reading “queens in exile” on the anniversary of sylvia rivera’s death
i have no home to my name and i
will not be
the last of my kind
to lose it all to avoid
death, or something worse.
maybe one day
i will leave this house
and hide with friends and
throw a bottle at the building
i trapped myself
in, let the walls bleed instead of me
then pick up
the shards
and toss the blood at the sky,
let it ripple,
give my father’s god the bird
while whispering the names of
mothers i deserved.
i deserve
enough hellbound laughing gas to
keep me and my future
roommates high for days, to
lay my guts on the floor so
they can name
every fucked up piece of me
without the fundamentals. let there be
an autopsy done by discord
servers and
the former daughter artist son of an artist
that i ran around in diapers with,
the one i still send pictures
of fish in ponds
while saying hey, it’s you.
there’s a lot of girls
inside me – dead girls. my girls.
girls that never existed if you look.
or did they? as if
you really care. actually,
maybe you cared more than me.
maybe the actor and the mask are
the same to you. maybe
the actor is the act
in your eyes. you don’t see
me before
the lights come up.
i stared at the hudson
for too long
when i left poughkeepsie
by train, as if
the window shielded me from anything and
the water wouldn’t kill me.
the streets will probably kill me.
but so will oxygen.
it’ll take eighty years
if people
don’t rip my heart out
first. i take the ice,
i take the glass, i take the bricks, i take
what i’ve forgotten
(for real this time)
and i say go cry about it;
i’m gonna cry but you won’t
see it. you saw me falling
in love with the stars and
thought it was for
you. you
wished on them for me
as if they’d do anything for you,
man. What a word “human” is
when you can’t feel it.
all i can ask
the ground and god and my memories
is that someone finds
a home,
a narrative worth loving,
mistakes worth celebrating in
whatever i leave in
my wake.