# of times I’ve been punched in the jaw since June 2020: 5.

#OT I’ve been pepper-sprayed: 1.

#OT this violence was at the hands of a cop: 0.

#OT this violence was at the hands of cis women: 1.

#OT someone’s told me they pray for my peace: countless. #OT my mother has cries “she doesn’t know what to do” but won’t google a book to help: 5.

#OT I’ve been told my death would hurt the people left behind: countless.

#OT my assaulted literally turned around to then try to soothe me, or fuck me: 3.

#OT my assaulter was trans: 0.

Welcome to my page. I’m a poet & professor. I’ve won many awards. I read many books. My research does not stem from either YouTuple lectures or my unexplored feelings of trauma. I regard that the world is larger than the Black Midwest of America, or a Twitter argument. I’m trans. I don’t argue with folks 25 years or younger, or who otherwise have yet to develop a prefrontal cortex. I won’t argue with folks who learned theory from Tumblr. If you have a cartoon photo for a profile pic, instead of the courage of your own face, I won’t argue with you.

When you break from grip of sleep to meet the dark morning just that minute beginning to rain, that’s intimacy with the earth. When you move yourself thru wake’s confusion, your nose pressed against the cold pain, the water sliding down, only quicker, than the glass, that’s the ask of earth.

I just think it’s funny how everyone & they momma is a writer, yet y’all all fell asleep in an English class. 🥴 If someone sends you a text with more than 50 words, you get nervous. If someone types as much online, your go-to reply is “I ain’t reading all that 😂” & you’re not even slightly embarrassed to admit it. 🧐

The inferiority complex of who I will call American Blacks have toward Black New Orleanians (who could also be called Creole Blacks) is deep, wide, & impressive in its attempts to reassert itself even when no more superior note has been tried or claimed. God bless the child. It is a legacy of American Colonial logic (ie, those first thirteen states) that makes mere difference, distinction and dissimilarity automatically suggestive of a hierarchy—that is a superior vs inferior—when it needn’t do. 🙃

My heart goes out to @lizzo because she really can’t do ANYTHING but apparently sing about how “confident” she is. This allows a certain group of people to pity her, confusing that for support, while another group uses her for their campaigns, confusing that for the same. 💔 There is a specter to the black femme body as it approaches a kind of “liminal attractiveness.” I know that’s clunkily-put. I’m trying to find ways to discuss parallels I see between fathpobia and transphobia, so you will excuse if I make some faux-pas as I think this aloud.

Y’all my body is ready! She, they, he — we ready! On the 21st, my Saturn return in Capricorn completes itself and moves into Aquarius. I am an Aquarius. From @chaninicholas’s website: “The last time Saturn was in Aquarius (1991-1993), apartheid was dismantled.” “Before that, Saturn was in Aquarius from 1962-1964, just before the Civil Rights Act [was adopted.] And before that, Saturn was in Aquarius from 1932-1935. The Great Depression had begun in 1929 [which eventually] saw the beginning of FDR’s New Deal...”

7 Statements that Rita Dove (@dovelyrita) shared w/the ‘06 Cave Canem Retreat, just shy of my first year in 2009. Doubtless some ideas here will frustrate & relieve; but the point, I think, is to model how a poet must start to discern & argue these poetic principles for herself. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’re hard-pressed to agree about any “rules of the poem” but there is a theory (prosody) which forms a basic line of agreement and mutual appreciation of “the poem” w/in a community, generation, nation, and language.