for Dominique

I know this

 

from looking

                          into store fronts

 

                          taste buds voguing

alight from the way

 

treasure glows

                          when I imagine
 

                          pressing its opulence

into your hand

 

I want to buy you

                          a cobalt velvet couch

 

                          all your haters’ teeth

strung up like pearls

 

a cannabis vineyard

                          and plane tickets

 

                          to every island

on earth

 

but my pockets

                          are filled with

 

                          lint and love alone

touch these inanimate gods

 

to my eyelids

                          when you kiss me

 

                          linen leather

gator skin silk

 

satin lace onyx

                          marble gold ferns

 

                          leopard crystal

sandalwood mink

 

pearl stiletto

                          matte nails and plush

 

                          lips glossed

in my 90s baby saliva

 

pour the glitter

                          over my bare skin

 

                          I want a lavish life

us in the crook

 

of a hammock

                          incensed by romance

 

                          the bowerbird will

forgo rest and meals

 

so he may prim

                          and anticipate amenity

 

                          for his singing lover

call me a gaunt bird

 

a keeper of altars

                          shrines to the tactile

 

                          how they shine for you

fold your wings

 

around my shoulders

                          promise me that

 

                          should I drown

in want-made waste

 

the dress I sink in

                          will be exquisite

From Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Xan Phillips. Used with permission of Nightboat Books, nightboat.org.

Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.
            —James Baldwin

In any case, the story begins
with darkness. A classroom. 

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised 
light held over a city. Or, the story 

begins with a child playing
the role of an ashy plum—

how it rises to meet the man's teeth
or doesn't. How the skin is broken 

or breaks because the body just wants
what it wants: to be a hallway 

where men hang their photos
on the wall. Does that make sense?

To want to own the image of the man
but not the man? To bask in that memory

of what first nailed you to the dark? 

From Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Used with permission of the author.

One of the four Royal Stars is watching over me.  Yeah, I’m blessed in these times of nervous weather.  The leaves chill in a bundle then scatter like police, off to the next doorstep.  They don’t step, they don’t faze me.  These jeans could hold three men.  But it’s just one of me, girl.  Only Son.  Only Sound.  Only Seer.  All this green to gold to red to orange is just theater.   I’m the Real.  Keep your eyes on the Navigator of Snow and Infinite Gray.  I rock these boots all year.  What a storm got to do with me? Who knows the number of strolls to heaven?  Not that I’m thinking on it.  The Heavens know my real name.  But you can call me Q.   Quicker than Q.  But, anyway.   Certain things a man keeps to himself.  Jesus wept.  So I don’t. The past is for people who like to play things over and over.  Me, I’m on to the next song. Listen to my own Head Symphony, to the Royal Stars.  The colors, they thrill me, they fuel these legs.

from You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love © 2020 by Yona Harvey. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved. 

California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.

Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.

When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say No, I’m something else
like that though.

A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.

Copyright © 2018 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

It’s true that I’m im-
patient under affliction. So?
Most of what the dead can

do is difficult to carry. As for
gender I can’t explain it
any more than a poem: there

was an instinct, I followed
it. A song. A bell. I saw
deer tracks in the snow. Little

split hearts beckoned me
across the lawn. My body
bucked me, fond of me.

Here is how you bear this flourish.
Bud, I’m buckling to blossoms now.

Copyright © 2020 by Oliver Baez Bendorf. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

You arrive on a Friday, with hail & vast
moving grey above small window
of white light, as a wound
which might be a passing through
of particulate ultra violet waiting
to arrive in sight, our adjectival
see. will it be violent, our photographic
ring around the light?

we inviolate what we can’t see,
revelate its arrival with our question:
boy or girl?

please, let the unseen speak in me.
there are stellar nurseries we cannot grimace.
i am a certificate of a bright somewhere.
you are a poem passing through
the membranes i have moved, mountainous you,
head up-of the interrogative blue

Copyright © 2020 by Jasmine Reid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

//

When my partner asks me for a self-
portrait, I tell them:

            Just out of high school
            I worked as a statue

           of liberty. I wore blue velvet
           and danced along an off-

           shoot of route 6. Mascot
           for freedom—I advertised

           a tax agency. I had come
           out that year.

           Passersby rolled
           down their windows,

           threw lit cigarettes, trash, pennies.
           I have always been one for retaliation.

           So I threw the torch.

\\

 

//

My partner and I research the back-
yard tree with purple droppings

until we discover
she’s a true princess.

Royal green blood with roots
the size of bodies.

This princess is invasive.
She garden-snakes under

our home and upheaves
what we thought we knew

of ourselves. And god,
isn’t it terrible to gender

even a tree. Isn’t it terrible
that she reminds us of what

we’ve named our bodies’
shortcomings. A flower

concaved as cunt
seems, right now, like a betrayal

we will never forgive.

But soon

\\

 

//

I dream that my partner leaves me
for eight years in the Coast Guard,

a kraken stings the surface
of this dark blue nightmare.

Split this dream in half and it becomes
four years and I still don’t know

how to swim. None of this is real.
But god, my partner loves the water,

enough even, for me to get in. 

\\ 

 

//

When my partner turns their hands
into window blinds, they smooth

my aging forehead with this new
type of shade, they call my skin

into perfect order with their skin.

I tell my partner I will be polite
to windows

only when I like what I see
through them. They understand

that this world is hell
bent beyond repair.

But inside
              one another
              there is a peace.

Inside one another
neither of us remembers gender—the meaning
of her or hers. She is lost

                                      to space. He was never
                                      that great to begin with.

We even misplaced the meaning of girl.

If we knew where it had been left,
we still wouldn’t go get it.

\\

 

//

Today I am the age
of an arsenal
                   of letters. 

Between my partner’s legs
I speak the whole

alphabet. They stop me

when I’m close
to what feels right.

At the end of the day
all we have is this ritual

of love, and that, I think,
will be enough

to live forever. 

\\ 

 

Copyright © 2018 Kayleb Rae Candrilli. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Used with permission of the author.

 

            After Ocean Vuong’s “Prayer for the Newly Damned”

Dearest Mother, what becomes of the girl
no longer a girl?

The stretch marks from my once breasts
have migrated 

to their new tectonic 
flats. But you can always find 

hints of what used to be. 
Trust me, it is more beautiful 

this way, to look closely 
at my body and name it things like: 

	   Pangea & history & so, so warm. 

Look at me now 
and you’ll see how blood 

faithfully takes 
the shape of its body, 

never asking 
too many questions. 

Dearest Mother, how many rivers
did I run across your belly? 

Do you love
that they will never dry up? 

Dearest Mother, I’ll make all 
this water worth it. 

Copyright © 2018 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.