on The Slowdown. She is proud to be #80 in Headmistress Press’ Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series. She lives in New Hampshire.
Thank you Liz Ahl. This is proof that the world is better and that growth is possible.