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Dominic / Xalli Anaya Gulaya

Dominic Anaya Gulaya is a teenage QTPOC and Disabled writer from Los Angeles. He studies creative writing at school, edits and writes for multiple different literary magazines, and is incredibly passionate about prison & police abolition, restorative justice, and mutual aid. She's an aspiring journalist, but for now, you can usually find her making zines, playing bass guitar, going to punk shows, watching horror movies, or scouring the internet for lucha libre matches!

" I wrote The Rebirth of Venus as a Dyke when I was struggling a lot with feeling like I had to rebuild others and help them discover themselves while I was still constantly confusing and rediscovering myself. It's about all the wonderful and incredibly exhausting things that come from that cycle of rediscovery."

The Rebirth of Venus as a Dyke

Bones are party clothes

and it’s gettin’ to be the end of the night.

They’ve started wearing me down—

so itchy and tight, making the flesh

of my heels hurt, feeling like i’ve got some

hot, heavy coals, taking their master’s role,

becoming the ones who dig and take,

to make their way through all my muscles

& all the way down to my feet.

It’s called the calcaneus,

and it makes me wanna take it out,

pretty as it & all its sisters are—

so bright red in a punk way,

and a femme and a masc way,

inviting so you’ll press your lips to them

to go ahead and create adam again.

I can make you something new, like him—

something gross and twisted, so unabashedly

trans(sexual)(gressive)(cultural)(itory),

like all things new are bound to be,

blown into reality by sweet, sibling winds.

My own kind of monster amalgamation,

and you might think that’s a curse,

bound to eat some plastic apple, but i think

your monster self will end up telling me

‘bout how frankenstein is a queer story,

so i can nod & act like it’s new information—

Like all creation stories aren’t queer,

and all rebirths aren’t grossly gay,

and i haven’t done both a million times,

and dealt with consequences when i did.

I don’t want to be the one to paint my face this time, so someone else: make me new. I’m stuck being frankenstein & his monster in one body alone, and it gets a bit exhausting playing both parts— rebirthing myself when I sit up in bed, imagining my sheets as whitewater and myself; as both

the ridge-filled clam shell & sweet venus herself, and as the monsters of the deep below her.