welp

hold on

the meme doing the single most to cheer me up right now

Hello.

I don’t have many smart things to say. there’s a million “what you can do” pieces circulating. no one has an attention span. everyone’s disassociated and on warp speed. fast fast slow slow. it’s been two fucking weeks. the white walkers are over the wall. every trans person I know is disassociated warp speed. me too. some days I’m calm, steady, working at my desk in sunlight in my purpose, some days I’m in a meeting til 10 PM, some days I’m crying for a couple hours. not gonna lie that I had a few insomnia nights of, well, maybe I, we, got to have one last good year with social gatherings and bodies before the clampdown. and then it’s like, good year? genocide year.

night of the inaug my body wouldn’t let me sleep. I stayed up watching the sky lighten and then went to work. when I was texting with Alexis later that week she said she was reading June Jordan’s writings from when she visited Nicaragua in Sandinista times. “tell that puto Reagan we never sleep,” one of the women said to June. I said, we don’t sleep, even when we do.

I guess I was right when I said a couple months ago, last month, that we could predict some of what would happen after coronation day and we could predict that it would be very bad, but we couldn’t predict all the specifics of it, and if we tried we would be fucking ourselves and wasting time.

being right about how bad what we knew was coming is doesn’t make it much easier to bear. this shit is predictably unpredictably batshit. catastrophic and yet, well, let’s see what happens. what else can we do. I believe in us and I believe in the things that are bigger than either us or them, like land, god and time. mostly I respect the power of the chaos factor, the and now for something completely different factor of the unexpected. which comes from land, god, time.

**

Trump is not wrong about one thing: being trans is against american values, because american values are about being a colonial rape deathlord.

**

I gotta lot of run in my hips. My grandmother survived her life by leaving three countries as they got dangerous and whisper hissed at me get a second passport when i was a older teenager in the 90s. her voice has been getting louder lately. Back when I got that passport, just like when I was a little kid reading Anne Frank I told myself, I won’t be stupid, I’ll see the signs when the time comes and leave without looking back. That logic’s real but echoes logic of, I won’t be one of those dumb girls who’s in love. I’ll leave abuse at the first sign, I’ll see it coming, which I was also taught. both are understandable, neither is so simple.

Looking at my grandmother’s indomitable gaze in the photo I keep on my kitchen table altar, I’ve been wondering what it was like for her, staying alive by running, leaving people and land she loved and needed behind.

Saving yourself by running both isn’t a possibility for so many for so many reasons and is not a unmixed blessing. There are people we are, ways we could be, that only become possible in the context of relationships with specific people and land. Absent them, and they go

My friend said their friend said that they couldn’t run, so they would choose to stay and be a waystation for those fleeing and a base for those continuing to fight. I think I’m choosing that one. I can’t leave this land that claimed me and these people who did, who I do. Pick your fighter.

**

I’ve been re-reading Toni Cada Bambara’s short story “Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain,” which you can find in her book Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, which can be hard to find but is in a lot of libraries. It is good reading for the times right now. Two youngbloods out defying curfew. Racist caricatures and yet Madame Bai visits and Mustafa tacks a Korean flag above the door to welcome her. Stone Mountain is for taking.

**

happy lunar new year of the wood snake. we fucking persist. Gazans are coming home and rebuilding in total destruction and in the face of a this just in USian declaration that the empire wants to take Gaza to make “the riviera of the middle east.” we are also persisting, slippery, sliding, shedding, tricky, curled up in the dark, waiting to strike. the image on the death card on my still-favorite tarot deck is a snake who’s just shed her skin, chowing down on some lush purple grapes. Death all around and the ways death has skinned us smooth can meant a lust for life, emerging from what death has made us become.

**

Being a writer in a post truth era is a trip. However, I have one if not two books of poetry in the works, and with all the hell of the last two weeks, month, 4 years, 8 years, lifetime it may seem fucking nuts to be editing poetry, but that's what I did a lot of the last two weeks. poetry is never a luxury, these are the times it counts the most. june jordan wrote “poetry is always for the people, and it is always a time of war.” some times more than others.
**

When people say it’s time to leave the internet social media I don’t disagree and in fact we may not have much of a choice, but I also remember how isolated in particular ways disabled comms were before social media. I would argue that disability justice wouldn’t exist in its current spread without social media; it’s also totally made for some weird-ass and particular dynamics within “the movement” but crip socials still meant connection, out of forced isolation in our sick beds. (and there are so many more people in sick beds now.) crip internt was a place so many sick, disabled, Mad, ND BIPOC cld dip our toe cautious into, am I that word, are you my people, let me ask this embarassing question from the safety of a screen in my house, not going to a support group at the Center for Independent Living where maybe it’s three older white dudes giving me the scare eye, maybe I just go nah, I’m not going to do that. that’s not to be discounted.

I’m glad I’m a very old xennial or the youngest Xer and I remember how to do both physical bulletin boards and digital ones. I also look forward to the third things we will create, that will come.

**

I cried for a long time last Friday watching that data get deleted. I talked to a lot of friends who don't necc want to be here anymore. not in an ideation way just in a.... this is our worst nightmares come true and there's not a way round it, and yes we can do everything we can and everything we've said we believe in and more, and the shock and awe of it is still beyond. it's watching twenty years of friends' data on trans health, trans BIPOC and HIV, trans sexual wellness, get deleted. yes that data is mostly backed up, that's not the point, the point is this is the digital moment of "you don't get to be in the cdc." Knowledge doesn't die just because someone kicks it out of a room, knowledge is eternal, but it sure sends one hell of a message.

I appreciate when I see other nonbinary and trans people saying, we existed before the modern moment, we will survive this. I get it. I also have to say, having come of age in the 90s, I was real happy when Medicaid started covering gender affirming care and friends could get their HRT at Planned Parenthood or the clinic at school. It still wasn't enough but it was space that made space possible, including my figuring out I was nonbinary at 41

I know DIY HRT is going to save a lot of people. and I still want people to be able to access HRT in a clinic or a community health center not my friend’s back bathroom. Disability justice in healing justice means we want and need herbs and pills, surgery in clean rooms and diy prosthetics.

Just because we (some of us) survived before, just because we always knew representation politics were not liberation, doesn't mean that before wasn't murderous. And doesn't mean that all our hard-earned work of decades to make shit better getting erased is something we can just auto-resilience our way out of.

**

If you go to white house dot gov, you will see one of the worst and most telling websites ever right now. there is no contact form. there is a terrible graphic design choice (a photo of the asshole in chief gesturing a la another leader circa the late 1930s) and even worse content. it made me say "america is a joke.” my friend said "What is a joke when it is so very very dangerous as well as comical?"

news:

some friends are making an itch bundle to raise money for crips for e sims for gaza, you can submit to it til feb 10th. “Broadly speaking, we invite a full spectrum of digital and physical content: video games, tabletop games, zines, comics, books/novels, asset packs, and any other existing itch.io project you'd like to submit!” Send your stuff and find out more here.

Alice Wong, Jane Shi and I wrote this Crips for E Sims for Gaza Lunar New Year Update. We’re still at it. Gaza may be under a temporary ceasefire but the cell and WiFi towers didn’t magically get rebuilt.

I’m speaking/ reading at Rutgers and then in conversation with Roxane Gay at the end of the month, register here

I’m going to read new work and give a craft talk about the practices I’m in of writing memoir in a post truth era at Miller Oberman’s class at the new school.: reg link here.

hard femme poetics in a time of death yet survival writing class is happening in march. it went so nice when I did it for workshops for Gaza in December I wanted to do it twice.

details:

• 4 week once a week writing class on four wednesday nights,March 5, 12, 19, 26, 2025, 7 PM ET- 9 PM ET

• for anyone who wants to read poems/ hybrid work out of a femme canon I made up of the monstrous demand question liturgy mean story unexpected kiss, and write some.

• sliding scale rates of $80-500 USD for a month’s classes, payment plans available, some free ninety nine spots.

• text based format with CART, once a week kitchen table write and read together with captions and access.

• space is limited. centers femme people or people with some relationship to fem(me) who live at multiple margins ie BIPOC, not-cis, working class/ poor, disabled, fat, sex working, migrant.

• what is femme? what I say is! KIDDING. but femme is a multiverse of possibility and I wrote a definition question of it that I think still holds up, here. one thing it sure isn’t is all white cis ladies. not sure if you fit the bill? email me.

• please email llpsx@proton.me with your interest and I will send you a form to fill out and more info.

here’s the resource list from the I’m disabled, how the hell do I survive this workshop I did at the beginning of January.

I added a page to my website documenting the disabled pandemic grief portal, which I first created for i wanna be with you everywhere 2023 which finally is coming to some new places and spaces this year. because we need grief alchemy, places to sit with each other and be in it and crack a joke and cry.

photos by Annie Forrest

and I’m lecturing at Labs for Liberation Summer Disability and Design Institute, which has a lot of implacable brilliance. “We extend the legacy of disability design cooperatives, wheelchair repair studios, DIY home design collaborations, Black queer houses, feminist science labs, artist salons, the kitchen table, and online activist spaces.” click here for more info. Application deadline March 7, 2025.

a pitch for a place to support: Hearts on A Wire is an inside/ outside collective of trans people in PA prisons that has been going for 17+ years, they publish and circulate a newsletter inside prison and create concrete supports for trans folks inside and coming home. you can find out more at the link above and venmo @ heartsonawire or mail a donation or a letter to Hearts on a Wire, 4722 Baltimore Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19143

a thing to read: I just got my copy of Rasheedah Phillips’ Dismantling The Master’s Clock and am making my way slowly into it, but am really looking forward to reading and learning from this genius about Black quantum ways of liberating time. click the link for more info, including events all over including two in Philly, one on March 13 at the Wooden Shoe with Metropolarity opening.

til soon,

Leah