Gemma Flora Ortwerth @gemma-flora-ortwerth - Tumblr Blog

The Holy Trinity of “Snooch Froots” by Gemma Ortwerth

These poems were written with discomfort in mind.

Mourning and Mayhem: Discomfort Guaranteed is a four-poem chapbook that offers no gentle resolution. It accuses the individual and the systems they uphold. It names how survival was made expensive, how the earth was emptied in the name of progress, how the decisions that broke us were made in rooms full of people who have never had to choose between filling a prescription and keeping the power on. It calls the goddess by her names. It holds the reader accountable for what erupts in them while reading.

Compassion. Sorrow. Regret. Disdain.

What you feel is not the poems. It is you.

This is political poetry for readers who understand that the earth is not a metaphor. It is a body. We broke it. We are still breaking it. These poems refuse to let you forget what we have done and what we are still doing.

Read. Begin. Be changed.

Amazon.com

Art by Gemma Ortwerth

No Stupid Rules of Engagement:

The President Who Was Going to End All Wars Started Three

Pete Hegseth said, “No stupid rules of engagement.” Trump said, “I don’t need international law.”

They aren’t playing by the rules. A bunch of toddlers throwing temper tantrums on a global stage, except instead of throwing Legos, they are dropping bombs, and instead of stomping their feet, they are trying to stamp people out of existence.

The president who was going to end all wars has started, aided, or instigated three since taking office. He bombed Iran twice. On February 28, 2026, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, killing at least 168 people, most of them girls between seven and twelve. He bombed Caracas on January 3. Abducted a head of state. Killed eighty people, including an eighty-year-old woman asleep in her bed. He keeps bombing civilian boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 163 dead. No trial. No charges. He is funding the genocide in Gaza. He added Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Ecuador to the list. Seven countries. One ongoing genocidal spree.

On our own soil, ICE patrols our streets. Power-hungry cowards who get to be called “Federal Agents.” A paramilitary force with a signing bonus whose only goal is oppression. Right in front of your eyes, they have taken it and rebranded it, but it is still the same old evils. Treatment that mirrors slave torture and Holocaust horrors. Resistance is being snuffed out or silenced. We should have learned. We should have grown. If it looks the same, it is. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a goddamn duck. These evils are one and the same.

On September 5, 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War. New letterhead. New signage. A new URL at war.gov. Two billion dollars to rebrand it.

Meanwhile, people I love cannot fill their fridges. Choose between rent and meds. Decide whether to feed their pets, their kids, or themselves. We build a White House ballroom, fund wars, and send aid to those causing the suffering instead of those bleeding out under it. Americans and people worldwide, in plain sight, begging for humanity, are ignored. So that the rich can be richer and build their mansions on our ashes.

Now the draft. Like most things Trump does, it slithered into existence in the middle of the night. On December 18, 2025, Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandates automatic Selective Service registration. 23 million men will be auto-enrolled starting this December.

We are not warning about a slippery slope. We are on one, and there is nothing to hold onto as we are sliding frantically, trying to grasp anything that resembles hope or joy, getting covered in scrapes and bruises on the way down.

Trans people cannot serve. The Supreme Court upheld the ban on May 6, 2025, and roughly a thousand trans service members were fired and removed from their posts within weeks. Disabled and neurodivergent people cannot serve. “Unfit” has always been political. The state has always seen you as another form of currency they can cash in on when they’re ready. In 1918, Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for a speech against conscription. A hundred and eight years later, nothing about that has changed.

I am glad I cannot be drafted. But the war I fight is here. Trying to help keep my community alive, speaking out, and standing up against this administration and any leadership built on hate. Like so many queer and marginalized people, I am fighting a war on my own soil just to stay alive. I am safe from dying in Iran. I am not safe from being shot by ICE with no excuse needed for my killing. Danger is not gone. It has just taken a different shape and was given a new badge.

Spain closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war on March 30. Italy blocked U.S. bombers from Sigonella. France refused overflights for Israel-bound military supplies. Even Giorgia Meloni, an ally of Trump, called the Minab school strike a massacre. Even Pope Leo XIV rebuked him. The world is awakening to the reality of our true nature, and they’re calling it out. And that’s nothing to scoff at, but it is not enough. We cannot outsource our own uprising to Madrid, the Vatican, or to some power beyond.

Trump is unfit, unhinged, and declining. JD Vance is clumsily dangerous, opportunistic, and loves the spotlight. A man who called Trump “America’s Hitler” and now sits at his right hand, a childlike grin as he seeks daddy’s approval, vice president of a legacy built on lies. Different toddler, same tantrum. Same weapons of mass destruction.

The White House created the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. Ten federal agencies. $166 million in Trump’s own budget request. Mandated to “proactively” identify Americans it classifies as domestic terrorists. Their targets: anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, antifascism, radical gender ideology, and hostility toward traditional views on family and morality. That might just look like a list of qualifiers, but that’s everyone I love and hold dear, everyone who makes this country truly great and beautiful, giving it color, flavor, rhythm, and wonder. They want a land that’s as bland as sawdust and don’t care how many trees they have to cut down. They are hunting us. Bondi admitted it under oath in February 2026.

Each time I step outside, I weigh the cost of never coming back. I weigh the cost of living, and the fact that my existence and my voice have power in this war we are surviving.

They want our silence. They are screaming that they will do anything to ensure it. But when we rise, when we break down the walls they built to confine us, when we scream at the top of our lungs in the name of liberty and justice for all, when we keep living, keep marching, keep chanting, keep resisting, we are the shield, we are the sword. We will not be silent. And we will go down swinging.

By Gemma Flora Ortwerth

Originally Published in HankyCode Magazine

“No Stupid Rules of Engagement” | hankycode magazine

“Alice Outta Wonderland” by Gemma Flora Ortwerth

Can you find all the hidden character cameos?

MIXTAPE: Validating Till It Wasn't

Beethoven & Dinosaur / Annapurna Interactive

Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, PC

3.5 / 5

I played this game in small bursts, over several days, giving myself joy when I needed it.

Something that keeps you smiling for three hours costs something. It costs something to let your guard down that far. 'Mixtape' let me.

From Beethoven & Dinosaur/Annapurna, 'Mixtape' follows Stacey Rockford on the last night of high school before she leaves for New York, and everything rearranges itself for good. Her two best friends, Slater, who has been hers since childhood, and Cassandra, the police chief's daughter, who joined them looking for a way out, come along. The game structures itself around a mixtape Rockford made to score the night, each song launching a playable vignette: skateboarding down a hill, flying above the town doing barrel rolls, racing through fields in zero gravity, directing fireworks, and stumbling through a video store while someone is intoxicated.

The soundtrack, Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure, songs that reward people who know the records and give something real to those who don't, gets into your body before your brain has an opinion about it. Songs ended up in my actual playlist.I didn't have a high school experience like this. I watched most of it through the glass. Playing 'Mixtape' felt like being handed something I missed, racing toward something long since gone.

Rockford needs music to set the mood of every moment, wearing headphones the way some of us wear our whole nervous systems on the outside, as armor and as antennae both. The game never names this. For those it resonated with, the headphone line was quiet and validating.

Cassandra wants to escape home. Her father is the antagonist of the night's specific chaos, and she exists in direct opposition to everything he represents. I recognized her grief in mine: the lack of independence, the outbursts from carrying too much too quietly, and the particular ache of being left by people who decided they couldn't stay, not loss, something closer to resentment, like a burning fire of a totally different type of disappointment, as I left them behind when I came out and they didn't show up.

The game gives her grief room, but not enough. It saves the space that should have held Cassandra for the slow-motion hand-release cliché with Slater.

This game queerbaits.

The trailer implied a queerness that the game never delivers. Rockford's demeanor, aesthetic, and the way she carried herself signaled queerness from the first minutes. Cassandra's devastation at being left, not "we are being abandoned" but "I am being abandoned," felt like something more than friendship, and the game knew it. There is a jealousy scene involving Julie Goodspeed, who starts occupying Cassandra's time. That jealousy is the specific ache of watching someone you have never been able to name your feelings for start belonging to someone else. The pinkies interlocked. The way they spoke. None of it was ever named. And then Cassandra faded while Slater got the real goodbye.

It would have cost so little: a kiss on the cheek that makes Cassandra blush, a hidden love note, Slater commenting on the chemistry, the option to choose the relationship depending on who holds the controller. The only physical intimacy: a gross, awkward first kiss between Rockford and a boy, played for laughs. This was a business decision. It is cowardly to play it this safe. It felt validating until it wasn't.

The ending comes faster than you hope. You see it coming, and it still gets you. I cried thinking about every person who meant the world to me before we became complete strangers. Real, raw, human. 'Mixtape' is a bread sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onion, and sauce: everything is there, but it is lacking density, lacking something that leaves you feeling full, feeling whole as a game. It deserves to exist. The smiling was worth it, even alongside the careless erasure by the developers.

The queerness being hinted at is the only hope they have at redemption for the audience they failed. In 2026, the distinction always matters.

—

Article by Gemma Flora Ortwerth

Originally Published in HankyCode Magazine

MIXTAPE: Validating Till It Wasn't | hankycode magazine

An Open Letter to Homophobes, Transphobes, and Christian Nationalists

This hatred toward trans people doesn’t come from nowhere. It is a product of oppressive systems that have convinced so many of you that cruelty is conviction, that someone else’s right to exist is a threat to your own. Under all of it is cowardice and greed. The pathetic fear of alienation rooted in standing up for someone else.

The anger toward others because you fear what others will feel if you live your own life honestly. Because for some reason you have found it too hard to reckon with the fact that equity is not subtraction. To be a victim while you hold your boot on the neck of others and call it love.

The machine needs you to believe all of it. And you have been very cooperative. A flock of sheeple, led by your manufactured shepherd built on fantasy and fear of judgment from a false deity.

And so much of it done in the name of the longest-running mythology. I taught CCD. Helped direct church retreats. I left from inside the very mechanism that continues to try to erase people they have othered.

Jesus will be no different from Zeus in a thousand years. The white man on your crosses will be a footnote historians study with pity. Those who followed will be remembered as people suffering from a kind of mass delusion.

What I want you to know is that if god exists, he is watching, and he is not fucking pleased.

Staying stuck is a choice. Choosing cruelty over the evidence, over the person standing in front of you asking to simply exist, that is a choice people make every day. You are not complicated, needing forgiveness and grace. You are just someone who had every chance to be more, found it inconvenient, and called your cowardice conviction.

Some of us stopped being surprised by that. Some of us are tired and fed up.

—

By Gemma Flora Ortwerth

“Human Riots Space Babe”

This is what justified anger looks like. This is how it feels: a pot boiling over with compassion filled rage, with disappointment in the human race. It’s 2026 and we shouldn’t still be having this conversation. The cowardice, the bigotry, and the greed of humanity cannot win. Speak up for the marginalized. Make noise until it makes change, snuffing out the darkness of hearts unhealed. Abortion is healthcare. Gender affirming care saves lives. No human is illegal. Black Lives Matter. Fuck ICE. ACAB.

Art by Gemma Ortwerth

"Fractals of Form"

Last Night's Insomni-Art

By Gemma Ortwerth

gemma-flora-ortwerth

The Math in Stepping Outside

Sometimes my partner is already gone by the time I get up. The foggy memory of a kiss on the forehead lingers. And some mornings I get up in time to make their lunch and say goodbye.

This wasn’t one of them. The apartment is quiet, a silence that echoes when the person who fills it with comfort has left. Cosmo is somewhere jumping off furniture and training for Cat Ninja Warrior. Wanda is being judgmental about it, sighing with her head on my lap. The pain is already doing a number on me, draining my batteries, making me recalculate my day before I’ve had a chance to start functioning like a person.

This is 2026. The math starts before my feet hit the floor. It always did, but now it’s requiring algebra I haven’t used since 8th grade.

Do I go outside today? That’s the question. Not rhetorically. I used to ride my scooter through Baltimore and give strangers compliments. Dancing as I’m riding, jamming to music. Nothing but whimsy. That was before I had to run the numbers every time I reached for the door: how visible am I, how tired am I, what is the cost today of being a body that reads trans from across the street.

Most days, the people who misgender me are not confused. They’re making a choice. Right now, that choice has a president behind it. They are emboldened in ways that are dangerous and fatal and not going away.

I think about the looming threat of emboldened bigots and ICE raids every time I step outside. I know my whiteness insulates me from what immigrants face right now, people swept from their lives without warning, without recourse, without the basic dignity of being treated as people. I know in my heart that the fear I carry at my own door is not the same fear. I will never pretend to know the terror people of color are facing right now. Yet what I am feeling is still fear.

I am being called a domestic threat due to my gender. And that is not based on any phobia — they just give it a clinical name so they can be victims of their own game, where they already make the rules.

Domestic terrorist is the language this administration chose as its masked army of rebranded slavers and Nazis roam the streets rampant, instilling terror in its own citizens.

I am a disabled, AuDHD, chronically ill trans woman in 2026, and what I feel in my body is not just anxiety in the clinical sense. Chronic pain began flaring more than two years ago. Fatigue that sits in my chest like an immovable boulder. I am Sisyphus. Taking naps I didn’t use to need, still waking up exhausted.

Stress makes a home in the body, and it festers. Even still, my creativity is through the roof, a driving fire. On the days when the weight I’ve been carrying since this monster took office presses hardest, my fire burns brighter.

My emotions are running higher than when I was a 13-year-old pumped with hormones and middle school drama, moving from home to home while my mental health surfaced for the first time. This administration lit something under me that I did not ask for. I’m using it anyway.

I stood at a microphone at Baltimore City Hall for Trans Day of Visibility and read my work in public, as myself, as a visible trans woman in a political moment where visibility is a calculated risk. I felt it in my body before I went. I went anyway because freedom and justice are worth defending when you have the capacity to show up. Because silence is also a choice, and I know what it costs.

We are watching racism being normalized. We are watching children killed in countries across oceans while the man responsible calls the weapons exquisite and grins for the camera.

We are watching an undertrained, financially incentivized force terrorize communities with zero accountability, led by a dog killer, staffed by people who are too loud and too unqualified to fill the space they occupy. They are doing their best to drown us out.

It is not working.

My partner brought me my inhaler without me asking at all last week.

That’s the whole sentence. They just know me, my needs, my soul. That’s what love looks like when everything outside is trying to drain you. My community holds what I can’t carry alone. Maryland protects me in ways residents of many other states cannot say, and I don’t take that for granted for a single day. We are not one country. We are fifty different territories, each one facing a wrecking ball wrapped in an American flag, with its destruction called God’s will.

If all you can do today is survive, that’s enough. If all you can do is exist in a body that they are actively trying to legislate out of visibility, that is not small. That is a blazing fire. Living out loud when they want you silent and shrinking and gone. Existing joyfully as yourself when the entire architecture of this moment is designed to make that nearly impossible.

The one thing they keep trying to extinguish.

Precisely the one thing they cannot.

I’m still opening the door.

I’m still going outside.

I’m still here.

___

A personal essay by Gemma Ortwerth

Originally featured in HankyCode Magazine

Chloe Price - Life is Strange

Art by Gemma Ortwerth