Life suddenly flowed all around her. Girls, girl-colors: pink, blue, white, black. Hair flicking and flashing, laughs and gasps and the glowing blue screen of phones in hands, but in the motion there was stillness.

But here in Alabama, in the South, in these red states lined with blue mountains, I am the undercurrent, and I know I am not alone. Where you think there are “small town values,” there is queerness, subversiveness, revelation.

We brighten in our twinkling; do you hear / that? The collective question, the sky shuffles its coat, / a pumping set of butterfly wings enters, stopped in one life but stronger than anything / in ours.

Diane D’Costa uses her work to explore concepts of masculinity. Juxtaposing muscular men with intimate poses intends to have viewers question their understanding of masculine vulnerability and dismantle assumptions of how men are to be portrayed in art.