[subterranean / dreaming grace roots]
subterranean
dreaming grace roots
we feast from (:)
calls your hand tender
turned toward the margins
in which we
stir ancestral / souls
against hegemonic
nerves
with what found & forged love ,
if in alignment our /
bodies defy
all the social could expect
run seams im/possibility
& all the flesh we’ve
fought for
& the ways of being &
knowing & fucking
on history’s tide
receding , sure tears,
façades
horror , food ,
umber busy pulling
out of the ordinary, demands
, antinomies, borders
in the composition of hands
re:visioning
lay ripe heads as the sun
thins
dizzy scent’s course
to place cupped on the chest
for a kinetics of otherwise
Copyright © 2022 by Nat Raha. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This short poem works through an expression of diasporic, queer desire, reflecting on how such desire feels and is enacted in this present. It understands this desire as rooted in a flesh that is both hirstorical in its existence and trans-hirstorical in its constitution—reaching across tender bodies towards dispersed ancestral lineages (understanding ancestors as chosen, claimed, and given). In the contested present of queer and trans life—where we’re supposedly more socially accepted while still often materially struggling—the poem remembers the importance of manifesting our visions and dreams into ways of life for social and material transformation.”
—Nat Raha
Nat Raha
Dr. Nat Raha is a queer trans femme poet of Bengali heritage and the author of of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.