#queer poets on tumblr

[briannapastorpoetry]

a poem from the poetry collection, 'Good Grief' by Brianna Pastor. Available here and wherever books are sold.

[mxmorbidmidnight]

My worst fear as an Aromantic is someone thinking my poetry about crows, suffering and being a creature is about romance

[love-ardour-anarchism]

I have the words "rage" and "hope" tattooed on my knuckles and there's a great deal of things I could say about that that would most certainly sound very pretentious but that I mean on the deepest, truest and most personal level but to summarize it I will say this:

To me rage and hope are two of the driving forces of this world. I think as a society we tend to demonize rage. It's seen primarily as a violent and harmful thing but to me it absolutely is not. Rage is to see a status quo, a "this is how things are" and go "absolutely the fuck not".

Rage is to see how you are being treated, to see how this world operates and to decide you think its cruel, unnecessarily so, and that you won't tolerate it anymore. Rage is, put simply, the emotion of "I am not okay with this" and as exactly that its a driving emotive force that inspires us to ACT and try and change how things are.

Hope is the second driving force I see. Hope is to see how things are, get pissed off and think "we could be better". Things could be better, things could be less cruel, we could live a different way. We could NOT be in pain.

Rage is seeing things and realizing they are bad. Hope is seeing bad things and realizing they could be better.

[cainvstheworld]

Inches Closer by Cain Birch

My boyfriend pointed out that when we hug now (both of us having had top surgery) our hearts are closer together, so I wrote a little poem about it :')

[Text ID: Inches Closer by Cain Birch. The long, sticky summer fades, and I slowly peel back the bandages cocooning my chest. My scars are just flowering, and will bloom darker in the coming cooler months. Yours are lightening, softening  under the un-weight of time. You wrap me in a firm embrace, one flat chest against another, our hearts inches closer than they were in August. Now, they throb in perfect sync, too-tender skin no longer interrupting when one calls out to the other. /End ID]

[killyourhistory]

I had a dream about us, Dorian Alain

[nearlywrites]

becky tarasick, published in identity theory

[gor3sigil]

About being ugly

So imagine this: you're a young teenager in need of validation. You see other people your age put photos of themselves on social medias and get tons and tons of compliments. You try your shot, post a picture of yourself and get like… 2 likes. And no comments about how pretty you are, just these 2 likes.

Then, you discover Twitter. You post a new pfp of yourself and since you see that it's a thing people do, you post with the hashtag “new pfp”. You go eat lunch with your family. Then you come back online with hundreds of notifications from people making fun of your appearance and calling you ugly. The only “nice” ones are telling you, “respectfully”, to delete the post, for your own “good”.

A few years later, you're transitionning and you see all the support trans people get online in some places. You're an active member of a discord server. You gather up the guts to post a picture of yourself in the designated server. It gets 2 to 5 “🏳️‍⚧️” reactions. The people before and after you get wonderful compliments and praises.

You leave the server feeling humiliated and sad.

And I wish I had advices to give you about how to cope with this. I don't. I studied cinema and photography for years, trying to make flattering pictures of myself, longing for the reactions everyone seemed to get but me. It never worked.

Even in designated spaces it never worked. I seemed to fail to get what to do with myself in pictures. No amounts of filters, poses, angles seemed to cut it. I'd never get one compliment out of anyone.

How do you build any self worth when people look at you only to say how you could improve your looks ? How you could improve your image? How you could be a good product™️ ?

Even dolled up in drag, all I ever gor was that my looks were “interesting”. This isn't a fucking nice thing to say. A book is interesting. A movie is interesting. A human can be, but hell, when I heard what people said about other performers I had to ask myself why the FUCK all I got was that.

Now you know part of why I play the part of the freak.

I'll burst the hell out of your bubble. If I can't be beautiful I'll be so rancid I'll make you want to puke. No, “interesting”, “brave”, “nice” won't cut it. If I can't get you to admit how pretty my being can be I will be repulsive. I will seize you by the throat and take you out of the comfort bubble you worked so hard to build. I will burry your head in the dirt of me, in the dust of my soul until you can't breathe anything but what I inspire to be, until you choke on your own tears and have nothing left in your sobbing lungs than the ashes of the selves I burnt for your little comfort, your little cabins made out of my flesh and bones. I'll hold your skull down and yell “What's beauty, bitch ?! Do you not like my belly rolls ?! Does my fat not feed you ?! Do you feel at ease now ?! Do I need to spoon myself into bite sized pieces you can digest ? Are you hungry for my rotten fruit ?”

I will spread my ugliness so far it's the only thing you'll see when you finally raise your pathetic symmetrical face.

I will shit on your perfect mouth until it's the only thing you can smell.

I will piss in your cookie cutter boxes untin you have to take swings of it when you try to fit in, your mouth dirty with the rancid liquid, forced to swallow bits of it down in every breath you ever take.

I'm beautiful.

[pearlmoney]

I Chose You

I chose you it’s not a decision I still make I’m not choosing you I’m done I’ve made my mind up I chose you and that will never change

-Mason Gilbert

[v333spertine]

[haydsbabes]

i want to grow old with you,

until the clothes we share are faded and stretched in all the wrong places, print rubbing off, but we still wear them in the house to pay homage to the (questionable) fashion sense we shared in our early twenties.

i want to grow old with you,

until these big dreams of ours one day become fond memories which we sit and reminisce with one photo album, one blanket, two mugs of coffee and three dogs resting at our feet.

i want to grow old with you,

until one day our child comes home from school, beaming with excitement, and tells us she doesn’t want a boring job - she wants to be a creative, just like her mums.

i want to grow old with you,

and we will never once find anything to argue about, because we both know that the sweetest part of this life is, and always has been, loving each other.

[briannapastorpoetry]

Good Grief by Brianna Pastor, available here!

[mxmorbidmidnight]

Fight Dog (an original poem)

[love-ardour-anarchism]

As I am inching towards being 30 years of age I think I found some utmost truth that I will cling to for as long as I will live

I think that hope is like a fungus, its growing in the crevices of everything that I believe in

and I will hold it like Antonio Gramsci said: the only way that we can truly lose as revolutionaries, as progressives, as people who wish nothing more than for a better world is if we give up hope and I won't sugar coat this mess we're in but I will rise each morning and I will do the dishes and I will ask you what we can do today to be less miserable tomorrow

and I will hold it just the way that Terry Pratchett said, and he made Death the one who said it: I'd sieve the world to finest grain and I will show you molecules of mercy, I'll show you atoms of all of the good things I believe in and I will tell you that that kind of hope starts with the little lies that I choose to believe in cause I think he was right if I can make myself believe in what I say each saturday at our game night table then I can rise another day and I can do the laundry and ask you what we'll do today to make sure that our friends will have enough tomorrow; all capitalistic deprivation will be damned as long as we're together

and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that any human power can be resisted by our human resistance. She wrote that all these systems of oppression that we've been living in won't always stay the same. That they are as unchangeable as was the right of kings to rule. They said that it was godly-given and yet it did not last. And in the spirit of the same I think that I am holding on to hope because to me its all that I can do. Le Guin wrote that resistance often starts in art and I feel called to that. And everytime that someone says that something that I wrote impacted them I know that I have reasons to hold on aplenty. And I won't act like all is bright and like there's plenty lights on the horizon that don't form mushroom clouds; and maybe all the world comes to an end in horror and in agony but I refuse to yield until that day is here. I still believe in better worlds, and I believe there's dishes to be done and friends to call and lovers' lips to kiss; once there is not then maybe I can have a look at apathy.

:SCRR

[cainvstheworld]

The Phlebotomist by Cain Birch

This is a persona poem from the perspective of my phlebotomist (person who draws my blood). It's a bit different than what I normally post on here, but I wrote it for my creative writing class and liked how it turned out.

[Text ID: The Phlebotomist by Cain Birch. The youngest tremble more than the graying, the grayed. Some of the children beg, barter with their parents, howl at the sun as I borrow their blood with a slender needle, but I offer every flavor of lollipop, so their pain is not fruitless. My heart breaks most for the ones whose fathers extract crumpled doctor’s orders from their jangling pockets, whose mothers offer tight smiles as their child squeezes their eyes shut, stilling, accustomed to the burn of the needle. I call out girls’ names into the waiting room and choppy-haired boys follow me into the sterile room, let me slide silver into the tender crooks of their elbows, measuring the hormones in their budding bodies. I call out a man’s name, and a woman with a five o’clock shadow coating her cheeks holds her arm ramrod straight for me. I don’t know how to ask her  what she’d like to be called, whether the “Samuel” in her chart should spell “Samantha” instead, perhaps “Iris” or “Rose.” Instead, I make small talk about the prices of gas, of chicken. I don’t tell her that the fried chicken my husband brings home grows cold by the time I arrive, that I do not turn on the heat in my hatchback even though my car’s engine sputters into the frigid night as I turn the key. I don’t tell her that I chew the tough meat without the microwave’s aid, so my husband’s breath, his still body is molten by comparison when I slide into the sheets next to him, drawing warmth into my bones, pretending the fire between us is more than a fading flicker. He wakes me up before dawn, before leaving to fill in the northeast's endless potholes, fills me up for a few minutes, catches his breath as he slides on his belt, his dirt-caked boots, kisses me with a closed mouth. I lay in the nest of blankets, let my mind slither off to hopeful gardens. In a few weeks, I will call a child’s name for the last time, his ailments healing, his parents glowing with quiet optimism. In a few months, I’ll call a woman’s name, Heather, and she’ll stick out her arm, ramrod straight, beaming. I won’t know what to say, but I’ll smile back at her. /End ID]

[earlgaylatte]

Old Enough-

Came out of the womb/Fists curled and screaming/Little red face scrunched up in the white light./Foreshadowing to the nth degree./Body soft enough to be young./Sharp shrieking anger like a banshee and a head of Irish curls./Born old enough for your emergency contact to be the emergency/Or old enough to taste acetaminophen on your breath./The first time you watch a X-rated movie/You’ll cry yourself to sleep and won’t know why,/The first time you masturbate to the sight of a pretty trans boy you’ll try to take your life during sub-drop./Baby never smelt like Johnson’s lotion, just/Jack Daniels and cigarette ash./Fifteen the first time you asked a man to put one out on you./Sixteen and realizing being called pretty boy raises goosebumps like worship music,/Feeling slick and wild under the red midwest Sun./Growing up like a humiliation ritual with no safeword./Queer and/There’s no metaphor for that, just being seventeen the first time you/Took a smoke break from his parted lips/And seconds old when they pulled you up off the hospital bed still rosy and roaring./Brought into this life knowing that it’d be spent starting riots./You’re not old enough to drink but old enough/For friends to be killed or kill themselves./Not yet prose but a/Poem.

[eyez-withoutaface]

trans activist art of the day you’re welcome