“Small Town Pride Parade” by Sylvie Jane Lewis

[after the first-ever pride parade in Chichester, May 2024]

We’re all pink powder eyelids and pink peeling shoulders. 

We scroll through question marks, through whines of why

can’t they fuck off to Brighton? They’d like us undocumented, 

unseen. We must make a record of ourselves. We are evidence

of our own happiness. We are our own small town. We are

makeshift, we are am-dram, we are accidental camp; we will

be here tomorrow. We are the nervous queen onstage, forgetting 

the words to Good Luck, Babe! We are the boy held in the crowd

by his mothers. We cruise utopia; we are a GCSE Drama piece 

(performed with maximum effort) that will probably get a C. 

We carry a history in our limbs; we complain about overpriced 

drinks. We are a small but infinite resource; we queue 

for the porter loo that will run out of paper by 3 p.m. 

We are a night out that feels like a school disco. We are 

grasping our girlhoods with forgiving hands. We are an image-

archive, but fear this: we exist in places other than your phone. 

We are the call of a jackal in the body of a terrier. We are

a database of questionable taste. We are the losing dogs 

you bet on. We are in love with what we might invent, we are

*

Sylvie Jane Lewis’s poetry is published in The London Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Them, all, and is commended in the Ware Poets Prize and the Bridport Prize. She is pursuing an AHRC-funded Literature and Film PhD at the University of Brighton. Website: sylviejanelewis.wordpress.com; Instagram: @sylviejanelewis.