Morgan Hyatt | Issue 6, Spring 2025

“Cycles II” is a prayer for a life lived as a Queer, Trans, Disabled person, and the cyclical nature of that existence. What better way to capture the feelings of the body, of change, than through stone lithography? You spend hours graining a slab of ancient limestone until the memory of its previous drawing is sanded away. You spend hours drawing on it with crayon, one small mark at a time. You get to know the stone in this time, it becomes part of you. You etch and you wait and you ink and you etch and you wait. Then wash, ink, print, wash, ink, print, wash, ink, print, over and over until the body of the piece is whole. Printmaking has its own cycles. It is laborious. The body and its movements become part of the work. The aches and pains from the labor linger in your muscles, your tendons, your bones. The work becomes part of your body in turn. I experienced my gender and sexuality as something cyclical as well, an act of both active exploration and gradual emergence of the self. It was a push and pull of attempting to identify something unnamable and changing things about myself in response. A name, a pronoun, a haircut, a surgery. Much in the same way, disability is something that I came into as well. A pain here, a test result there, lost time, lost relationships, lost abilities, adaptation, mobility aids, community, joy. Building our identities up, breaking our identities down. Our bodies building themselves up, our bodies breaking themselves down. It becomes a natural rhythm, these cycles of growth and decay; they are not necessarily good or bad, but in some lights beautiful in their reality. You begin to relate to the stone that wears down under the river’s current, the irises in your grandmother’s garden that shrivel up at the end of each season. You hope that, like them, you’ll become a part of the river bed, that you’ll bloom again in spring. If the natural world can flourish through its changes, then so can we. These cycles are part of the Queer ecology of the self. I can think of nothing more natural, more holy than this.