in first semester i wear my zeal
on the edge of my teeth but now
i let the voice of reason carry me
over treetops and ledges and right into the streams.
somewhere else there’s a man and he looks like me
except he didn’t need to fight the world the way i did
somewhere else there’s a man with my face and
he was born to be me but he isn’t me
he was born to be glorious but he’s a bastard
or something like that, and this wasn’t
supposed to be a poem about privilege
but almost all poems are ultimately about privilege
or about existing, which in itself is a privilege
by which i mean, literacy
privilege, accessible literature
privilege, eloquence
privilege, self-actualization
fucking coincidence but you can slot that under
privilege if you want
university
privilege
still being alive on transgender day of remembrance
privilege
or maybe privilege isn’t the right word
not when we’re all persecuted
you could probably pin it all down
on sheer luck
i am not a man in a woman’s body, i am a man’s body
in a sheath of nonbinary and i curve everywhere
a woman should but i am not a woman
because i perceive myself
the way i want to be perceived
which means, skin and bone
and isn’t every single poem just a tribute to
being around to create poems
being hurt or being happy or being in love
which essentially means you are hurt and you are happy
we are all does on the sidewalk looking at the arrows
and saying to the hunters, hey
keep the taxes quiet for a minute,
listen, are you sure you want to kill me?
somewhere outside, a man wears a body
designed for me that somehow
got lost in factory management
but it’s fine because
i love my transgender body.
in first semester i think i am cis
but i am aware of gender in the way that birds are
aware of the sky and salmon are
aware of the stream
which is almost the opposite of
privilege
it’s living on the very edge
of the fangs of existence
and i’ve always bitten down
with all my front teeth
making it to sixth semester is a
privilege. in a few months if all goes well i will
graduate and if i’m lucky enough i might
get into my dream university and that might be
privilege again or maybe just a coin toss in my favour because
if i don’t make it out of here i will be just another
statistic, just another person grieving and
swallowed by grief
swallowed by violence
swallowed by hate
transgender and brown and all the way down
from the south asian south
i only wanted to write a poem about pain
about how when one of us dies
all of us
feel it within ourselves
ripples
in the pond of the transgender collective
bullets
in an area of common assembly
blood that belongs
to everybody in the vicinity
it’s not empathy as much as
a personal wound
that hurts each and every one of us
because none of us are safe until
all of us are safe and
we are all afraid of
becoming statistics
while the most privileged groups make tables and
print out charts the most privileged groups
do nothing and watch.
the most privileged groups
could never feel collective love
the way we do
or collective sadness
collective pain
collective grief
which is why i think that poetry is a little like
the song, “the winner takes it all” by ABBA
except that the game is rigged each round
and some of us lose no matter what the stakes are
gambling our energy each time we demand respect
all the batteries in our bodies
always running dry
always running empty
always running.
somewhere out there, a cisgender man
is wearing a body
that should’ve been delivered
to me
he can keep it.
blackbirds in my lungs. 