Sinister Wisdom Newsletter
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October 9, 2025 (by Barbara Johnson)
I walked this forest trail with you for years.
Now, alone, without you, for three.
Looking for fairy bowers. Owls. Or a sign that you’re still with me.
Had a memorial bench installed in your memory.
To commemorate our love of this trail, the nature sounds, the creatures, the Jacks in the Pulpit, the “white dog,” the peaceful holding of our hands.
“… Who walked this trail every weekend with her wife, Barbara.”
Visited six days before the anniversary of your death to find the words “her wife” scratched out. Unfixable. Someone trying to obliterate our love, our life together, our existence. Peace turned to menace.
“The love that dare not speak its name.”
A female cardinal alighted on a tree in front of me as I sat sobbing on your bench today, the anniversary.
“Cardinals appear when angels are near.”
Was that you?
Barbara Johnson is a former Naiad/Bella Books author and winner of the Alice B. Toklas award in 2018. This award is given annually to living writers whose careers are distinguished by consistently well-written works about lesbians. She met her lover and soulmate, Kathleen DeBold, at Flager College in Saint Augustine, FL, and they were together for 48 years before Kathleen’s death in 2022.
They walked the trail mentioned in the poem weekly for nearly 15 years. Though bittersweet, Barbara still walks the trail in memory of what they shared and what she’s lost.
"Empowerment comes from ideas."
― Charlene Carruthers
"Your silence will not protect you."
— Tourmaline
"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."
— Leila Raven
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