The chains around your neck could slip right off.
Try it. Then send the pieces to threepoets2017@gmail.com.
Artist Index
7 - Ryann Peats
6 - Ryann Peats
5 - Austin Anderson
4 - ic
3 - Dennis Sweeney
2 - lw
1 - bvonhoene
7 -
It’s 2017
at the Center for Literary Publishing I read
a poem about a hate crime
two men in love
in bed
shot to a heaven through the head in bed queers get dead
I read Ocean, how he talks about the impossibility of being a good gay citizen
how men can love each other tenderly
how men who love each other at all
get set on fire in their beds
I read bell hooks no woman has written enough
I read the bodies of trans women their fur and bones that can squeeze through all these narrow holes
“in small presses, they only found evidence of one trans person’s work (this was in 2007).”
a statistic TC Tolbert cites in his introduction to Troubling the Line: A Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Anthology
between October 2015 and September 2016 there were 295 reported murders of trans and genderqueer people worldwide according to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project
in the US alone:
Keisha Jenkins Zella Ziona Jasmine Sierra Monica Loera Kayden Clark Veronica Cano Maya Young Demarkis Stansberry Kedarie Johnson Quartney Dawsonn-Yochum Shante Thompson Keyonna Blakeney Reecey Walker Mercedes Successful Amos Beede Goddess Diamond Deeniquia Dodds Dee Whigham Skye Mockabee Erykah Tijerina Rae’Lynn Thomas TT Saffore Crystal Edmonds
Since January 1st 2017: Mesha Caldwell, Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, JoJo Striker, Keke Collier, Chyna Gibson –all black trans women
read : insides filled with flowers with bombs filled with deep sea and spiders their becoming their limbs that crawled their bodies
to bus stops and vestibules gurneys stirrups elevators to planned parenthood to survival sex trafficking transit stations tool sheds the DMV daycare the doctor bellies bars bottles bang bankrupt bandage backhand baseball bat border bed basements bathtubs only just in their beginning
beaten by 5-6 men / shot in back of the head / found shot in head and groin / police called to protect them from self-harm, claims they were armed, shot dead/ she was only 16 / set on fire / stabbed 119 times in the face
I am a mirror / How much longer
this list how many more unreported
This is a silence I am concerned with
at shelter on a crisis call I ask what her name is
really listen
all dead names wash mouths
out with stone
one round to weight
you to the ground
it’s 2017
4,200 wolves have been killed in 6 states in the last ten months
feel : that absence in your chest
the bees sung until they died /dead
howl rings like a new year’s cheers
the president walks steps ahead echoes of his wives
gags our pussies, our pinks, insert : word for what makes
a woman
it’s January 22nd 2017
a gay man was brutally beaten
blocks from where I live
the picture of his face bruised
bubbled unbearable
I am white I am feminine bodied
I can still fit we can still fit
quietly read : hide
roommates friends women
it’s February 22nd 2017
the president revokes protections for trans students
to use the bathroom matching their gender identity
today Laura and I make living wills
after health care, climate change and LGBT pages disappear from the white house website
after reading that the vice president believes you can shock the gay away
after reading that trans and genderqueer people are murdered at a rate of one every other day
I am queer
I am quiet here
It’s 2017
“there are 347 pages of poems by 55 trans and genderqueer authors from all over the country” sitting on my lap
“I am not alone today”
(*quoted from TC Tolbert’s introduction to Troubling the Line titled “Open and Always Opening”)
6 -
maybe our pussies are the problem
all these women marching with their pink cat ears
can’t hear
an email from the DV shelter reads
“attn: transgendered woman in shelter
salt and pepper shoulder length hair”
instructions to list her “real name” first
hear all these dead names
ripen all these
dead trans women
always the gaze at her transition
whether she is in it or not
passing –an arrival
a marker of trueness
devout woman
we are scared
we pass around your photo like a mug shot
in case we see too hard your jaw
in case we are only capable of saying the word “transvestite”
in case we mistake you for a perp
for a man –this woman
transgendered
this noun
because must have a pussy
to be grabbed
by it
5 -
those coral pink cliffs
of rolling sandstone, gutted
& pocked by desert winds
& desert rains, a heft
like the upperside
of a cloud, the ocean
gone, the sky somehow still
between a plane or a boat
or a car on a desert road
& the stars. or the nothing
between a few moons.
or the sun. the suns. waiting
on a radiator at the trailhead
for chinle toadstools—
what would it be
to waste here, to walk
a desert without a home
& maybe without shoes
& maybe without hope
& maybe without words
or a word to offer
the cactus or desert fox,
the raven & the vulture
who know the land.
what would it be to be
in a place, blink,
& be there again. near
the toadstools. waiting
on a radiator. to blink & be
beyond a fence by a desert
lake or a stream whose sulphur
makes the water milk
& wraps white along the lying reeds.
to know no borders
or statelines: only the bend
in the canyon & the folds
of the rock there
& the waterfall spread
like a veil. to be limitless.
or simple: wind, rock, water,
sage, pine, aspen. to take
a fist of dirt, hold a hand
& pass the earth, breathe
two breaths & look together west
for the lake or east for the canyon
or south for the sun, north for the shadow.
to watch them here
where the grass is matted.
& there where the grass is tumbleweed
& yellow. & there where the grass is sand,
& where it is green
& where it is stone
& where it is ice
& where it is coal
& where it is
drying leaves.
4 -
There’s the video with the dogs who bare-teeth snarl and bark on two sides of an electric gate which begins to slide open as the dogs bare-teeth snarl and bark and retract as the gate retracts listing sideways and thickening in a canine pile up until the gate is fully open until the gate is gone.
The dogs disperse in silence. No border, no blood lust.
It’s funny.
I like how the dogs just cease to give a shit once the gate’s gone.
Game over.
3 -
I was sitting at a reading and thinking about how words hit us when they're aloud. It isn't like music. It's less emotional, more intellectual, and the wheels have to be turning, but there's so much else to turn over, and I was bad at paying attention to the readers this time around. Then I was on my way home and the night was nothing around the car and I was worrying to my friend (sitting beside me in the passenger's seat) that maybe what we see as an injection of emotion into a product, into a humming thing-in-the-world we call a story or poem, isn't much more than a way of compartmentalizing feelings. As if writing is a setting aside rather than an action for good or for change. In response to this my friend said she knows writing is not the best thing or the only thing but it is the thing for her. It is what keeps her moving through life. And I understood that I expect a lot--too much--and writing is mercy enough.
If it all takes place in my head I am lucky. It means my body is safe. I got up the next morning and did the thing again. Wrote.
I have been thinking about human extinction, which feels inevitable to me, and it seems all right that the stars will have each other, and that the ice caps will have the ocean and slowly become it. I don't mind getting out of their way. But also, maybe (maybe), in our blip of geological time, we get to have some small ideas of purpose. They are like diamonds, meaningless but nice. They are some lost random thing to find and wear, even if our dreams by now are blank.
2 -
1 -
pisces: it’s all fucked right?
scorpio: yeah it’s all fucked
pisces: why don’t you come over?
scorpio: mmm I’ll wear you like a suit
pisces: let’s play that game where you’re the ventriloquist and I’m the dummy
scorpio: let's suck shrimp down whole
pisces: swap jeans
scorpio: put things in each other’s butts
