I wrote this poem in April and then put it away for a few months. I've thought about it on and off, tried to tweak lines in my head that I'm not entirely happy with, but I lack the energy or focus to do much more to it right now. I always think when I write things that I need to submit them somewhere, get a few dollars for them, gain exposure for my writing, but I finally decided this one is not for that. I don't think I fully said what I wanted to say, and maybe eventually I'll be able to come back to it and revise it into something better. For now, though, it feels fitting to put it here on this day. I hope it's read with the spirit in which it was written, as inadequate and incomplete as its language might be.
The world is on fire
and I am falling in love, again,
with a man made of distance,
an ocean and a whole world between us,
messages carefully doled out like
doctor's office lollipops, rewards
for good behavior,
my urgency a trapped bird fluttering in my chest
each time I send out a plea for attention
and receive silence,
each time he says my name
and offers up a glimmer of something real.
The country is catapulting into fascism
and I step out my front door
into sunshine and a riot of birdsong
and I am thinking about eating
toast with strawberry jam, laughing
at an inside joke with my friends,
reading a book with sentences so exquisite
they leave me breathless,
all these little joys collected
in my cupped palms and tipped
down my throat to keep me fed.
People are being deported to places
they don't belong for invented crimes
and I am consumed by the grief of a cat
who has cancer, trying to stitch together
a tapestry of memories on borrowed time,
to soak up his purrs
and his headbutts to my face,
his body weighing down my legs
at night and the victory
of getting him to take his medicine,
trying to make peace with the inevitability
of death, to prepare myself
to play god when the time comes,
too soon, for a peace of my soul
to leave me.
They are trying to erase trans people
from the narrative of our history,
to make woman a taboo,
and I am writing this poem,
attempting in whatever ways are available to me
to carve something good
out of abject misery,
to say something that matters,
to build a shelter against
the relentless onslaught of hate.
I am writing this poem
to wield as a weapon against
men with guns and hands
and laws and power
born of murderously poisonous masculinity,
as though it could be enough,
as though my words could make a difference.
I am happy and I am so sad
my chest feels like it will collapse
and I am afraid and
I am alive,
I am alive,
so many are dead but I am alive
and I have to live,
and while I am living, people are dying
every second. People are committing genocide
and even still I have to live,
and living demands feeling,
demands presence,
demands joy and hope
and love and pain
and I don't know how a body
is supposed to contain all of this.
But here is mine,
containing all of this.
Here I am, writing this poem
while the world we thought we knew
is systematically dismantled,.
Here I am falling in love
and wishing to be loved
and focusing on mundanities
and another day passes
and maybe if I can turn this into something
that resonates clear
as a struck bell,
it won't feel so much like
a betrayal.
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