Tag: A Queer POC Poetry Reader

“Rope / Tongue” – No’u Revilla

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
2558846073_8ac3f15301_b.jpg
Image: Tied in a Colored Knot, posted at Flickr by Damien Cox under a Creative Commons License.

When young, we reach for everything that wants us, for many things that don’t. In No’u Revilla’s mesmeric “Rope / Tongue”, sexually audacious girlhood is layered between the origin story of a grandmother, ancestress who “jumped into the ocean with her legs spread, landed, and the / water turned to foam.” Coiled in the language of the poem, passing between grandmother and her scions, is rope, thick and stretching across the pier with sexual suggestivity. The rope is a boardwalk, a promenade to erotic self-discovery, a bridge to the worlds of power — and learning how to straddle it.

You might think this poem is a tidy back-and-forth between past and present feminisms, but the rope that stiffens between your legs while you read, that rope carries you in and out of conventional temporality, like the seeking tongue of a lover in dreams and waking life. If Revilla makes the major metaphor of “Rope / Tongue” evident from its title, what follows is not a disappointment; it’s a corded detailing that makes you squirm and nod, yes. I, too, have straddled things not meant for me, marvelling at the rush of blood-excitement between my thighs. I, too, have measured longings for “sex in tents on cliffs in the morning out of wedlock, / of making eyes biting lips saying “I want” “I will” “I do” / and meaning the fuck out of it.”

Meanwhile, the grandmother dives, a lizard shapeshifter, sovereign of the rope with thirteen children issuing from her. Grandmother’s reckoning with the rope is different to the revels of her young: in this way, herstory braids upon itself, the poem tells you: both furtive orgasms and fertile motherings emerge, slick with the water. Submerge, tangle with the tides, a rope-tongue in your mouth, and see how you rise, barnacles blooming over your bare breasts.

Read “Rope / Tongue” here.
No’u Revilla’s chapbook, Say Throne, was published in 2011 by Tinfish Press.

This is the tenth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes.

“Traces of Invasion” – Adam Lowe

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
2194013048_0aa5edbb00_o
Image: More Hugs & Kisses, posted at Flickr by Tamara under a Creative Commons License.

The fidelity of the heart is capricious, no matter how unbuckled. Ask the speaker of “Traces of Invasion”, who’s busy rifling through his man’s apartment for traces of another man. Where will he uncover the interloper? Who, after all, is the interloper? The magnificence of this stilettoed, melt-on-you-like-molten-butter poem is its crystalline vagueness. It dances on points of suspension, smears fuck-you messages in lipstick on vanity mirrors, and asks you to fill in the blanks.

We don’t know whether the speaker of this poem, the one scouting through the/his man’s digs, is the boyfriend proper, is the fly-by-night shag of the week, is one-third of a seamlessly calibrated trinity. The terms and conditions aren’t fully revealed, but oh, “Traces of Invasion” shows us the stakes, when love’s a tradeable entity — which it always, always is. Listen to the speaker’s sotto voce rage, his honeyed vitriol, when he says

“Does he know? Does he see me
in the streaks of your mirror, or
smell me in the carpet when you
fuck him bareback on the floor
where you like to fuck me?”

I’m so alert to the ways Lowe serves us these trifle-and-gunsmoke slices of revelation, of bitter disappointment and brined satisfaction: clean, and clear, and right between the eyes. It isn’t easy for a poem to do this, to wind itself around you without the commonly-perceived artifice of poetic apparatus. The apparatus, in Lowe’s hands, is like a gun you could take apart in your sleep, like a vibrator that knows the inside of your body better than any man’s rawboned, callused knuckles.

The poem isn’t only a bacchanal. Read beneath the crumpled sheets. Actually, no, inhale them. What we’re after isn’t just sex. We want, despite every wisdom urging us otherwise, to be lived in, to sleep late, loving.

Read “Traces of Invasion” here.
A writer and publisher, Adam ‘Beyonce’ Lowe was a 2013 LGBT History Month Poet Laureate.

This is the ninth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes.

“He Stood Near My Bed” – Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn Blood1 Comment
2422802744_69ee4da056_b
Image: slave house, posted at Flickr by Ryan Kendrick Smith under a Creative Commons License.

How do we word grief, in the house belonging to mothers?

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s “He Stood Near My Bed” is an elegy. It gives a date: March 22nd, 2016. It surrounds that date with lamentations and wailing. Listen to the poem, to what it implies by its use of white space, the vacancy around that date. The brief column of whys that precedes March 22nd, 2016 deftly vaccuums the sorrow. It’s starkly omnipresent, both fecund and ungovernable.

The poem takes us through the halls of the beloved child, “boy who smelled like popcorn and freshly picked tangerines”, a boy who is the “red Arima dirt road”. When the poem opens, this boy asks his mother about the origin and function of prayer, of the recipients of that divine asking. “He Stood Near My Bed”, through stations of loss, moves itself into a prayer, so that by poem’s end, the bereft speaker, wounded and brittle in her grief, says, “dear glorious morning   hold him dear raven / dear wings that carry us   hold me.”

This entire poem is an ache, a witnessing of death that is both heartrending on a factual level, and radiantly alert in its use of language to convey that spirit-rupture. When the poem carries me to the House of Slaves on Gorée Island, I feel my throat constrict with an airless tension. It is a place, the poem’s speaker tells us, where “our spine fades  into the walls”. These sites of historic pain reverberate with the weight of the dead. The mother’s body, as a site of mourning, can do no less.

An activation of “how sharply loss wounds the body”, this poem is its own pallbearer, its own brigade of tears: and of a remembrance, too, when all was joy in the smile of a young boy, questioning our prayers.

Read “He Stood Near My Bed” here.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Arrival, was published in 2017 by Northwestern University Press.

This is the eighth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes.

“Lingerie” – Jay Bernard

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
8894467210_e43c515781_k
Image: Bra Lace Detail 2, posted at Flickr by Littlelixie under a Creative Commons License.

Depending on how you look at it, how you layer it on your body, lingerie can be a softness, or a weaponry. Both, like as not. In Jay Bernard’s “Lingerie”, a bra – this simple, torturous chamber – becomes a mechanism of distance and anti-desire, between the poem’s speaker and their mother. A bra can smoulder the senses, even when it isn’t burning.

I’m most compelled by the poem’s bone-whittled, seemingly spare declarations, such as “But our basket was filled with / eggs and seven day bread. / It is why, at twelve, I had sagging breasts.” Later on, the poem despairs of the lack of a good bra, asking, “how many lovers would / be crushed in that sickening / fold where each breast hung / soft and fat and waxen?” I love this uneasy intimacy, the way the speaker’s body becomes a ground-zero of ruthless personal commentary. This description of breasts, almost as unwelcome invaders, as alien appendages seeking – nay, demanding – genteel homes, is its own way to contain the sprawling hurt and isolation of the poem.

It’s a world in which the speaker and their mother square off over a sea of suckling flesh, where images of the speaker’s youth – an innocent, nuzzling child – contrast with the final visual filters of the poem. In them, the speaker encases their breasts in armoured, pantheresque black, a stern rejoinder to the prawn white, pigskin-soft concoctions with which the poem opens. The mother of the poem does not speak, she’s addressed, and in the latter half of “Lingerie”, we feel the speaker’s orbit pulling further and further away from that initial galaxy of bosom-as-tether. By poem’s end there is no warm respite for the pains of what is conventionally called ‘womanhood’, only a sleek black prison for the entrapment of softness. What chafes may yet protect us.

Read “Lingerie” here.
Jay Bernard’s Surge: Side A, produced by Speaking Volumes, won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

This is the seventh installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar” – Danez Smith

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
3997480206_d5f9a9e98c_b
Image: shot glasses, posted at Flickr by bl0ndeeo2 under a Creative Commons License.

Gaywakening. We all come to it, queer fam. Or we do if we’re lucky. What happens when it happens for us at seventeen, and we’re a Catherine Wheel of hormones and idealisms, glitter lipstick tucked in our back pockets, antiwar decals on our messenger bags? Danez Smith’s “The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar” comprehends the short fuse of that tall hunger, of wanting to chase everything you can with your mouth first, see if you’ll live to regret it, later.

It’s the strokes of stylistic flair in the poem that most move me, the way the word “dash”, set on its own line, feels like a canyon, a broad-hipped homecoming for the bodies of other men. I love, too, the embodiment of “whiskey coke” as new-appointed lord and saviour, a move that feels both insouciant and deeply invested in a whole avenue of self-care previously denied one. A gay bar, after all, can be a sanctuary. The poem alerts us to this from the very first line: “this gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we.” Sometimes all the acceptance you’ve thought to ask for comes from sticky pleather seats, before-midnight drink specials, colourful condoms dispensed like candies from the all genders bathrooms, the weight of a boy’s tongue in your mouth when you are yourself, in this moment, a boy with a needy, sugared tongue, wanting it lit.

What the poem captures perfectly is the twinned, double-forking spiral of young abandon and its mirror-awareness: “i want my new god to look at the mecca i built him & call it damn good / or maybe i’m just tipsy & free for the first time”. Because so what, if in this one, outstandingly queer moment, you say more than you mean? Beneath the strobe lights, you find you can say anything, at all.

Read “The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar” here.
Danez Smith’s second full-length collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, was published in 2017 by Graywolf Press.

This is the sixth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country” – Angel Nafis

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
3977237190_979d2aa10a_o
Image: Wedding ring 3, posted at Flickr by Furcifer pardalis under a Creative Commons License.

Before I dreamed of having a queer community, I had to learn what it was like to be queer alone. Solitary, too, is the central figure of Angel Nafis’ “Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country”. “The body prayers home”, advises the second line of the poem, and what follows is a linked belt of invocations, each buckle a mandate. The address of these lines is both tender and stern, rising like a road that bites the ankles into daily blisters and kisses the ragged skin better by moonlight. Such is the ouroboros of self-dependency, for those who travel with no dependents, for those who take their census of one.

The speaker, who addresses the poem’s self-appointed bride in second person, offers no platitudes, only ways to survive: “Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride / Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.” These directives have little sugar to ease their swallow, but there’s sweetness in this ghazal: look to the honey and nectar in the penultimate stanza. True, the honey is burnt. True, the nectar coats arms and hands, like gloves of efficient purpose. Yet, isn’t this repurposing, this bitter refining of the dulcet, its own queer survival?

Nafis takes the ghazal form by several of its classic tenets, including the utterance of the poet’s own name in the final line of verse. “Angel, put that on everything.” How tactile, and malleable, does the poem issue forth its own unkillability. We read, walking through “goodest grief”, the scent of burnt honey haloing us, wrists blotted with the blueprint of too-hot milk, our bridal raiment scored with the marks of tough travel, and what persists for us is that we have not curled up to die, easy or at all.

Read “Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country” here.
Angel Nafis’ first collection of poems, BlackGirl Mansion, was published in 2012 by Red Beard Press / New School Poetics.

This is the fifth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“Femme futures” – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
2850115284_912a4956f0_b
Image: pastel swing, posted at Flickr by Isuru Senevi under a Creative Commons License.

What do we mean when we say the future is female? That the past has been. That the present must be. That in every age of woman, we raise fists and rip saris to staunch bloodflow, no matter who opposes us.

To image the future, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poem gives us a past. It’s one of a strong collective of Sri Lankan women, dauntless and excited, determined and agile in the face of struggle: “We do things like, oh, start the first rape crisis center in Jaffna / in a war zone in someone’s living room.” The women in this first movement of “Femme futures” know when to stand their ground, and when to flee in pursuit of sustaining their resistance. This is the womanhood of the narrator’s past, her “appamma and great aunties” of the 1920s, who were radical and revolutionary in their time.

There is that love into which you are sometimes born, “Femme futures” reminds us, and there is the “radical sisterlove” you must hew yourself, from the utterly-real imaginarium of books, inventions, and the people you have yet to meet. As the poem builds upon the base of its three movements, it roves from historical sisterhood, to the community of disability, “where crips limp slowly, laugh, have shitty and good days / recalibrate the world to our bodies instead of sprinting trying to / keep up / Make everyone slow down to keep pace with us.”

As the poem casts its gaze – unapologetically crip, undauntedly queer – to the future, it imagines compassion; co-construction in safe spaces; all the ways queer women can build their own possibilities, hand in hand in hand. It’s about “the money in the bank and the ways we grip our thighs / back to ourselves”. Oh, women like this change the world. You know they always have.

Read “Femme futures” here.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s memoir, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, was published in 2015 by Arsenal Pulp Press.

This is the fourth installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“Vows (for a gay wedding)” – Joseph O. Legaspi

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
2611296015_aa0ce876a7_b
Image: Maggie & Beeper, posted at Flickr by marieimy under a Creative Commons License.

I needle at the notion of queer ‘difference’. Do we sin differently, rejoice in ways distinct from straight folks? The stirring liturgy of Joseph O. Legaspi’s “Vows (for a gay wedding)” take love by the tufted bird-throat, first. It centres the survival, the gentleness and homeroosting, of queer desire. It foregrounds a love that, like any other love, often wends a treacherous route to the altar, but gets there, and basks in its honeyed self-possession. Pick up your rainbow-coloured rice, kinspeople. Welcome to the wedding.

Breach the declarative oasis of Legaspi’s poem, and you find proof of ‘queer difference’, which is not perhaps in the fact of loving, but in its legislation. Scarcely two lines into the narrative, the poem’s speaker says, “Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous. / How it frightens and confounds and enrages. / How strange, unfamiliar.” The poet handles this outward fear and anger with all the delicacy required of balance, allowing us to see it as a physical force: levied against those who love, received with equidistant strangeness by those against whom it’s levied.

But these vows aren’t for the picketers; they’re for the ones getting married. Frankly, the poem is a tenderness. It’s a declaration of bravery, of constancy, of the balm of being well-matched to one’s mate in perilous times. What I love best about Legaspi’s poem is that it conjures an almost animal, mineral, natural assuredness of love’s succour, one the world of men does not assure. It’s a world where the rooftops are “barbaric”, the wilderness “nourishing”; it’s our world, in short, where we who are queer find ourselves loving in it. I love this poem because it reconnoitres us to the roots of loving, no matter who bangs on the doors of the forest with hate. Isn’t that worth a vow?

Read “Vows (for a gay wedding) here.
Joseph O. Legaspi’s Threshold was published in 2017 by CavanKerry Press.

This is the third installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls” – Chen Chen

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
635493391_8c479bbfe6_o.jpg
Image: Gnikolay the Gnome, posted at Flickr by rumolay under a Creative Commons License.

Sometimes, there’s razing the heteronormative superstructures of the world. Other times, there are handfuls of salty, hot popcorn, eaten with a wide mouth. Do the two cancel each other out, on a queer ballot?

I love the irreverent interrogation of Chen Chen’s “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”, in which junk food juxtaposes unwilling migration, and italicized conversations run to both sombre and pugnacious ends. The poem gives itself breathing room, even if all the space is uncomfortable, made of constraints and saturated fats. The poem’s speaker asks us, or themselves, “& don’t we need to get lost? Lost, dizzy, stubbly, warm, stumbling, / whoa—that’s what it felt like, 17, kissing a boy for the first time.”

It’s rare to find the kind of narrative that feels stumbled-upon, self-referential without being deferential, without the apology of its own internal monologues, asides and Hamletian pickings at the fourth wall. And surely a poem can do this, break its own nervous, kinetic quickstep of rhythm (wherein the break becomes absorbed into the rhythm) to laugh, to pick its own scab, to shit (one of my favourite Chen Chen poems is about shitting) without abnegating any sense of its own beauty.

What’s beauty, to a poem, to a queer poem? I love the quickwitted honesty in these lines, the vinegary awareness, the way that structurally, the poem peppers itself with questions, with ampersands linking “boys & heat, scruff & sweet”. This is the poem holding itself by its own scruff, wriggling a little on the hook of all these questions, no definite pronouncements but the hunger for popcorn, for a boy’s mouth, for the confidence of one’s own maw, needing the salt and the slick. I come back to this space for its queer activation, for all the ways it says I stuff myself, never satisfied, never salted enough.

Read “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls” here.
Chen Chen’s first full-length collection of poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was published in 2017 by BOA Editions.

This is the second installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes. 

“My Brother My Wound” – Natalie Diaz

On By Novel NicheIn Here for the Unicorn BloodLeave a comment
Image: ferris wheel, posted at Flickr by Peter Roome under a Creative Commons License.

If the wound is the place where light enters us, how does our pain leak from us?

Natalie Diaz’s “My Brother My Wound” is an unstitching. The poem reveals increasing losses, through calculations of need and absence, by the way a pair of siblings regard each other. Of sharp and injurious urgency is the poem composed: Diaz lancets the reader open, as the narrator is surgically opened, by wilderness, by the menace of cutlery, by what one body can use to cleave into another for residence.

How moved I’ve always been that the brother of this poem uses a fork to stab a Jesus Wound into the speaker’s side. Forget rapiers and their jewelled scabbards, at least for the purposes of this particular dinner table: I like the grim, domestic assurance of the poem, that almost any object can be used to guarantee entry. It’s the fork, in this case, that lets the light in, lets the brother trample over the speaker’s ribs.

Every corner of this poem startles me. It’s in the cohabitation of words I don’t expect to see together, no matter how many poems I read: mouth as nest; Mars erupting from the stomach; the Ferris wheel that lives inside us, we who allow at least one human passenger aboard. I experience Diaz’s poem breathlessly — not the flush of romantic suspense, but the vertiginous thrill of being unsure when I might topple, when I might be at most risk.

What of the wound, of the path it makes in the human body, in the human capacity to suffer for the sake of being a light unto others? “It wouldn’t stop bleeding. / He reached inside / and turned on the lamp —  / I never knew I was also a lamp”, says the speaker, already perforated for love, already leaking light.

Read “My Brother My Wound” here.
Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was An Aztec was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.

This is the first installment of Here for the Unicorn Blood, a Queer POC Poetry Reader which runs from June 1 – June 30. Historically, June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, heralded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. #PrideMonth’s global significance, its unabashed celebration of queerness, its marshalling of non-heteronormative joy, resistance and tenacity, motivates this close reading series, which specifically engages the work of POC Queer Poets, in international space. People of colour have been vital to queerness before queerness had a name: this is one way to witness that, to embed my reading practice in it, and to raise my brown, queer fist in yes.