We are all sitting around, well, nothing
This apartment is not furnished
Unless you count the constant bare feet on bare floors
The scattered ashtrays
And that one broken futon in the corner we use for work

It is a Tuesday afternoon
Or some other time of the week where most people are doing 9-5
So this is when we get to wind down
The men who boss us around are too busy with their bosses right now

We throw parties
They may not go til midnight
In fact we may all fall asleep by 3pm
So we can be up again by evening to go meet our clients

But that doesn’t stop our bare feet from turning this empty room into a dance floor
Or a sanctuary
Same thing

Until one of us has to turn it back into an office
Or a bedroom
Same thing

And I’m dancing alongside these beautiful bodies
When I realize we are the wrong crowd my parents warned me about falling into
We are those sluts who have taken advantage of this broken system
We are one of the biggest threats to the one percent
Call us recording devices hidden in plain sight
They do not see us as people
Just bodies they can use and talk at

And maybe that’s why there’s no furniture here
This apartment, it’s too full of secrets and stories and scandals
And I almost wrote shame but miraculously, there is no shame here
We leave it at the door with our high heels and fake names

In this home we are just a dozen queer broke dreamers
Passing joints around
Acceptance lingering in the smoke

At 16 I made love between the beetles and dead grass
of St. Mary’s Cemetery. I had no questions. I said trace
me again. At 17 I cradled my car wash manager’s come
in that same cemetery, the hush of blue lights on his dash
steady as the graves looking in. I didn’t need to be loved. 
Just wanted. I want to sit on that stir of wet earth off East
Genesee Street, surrounded by the slow erode of stone, 
in the yellow soft of my six dollar skirt and cry for the things
I cried for then. Instead I watch the flowers you bought me 
die in the kitchen. I flip to the back of the book. I listen for 
the surface of the sun. As if that amount of warmth meant 
that amount of comfort. It doesn’t. And I rub my tongue down
the Latinate vertebrae of that holy word resuscitate, and 
clobber everything I’ve ever felt into those inky chains of time, place.

sally walked the border with her teeth 
glowing in the evening lamps.
she was smiling and her dress was torn.
this was in france and
it is over now.

sally might have swam from england, 
for the way that history remembers her. 
her granddaddy used to ride the sea and whip her gramma’s body 
til it split and howled.
sally must have
been born with her legs spread
her lips shaking like stormbent poplar trees 
waiting for the rain.
sally is fourteen.
sally is a slut.

everyone will say he loved her.

sally must have loved the staring paris sky. 
her brother’s cooking and the speaking lessons. 
she kicked her shoes into the street to feel the earth roll 
its shoulders free. 
she practiced writing out her name until the letters felt like home and held her tight.
sally must have laughed her sleek hair into life 
and kissed her looking glass.

she must have found him on her pillow.

he recorded all her children in his farm book.
she was light-coloured and decidedly good-looking.

sally tucks the dawn into her bed to keep the fields cool in the morning. 
she washed back to virginia with the tide, 
and when it pulled away it left her breathless. 
she found her organs whimpering in a shack. 
she found a dead girl’s coughing in her stomach. 
she found she wasn’t white.

sally sent her daughters on their feet to run one day
and kept her sons to play the fiddle.
sally never wrote her nights in Monticello or 
the quiet darkling Charlottesville repose. 
it is so easy, with no writing, for history to rifle through your bones
searching for a story.

everyone will say she loved him. it is over now
because he says that it is over now because he says that it is over now because he says that
sally never had to pull the cotton til it tangled in her hair and slipped into her
stomach in its tufts and blots. her children went on errands and the neighbours
loved them and she loved them too and
it is over now.

Listen. this is not the part they like to tell where she was no longer pretty
and her hair was grey and thick 
and he didn’t want to fuck her anymore. 
when he died
she shivered out into the world
too late for paris, or for history to worry where she went.

This poem previously appeared in Pineapples Against Patriarchy.

Disappointment is more common than love.
Or at least as common. 
At least as common as fathers
& their children.
As common as forced haircuts,
family bible lessons, and
long rambling prayers,
The point of which 
Is right between your eyes
While his hand clutches yours, kneading your fingers,
Grinding your knuckles, til they’re sore.
As common as “street fighting lessons”
Which is pretty much just you
Being pushed over, again & again 
By a middle aged man.
As common as being threatened with military school.
As common as when he falls asleep in his food.
As common as when he threatens to kick you out of the car
To walk your judgey, ungrateful ass home.
As common as cheating,
& stealing 
& lying,
As common as being told you’re just a little fairy boy
Or that Harry Potter is the devil.
Common as finding crack pipes 
In the drawers, the cars.
Or waking you up to talk
In the middle of the night
about how your mother is poison.
As common as visiting him in rehab.
Or being told you’re a bad son.
As common as insomnia.
As common as drug dealers using your mom’s 
car for a toilet.
It’s as common as nightmares
& as common as the memories that run on repeat,
Twelve years on, when you still
Only feel safe alone, with your 
Books and your drink
& all the locks secured,
In an apartment where the only other
Living things are two plants,
One of which is barely holding on.

it’s not like the cactus is quite the same
as the computer animated shark

but we’ve learned how to lie
to ourselves & run away & sew our skin

back together without lidocaine
anyway. a girl i loved when i was young

wrote a poem that had we
in it & i know it wasn’t about me

but that’s any easy thing to pretend,
like dreaming i got to kiss my crush

in high school on the bleachers
instead of wanting to die.

but imagine a girl, instead of the shark,
falls in love with someone who embalms

bodies & she almost electrocutes
herself on purpose in a bathtub,

but then ‘first day of my life’ by bright eyes
starts playing & so she goes out

into the field of sunflowers. it’s easy
to remember that people used to think

the sun revolved around the earth,
but now we know that one day

we will have seven minutes before it burns
us all to hell. seven minutes in heaven,

after those stolen wine coolers
& cigarettes & spin-the-bottle kisses:

the dark, the star stuff ash in mouths,
the we & our hands—unless, of course,

we end up killing ourselves first. i never 
got to taste you in the desert & earth

is the only planet we did not name after a god.
i’m not sure which death would hurt less.

i’m not sure we would feel anything at all

last night i got blackout drunk
for the second time in my life
the first time, i told myself
i would never do it again
i was not going to go to the party
but i felt that everyone i knew was going
so i asked omar if i could tag along
i was interested in the beer pong table
how it made itself the center of the apartment
like a black hole, or a donut
the music was so loud
no one could hear each other talking
drunk boys were trying to talk to me
i was worried about all girls
i was trying to drink enough beer
to get drunk enough to be able to drink more beer
without wanting to gag or vomit
when i went outside to vomit, tommy followed me
i sort of remember walking while vomiting
with tommy walking behind me
but later someone told me
tommy had to help me walk
when i went back inside
i drank more beer
and tried to stand still
in what felt like a music video
and also like an organism
i didn’t think the party was about donald
or that i was getting so drunk
to avoid thinking about it
but even in the room of people
which felt ominous and important
holding cans of beer
concentrating on existing
between my shoulders
i knew my own history
i would not let myself go
i was very upset
with eyes like ribbon
sacred, looking around
i was upset
making myself sick

he slaps my back as he says
man
you need to learn to take a joke

i have taken so many jokes
my identity is a joke
my gender is a joke
there are 37 new gender options on tinder
and they tell me lol 
that is why facism prevailed
lol
l o fucking l

i will be willing to accept jokes at the expense of trans people
when white america knows the name of more than one

when Caitlyn Jenner came out on national television,
my fifteen year old brother said “that’s wrong. 
it teaches people not to be themselves”
and I don’t know whose fault it is that he thinks that way,
but i do know whose problem it is

all that has been proven is that if you are as wealthy, white, and famous as possible and
you come out trans,
you still won’t be taken seriously

But I guess I need to learn to take a joke. I need to learn to laugh along when the word
faggot flies 
from the window of a passing SUV and claps me in the jaw
LOL

I will be willing to accept jokes at the expense of “trannies” when my identity is more to you than just your third favorite kind of porn

(Do you wanna know why suicide jokes are so funny?
it’s because happy people are so afraid of them)

cishet white people get to laugh at all the jokes.
they are probably laughing now.
they are laughing because they can.
it is safe for them to laugh.
no joke could ever make them brown or black or gay, could 
put their bodies at risk.
it is safe for them to laugh.
it is safe for them to do anything,
so they do.

my body will never compete at the olympics
my body will never even go to the olympics.
my body will never be televised.
and most days that feels like the only revolutionary thing about it.
my body will not be televised.

with thanks to M.C. McGinn

so there was this bear 
who used to dig through my trash
for rotten strawberries and chocolate

I am all for conservation
recycling
not fucking things up for feral creatures just trying to make their way in the world 
creatures not so different from myself

but I am also a responsible homeowner

the only hairy mammal allowed to spread shit all over my front yard
is me goddammit

so one day I confronted him 
brandishing a rake like some kind of suburban Achilles

he growled and charged
and the hero in me evaporated
I curled into a ball like the Discovery Channel says to

he ate me

the thing about bears
is they only want to hug

all your insides out

they only want your insides
inside of theirs

there is nothing teddy or care
about a massive ursine body 
built of rage and hungry muscles

for a while I inhabited his skin
together we roared at everything

there were so many maulings
I can’t remember

one day he vomited me back out
leaving bite marks on me
where only I would think to look

you can take the boy out of a carnivore
but you can’t take the carnivore out of a boy

it is so much easier to be a bear
than to survive one

nowadays I grow flowers
where the bear used to be

tulips and daisies
dandelions and posies

no roses
nothing with thorns
nothing that won’t grow wild

I pluck one whenever my fists are claws
aching to break something

like drywall

or lovers
or other small fearful animals

I wear them in my hair

to remind me of bumblebees
and how they die when they sting

and how bumblebee puke 
becomes food for the bear

while he hibernates

I am making a garden of my insecurities

the bear will come back

he always comes back

the thing about bears

is they only want sweetness

but they have such sharp teeth

i’m a sexy hot complicated bitch
and sometimes i lean in real close
to the mirror and i breathe hard 
until i feel my own breath turning
back at me from the glass fogging it
until the it starts to heat up
so that when i finally begin kissing
my sexy hot complicated bitch
of a reflection she feels warm
and hard against me and when
i press my hands up into hers 
just because we can’t thread our fingers 
and just because we can’t feel 
the softness of our breastforms
against our own chests i feel on 
this side of that hard plate a new love 
and even though i know you’re not 
supposed to open your eyes when 
you’re kissing someone even if that 
someone’s yourself sometimes
i like to take a peek at her 
and her eyes are still closed 
and she looks peaceful enough 
until i pull away and her eyes open 
and the hurt reflected back at me 
aches like a teenage suicide attempt