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thin/refined
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

thin/refined

by
May 3, 2022
Renaissance painting of four women
Venus and the Graces Offering Gifts to a Young Girl, Sandro Botticelli, 1486

Ed Dams (she/they) is a writer and student at the…

We hid grace under the bed in the drawer of shoes that didn’t fit, that we couldn’t walk in, that we imagined men would watch if we only could. We buried her in our underwear drawer. We thanked our mother and her mother for grace, freely given to us, and though she smelled like retirement, we held her anyway. We grew grace in the garden and she gathered spit bugs. Slow uncovering from inside her, other tenants, new world peering through the cracks in our hands. Grace summoned fat bees with heavy wings and laid them down on the hot flagstones of our garden. She sat with us in the bathroom whilst we bled and watched us wash afterwards, scrub clean the grip, the lingering feel of dirt. We wore her in our hair and she made our noses run. We ate her in our ice cream, the stalks on our glazed potatoes, later tasting her through Sunday night television. The summer we turned sixteen she wilted with disease and had to be cut root from root out of the garden. Without her, the seasons changed plainly. We walk through strangers' cities and we smell her. Lately we’ve been trying again, costume jewellery Rococo dress dream, leaning towards womanhood the way pollen draws insects. In the glass bottle on the dresser is the taste and smell of grace and we wear her everyday, waiting.
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Ed Dams (she/they) is a writer and student at the University of Birmingham. Her work often explores the body, acting, identity and the difficulties of expression. Outside of writing, they find creative inspiration in hiking and trash TV of the Riverdale variety. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Lemon Peel Press, Ghost Girls Zine, Hecate's 'Frankenzine' and Death's Dormant.

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