Combining lo-fi video from the author’s personal archive, the femme silhouettes are joined by the spoken word lyrical poem “Raw Girl Money”. Forthcoming in the book Negative Money (Soft Skull 2023), the poem addresses the speaker’s younger girl self and speaks to trying to protect oneself while being sexualized and becoming a sexual being, attendant to all the conflicts and dangers this entails. This newly minted version includes sound design by Dashiel Carrera.

Raw Girl Money

All us girls we agree to be big teen islands scouring the slips for who came closest. I tented my sour girl with boy-textured

leans from the could-have bin. Couldn’t let out what lived in the back with all the trouble rubbing at my tender. A girl’s sight becomes real

in the flee, her thrum of identifying marks, private seams, marbles of fat for pillage. I meet myself at every mask collapse.

Like the old wounds slack on my hiddens I was the danger I exchanged for my hair, the song I rubbed against my song.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American poet and writer, and the author of several books of poetry. The poem "Raw Girl Money" is forthcoming in their collection Negative Money (Soft Skull Books, 2023).

Dashiel Carrera is a Half-Argentinian novelist, musician, and media artist. The author of The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022), his writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, FENCE, BOMB, and Brooklyn Rail. He has also released 5 albums with 75OrLessRecords. Currently, he is working toward a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto.