Tag Archives: trans

How to burn a woman

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Claire Askew

You will not need kindling.
I think I’ll go up quick
as summer timber, my anger
big and dry as a plantation
that dreams of being paper:
the updraft already made
in the canopy, and heading down.

Bring your axe to split me
into parts that you can stack
over the dry leaves, over the coals:
my old coat and my bedding box,
the things given to me by women.
You’ve heard of spontaneous human
combustion. They say it’s fat:
once lit, it flares so white-hot fast
the bones give in.
Make your touch-paper long.

Spread the word that the crowd
who will gather should stand
well back. I am coated
in the accelerant of men:
my craving for their good necks,
their bodies in button-downs
crisp as a new book.

As you douse the embers
I will smell like ground elder
choking the cemetery —
roots looping up
out of dead women’s mouths,
a problem thing
you’ll never get cleared.

Make the stake thick, the bonds
stiff on my innocent wrists.
Burn me the same way
you burned her: do it
because we took the plain
thoughts from our own heads
into the square, and spoke.

From How to burn a woman (pub. Bloodaxe, 2021)

After the horrendous anti-women hatred from Donald and his cult and anyone who voted for him, this poem is raw and fits perfectly in this evening of motors revving dying away and leafs smacking the window.

Trans Rights Are Human Rights- love, joy, sadness

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To Love Somebody

By Jada Renée Allen

There’s a light, a certain
     kind of light that has never
shone on me—
     Nina’s version. 
Not the Bee Gees
     or even Janis Joplin,

but the way Nina
     sings it, almost a plea.
Not the studio
     version either. No, her
performance in Antibes.
     Her earrings

dangling their own mute
     musics, her silk headwrap
an aureole of sorts.
     The sheen of her face
a thesis in Black glamor
     sui generis.

I want to be glamorous
     in the way she was
glamorous. The way
     women I knew growing 
up were glamorous: campy,
     yes, but regal.

If I knew of Nina then
    I would have drawn
her. Drawing being
     how I coped
with the expurgated chorus
     of my girlchildhood.

I drew women then
     because I could not be
one. Nina knew
     a life of could-nots
too. Little girl blue rejected
     from music school.

Aye, I knew the blues; still do.
     My godmother Pat whupped
my ass when she caught
     a glimpse of me at her vanity
tracing my mouth with her
     carmine matte lipstick

blues. I’m still afraid to touch
     my face with shade #309 blues.
The same hue of blues
     that would make someone want
to cry, I’m a woman. . .Can’t you see
     what I am? I live & I breathe

for you! But Nina?
     Oh Nina—
the way she sings it.
     I imagine myself singing
the same way to the deferred girl
     at the vanity, assuring her:

Baby, you don’t know
     what it’s like to love somebody,
to love somebody—I ain’t finished—

     to love somebody,
oh, to love somebody,
     to love somebody

the way that I love you.

Follow the poetess https://www.jadarenee.com/

#BlackHistoryMonth I love black men by Kukumo #TransIsBeautiful

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Tiq Milan in NOW Magazine and the NYT.

http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/07/2013714black-transwoman-to-black-cistransman-an-open-letterpoem-for-trayvon-and-the-rest-of-us/

Two extracts below. For full poem click on link.
Donate monthly to BlackGirlDangerous here.
07/14/13

By KOKUMO

ATTENTION WORLD:

I, LOVE, BLACK* MEN.

From the drug dealers, heart surgeons, stuck at rock bottom, ten years sober, servin’ a dime to life, ex-con turned youth-minister, trans*, gay, D.L., paraplegic, Olympic gold-medal winnin’, current U.S. presidency presidin’, illiterate, artistic, broke as a joke, ballin’, dark-skindid, light-skindid, country-bama, Brooklyn-bred, OG, GD, Rasta bombaclot, to the European transplant and etc.

And no matter how many Jim Crow laws you revise, nothin’ can change that. I grew up with black* men. I’ve fought with black* men. And black* men have fought, for me. Hell, I was supposed to be, a black*, man. I’ve been insulted by black* men. I’ve been consoled by black* men. I’ve been schooled, had my socks knocked off, and mind blown by black* men. I’ve loved black* men, and had the privilege of having them love me back.

(…)

ATTENTION BLACK MEN:

Black* transwoman to black* cis/trans* man. I revere and respect you for living brave in a world that hunts you with hypocritical indignation. I thank you for living in the body I couldn’t and doing it with such swag, intellect, and a vengeance.

As a black* transwoman I want you to know that I never abandoned you or took the easy way out. A war was waged on black* bodies the moment the first slave touched Virginian soil in the 1600′s. So I transitioned from “male” to “female” because I just needed to be in more comfortable battle fatigues.

(…)

“KOKUMỌ is an African-American transgender woman and product of Chicago’s South Side. To KOKUMỌ surviving is passé. Therefore, she believes in sanctioning artistic, political, and actual space for other Trans, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people of color to thrive in. In accordance to this belief and her name, she created KOKUMỌMEDIA. KOKUMỌMEDIA uses film, music, and literature to create and generate realistic depictions of TGI people of color.”

Click on link: http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/07/2013714black-transwoman-to-black-cistransman-an-open-letterpoem-for-trayvon-and-the-rest-of-us/

Donate to BlackGirlDangerous here: http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/donate/

 

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” Black History.

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Black History Month– Poems about the body. Your body. Your body.

[…]
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
[…]

I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
[…]

but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers
[…]

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life

June Jordan. “Poem about my rights”

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust.

Link

From Black Girl Dangerous: donate at http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/donate/

Black* Transwoman to Black Cis/Transman: An Open Letter/Poem for Trayvon and the Rest of Us

07/14/13

By KOKUMO

ATTENTION WORLD:

I, LOVE, BLACK* MEN.

From the drug dealers, heart surgeons, stuck at rock bottom, ten years sober, servin’ a dime to life, ex-con turned youth-minister, trans*, gay, D.L., paraplegic, Olympic gold-medal winnin’, current U.S. presidency presidin’, illiterate, artistic, broke as a joke, ballin’, dark-skindid, light-skindid, country-bama, Brooklyn-bred, OG, GD, Rasta bombaclot, to the European transplant and etc.

And no matter how many Jim Crow laws you revise, nothin’ can change that. I grew up with black* men. I’ve fought with black* men. And black* men have fought, for me. Hell, I was supposed to be, a black*, man. I’ve been insulted by black* men. I’ve been consoled by black* men. I’ve been schooled, had my socks knocked off, and mind blown by black* men. I’ve loved black* men, and had the privilege of having them love me back.

Therefore I KNOW BETTER. Black* men are human. They come complete with contributions as well as flaws. And black* men have a seemingly generational immortal dream to live. Therefore I KNOW BETTER than to believe you when say they deserve to die. Therefore I KNOW BETTER than to believe your propaganda. Therefore, I won’t.

ATTENTION BLACK MEN:

Black* transwoman to black* cis/trans* man. I revere and respect you for living brave in a world that hunts you with hypocritical indignation. I thank you for living in the body I couldn’t and doing it with such swag, intellect, and a vengeance.

As a black* transwoman I want you to know that I never abandoned you or took the easy way out. A war was waged on black* bodies the moment the first slave touched Virginian soil in the 1600′s. So I transitioned from “male” to “female” because I just needed to be in more comfortable battle fatigues.

ATTENTION BLACK* COMMUNITIES:

Trayvon Martin was my little brother, Emmitt Till, my North Carolina sharecropper forefathers, and me before I transitioned. Young, black*, male-bodied, and trying to figure out why my body owes the world an apology. Black* communities across the world, please hear me. Before I knew what trans* meant, I knew how black* felt. Non-LGBT black* people I beg of you. Discard your fear and join forces with your LGBT black* siblings. Because everyday we lose more and more of our sons. Ase.

All work published on BGD is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not republish anything from this site without express written permission from BGD. Yes, linking to this post on Facebook and Twitter or elsewhere is okay.

KOKUMỌ is an African-American transgender woman and product of Chicago’s South Side. To KOKUMỌ surviving is passé. Therefore, she believes in sanctioning artistic, political, and actual space for other Trans, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people of color to thrive in. In accordance to this belief and her name, she created KOKUMỌMEDIA. KOKUMỌMEDIA uses film, music, and literature to create and generate realistic depictions of TGI people of color.

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