Moment MusicauxBy Sophie ZhuVigil, slackened. Under his good measure, my meter
was half of his, a duple rhythm. Quantity meant so much. The other women tippled in living, bereft of it all. Chords steady in his footsteps, he taught me to take cue, to move about like arrhythmic wind. Wind around a verse, I held scores of my own, numbered my days of rest like pages, like war crime. To yield, he said, was to be one’s due; feel, another’s soft coo. It was debated: should I have been moved by all this? I felt small beats, then a beating before the time-beaten wants. I thought little dangers: waking before the fervor, mouth prodding itself open. If you watched closely enough, you’d see creased silence fall out, like every obedient thing. In the fifth score I scratched out the virginal note, the up beat. The women began, flitted in keen music. Past nothing I moved — I still take to the arrest of the night, refitted. From his mouth I was so moved by the wrong tune. |
Mounted WingsBy Eleen WaffnerI knew a girl once who had wings.
They trailed behind her, Silver gossamer streaks of naivety with touches of satire, Though she did not know it. But that was rather the point wasn’t it? She would giggle, Running in circles, trying to catch their shadows. Or the glint when the sun caught them Like dew drops on grass. They told her they were beautiful, Smiles twisting into sneers. The world doesn’t like it when you have something they don’t. When she saw them laughing, She cut them off herself. And someone mounted those wings on their wall. Like a trophy. And when she decided she missed her wings, She took someone else’s, And mounted them on her wall. But it never filled the void. |
Eulogy
By Joseph Vendetti I. The air is thick with dead sisters. Sisters drowned, strangled, shot. Beaten until they became their flags, pink blood & blue veins & white bone. They met the lynch-mob’s justice, hate cooked hot against their skin. A smashed door. A darkness stained with fists & curses. The sisters paid their penance. Their crime: Being black. Being trans. Being too beautiful for mortal eyes. All the mob saw was a bright light & with light they know how to do only one thing. Afterwards: the shards. Flesh, glass. Lightbulb, woman. The mob labeled it a monster & left. There was weeping in the streets for one day & then an interminable silence. II. The earth curls its spine around the broken bodies. Holds the names of the victims in its green, the way it has always done. I sliced a leaf open yesterday & heard a whisper: Felycya Harris. The ground is brittle with hate speech. III. You can tell a trans woman in the street by the way she walks. Quickly. With a bleak determination. She is off to live the lives of those sisters who couldn’t, for as long as she has left. She is smiling their smiles, crying their tears. There is no survivor’s guilt, just the hunched shoulders of prey, wounded. A bruise on top of a bruise on top of a bruise. A train wreck behind her eyes. You know there is something wrong with a place when stepping out of your house in the morning becomes a kind of bravery. IV. The trans girl quakes, a shiver of pale pink. She does not read the news anymore. Instead, she curls up in a hole under the poplar tree & tries to hide from the vultures circling overhead. The legions of her disappeared mothers watch with crossed fingers. Let her grow up, grow up, grow up. Imagine: making plans for the future in a country that wants you buried. V. Here is the tradition: every four years, your freedom is jeopardized. Sometimes you get a president who ignores you. This is called bliss. Sometimes you get a president who despises you. This is called war. This is called laws winding tighter & tighter around your throat. This is a woman misgendered in a police report. This is her killers walking free. This is every day feeling more like an endangered species. This is a box. You thought it would contain a peace offering, but inside you found only her bones. This is America. You should have read the warning label before you were born, before your chromosomes decided to twist like that & leave you for dead. This is not her fault. But she will pay for it. Oh, she will pay. VI. There are brothers, too. Maybe they are safest in the grave. The layers of dirt will keep them from the slurs, from the guns. So many guns, so many trans men & boys to be targets. They should make binders bulletproof. Better yet, they should make the men bulletproof. Lace testosterone injections with steel. Would they still bleed? Maybe the only solution to being called a monster is to become one. Maybe all the mourned boys, the taken-too-soon boys, will rise from the soil & begin to hunt. I don’t know what they will find. Justice or tomorrow or family or a voice in the night, calling them by their real names. VII. Sometimes you get a president who pledges to protect you. This is called hope, & isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it a new kind of sunrise, to believe that there will be no more murdered sisters? It takes more than one speech to make a country safer, takes more than a promise to dim the hatred in bitter hearts of dark & ugly chambers, but what a star-studded promise it was. What warm & tired joy. VIII. The hunters will never relent. The hunted will never stop fighting back. & the dead- oh, the dead- The dead can only be missed. Note: More transgender people have been murdered in 2020 than in any other year on record. Most of them were black women. |
On Sacrifice (after the Great Leap Forward)
By Sophie Zhu Hunger’s little regard, draped on the knees like bandages. The father who buried mine in his livid field weary. His father, a supple spade. Ultimately, I learn this again. Women swelling water in valises until it stains warm yarn gray-- the hassle of offhand barters. The West is worried. Monthly, mothers would gather at the moon for its slivers: silver as commodity, as steel. And now, they covet its passing. Temper yourself. I don’t witness the same; bodies, condensed like sweet milk, left to quiver as if laughing. Father, lend me sickle. Onist. Honest. Lithed am I, lean into me a scythe. I understand sacrifice as it is, and what it betrays. I understand your mother. Spate, spite. I understand her blood land has yet I lack. The body has the tendency to when it is poor of things: your hands a tragedy and inside them, another. When the moon stopped waning, I learned to wail, as if a child. I held a body, then yours; I’d revel in the giving of give or take, only my bones you leave safe. Temper yourself. It is most comforting to be saved—not sacrifice, besides to hold the silence one uses to hide it. NOTE: The Great Leap Forward was an economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong. He aspired for China to be economically successful and believed high steel production was necessary to do so. His plan included forcing peasants to daily quotas of “homemade” steel and stripping them of private property. However, the Great Leap Forward was ultimately a failure and highly detrimental to China: the steel was of low quality and was useless, and peasants without private property were unable to afford themselves necessities, leading to a famine in which at least 30 million people died. In fact, a father was arrested for killing and eating his own son during this time. Temper yourself and The West is worried are two propaganda quotes used in posters to promote the Great Leap Forward.
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