Unity

It All Goes Around

trigger warning ~ however if you start and become upset, read until the end, I hope it makes you feel better.

May 3, 2019

I Seek 2

I wake up screaming after spending too long running from

violent transphobia, bare feet on creaking floorboards,

wailing for empathy from anyone who can hear.

In efforts to cope with the turmoil, I think:

"I shouldn't be scared, I should be used to this."

But why should anyone have to get used to this?

To be trans and to have a voice is breaking the rules.

I'm one to know that me and my siblings alike

get anxious when we have to use a public restroom, for

danger is a label placed on us, but trans women of color are still one of

the most targeted communities in the world.

For the cis and powerful,

us trans folk are nothing but birds in a cage to gawk at,

or a pair of legs meant to be forced open,

or a body to add to their basement.

For the trans and powerless, our voices mean nothing.

Our suicide notes are to nobody.

They cry:

Dear anyone who will listen,

I've been standing in the kitchen with a pill bottle in my hand for an hour now,

I haven't decided what to do with it yet but I'm writing this just in case,

and I don't mean any harm to anyone who might love me but

the way this bottle feels in my hands right now is almost natural,

like a phone, or

a knife, or

a gun, or

the list of trans people who have attempted.

I don't want to die but the world isn't on the same page.

Signed,

one of the hundreds of trans youth who have killed themselves this year,

the third queer person in this psych hospital,

but not the first to go through this.

I am not alone.

My voice teacher would say, enthusiastically, after tears of shame over singing,

"your voice is nothing to be ashamed of," as if I could turn dysphoria off but

it was reassuring to hear he believed in me even though testosterone was

not yet stretching my vocal chords like

the current society has that thrusts me side by side.

Apr 17, 2019

I Seek

Somewhere someone's goofy grandfather, a man wearing a hoodie and sneakers,

who speaks far too often of life for somebody with nobody to talk to,

is standing at the train stop in ----

smoking a cigarette. He is inhaling deeply

like if he doesn't the nicotine won't

make it to his lungs in time to reach his brain. Snow falls

vigorously in his direction–it is collapsing on him like an avalanche. And

though there is a structure on this ---- train stop, he stands

where the storm culminates and bathes in it and I am just there, a

ball in a foam pit.

I don't notice the hand on my shoulder until I hear the

singing of paper and tobacco in the snow.

May 20, 2023

You are where you are and there's nothing more important than that. I love you. You are love. And everything is okay because everything is you.