self-portrait

by Erica Rivera

Jump to: self-portrait ・ river ・ essay ・ i don’t know who i am

self-portrait

colors stream across a brown background streaked with vertical white; fire at top-right, fenced by black lines. at top: text, “would you endure.” at bottom: sideways cut-out of a text on surviving nuclear war.

river

blues, greens, purples, flow out of and into red suns. black lines like a bar graph across the bottom half.

essay

colors are meaningless. only words matter. many are cut off but one can read: “exposure,” “fallout,” “surface,” “earth,” “elements,” “beta,” “skin,” “X-rays,” “shields,” and “radioactivity.”

i don't know who i am

the first image but upside-down. the black lines stacked like a kid’s toy. text is meaningless. colors flow in different directions; to and from where is anybody’s guess.

Erica “ERN” Rivera (she/they) is a trans Latinx/e performance writer of color. Her work appears in en*gendered and JAKE, and is forthcoming from beestung, Sophon Lit, The Emerson Review, Osmosis Press, Under the Sun, and Broken Antler Magazine Quarterly. For fun, she likes to watch TV and pretend all the characters are trans.