In this week’s poem, “Monday Night Choir Boi,” Jae Casella tells of singing in the “Lavender Choir” with several generations of queer, trans and nonbinary singers.

I love this poem’s tender details of the speaker’s fellow singers — all younger than them — and of the speaker’s own youthful struggles with identity. I also love how the choir, and the poem, bring so many queer lives together in song.

Casella (they/them/jae) is a queer poet and photographer who lives with their spouse on the southern coast of Maine. Their writing is informed by all the thoughts they don’t say aloud. Their favorite place to be is outside. Casella’s poems appear in redrosethorns journal, Epistemic Literary, Bending Genres, Monster Beauties and the Monterey Poetry Review.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.

Monday Night Choir Boi

By Jae Casella

We call ourselves The Lavender Choir.
We practice every Monday night.
Charlie ushers us into the sanctuary.

The door lock clicks like the safety on a gun,
leaving the slur-slingers on the other side.
My old knees are scratchy from a lifetime

of kneeling in protest and false prayer.
They bend me into my seat in the alto section.
I tell Micah about the first gay men’s choir.

He saw a picture of a giant quilt
with the names of dead guys.
Harvey Milk is a hero

in his history book, he says.
I get it. They don’t know my whole life. Eyes crinkled
from searching for someone I could have been.

The etched smiles around my mouth
for every girl I loved from across the dance floor.
The curve of my spine from hiding

sagging breasts, slow walking
shuffling feet
sore from marching for them.

Voices soft as the fuzz on their faces
mix with tremors from the baritone bois.
Some squeaks and cracking throats reach

for bass notes and my own voice
strains to meet somewhere in the middle.
Some slick back bangs over short fades,

swell their chests out of their bindings
with every breath in, take and give
no cares, puff their stubbled cheeks.

They are brave and I am proud.

And maybe a little envious
of the x on their id’s,
of mothers who saw them,

fathers who grew them, bonds
with friends who knew.
I had none because we hid

in the safety of our girlish names.
We hid to not be known as queer––
which in my days meant freak.

Exhausted, I claw at my female skin
worn thin over male bones,
digging to sing my song aloud.

I am old now.

I arch my grief open
to the child who had to sing in the quiet
of their room, who ached

to stand shoulder to shoulder
with these younger versions
of me.

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Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Monday Night Choir Boi,” copyright 2025 by Jae Casella was published in Monster Beauties: A Trans Poetics Archive Anthology. It appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.