My mother tells me to be quiet.
Their home-brewed bigotry spills
over every edge of the bar--
every chair laced with straight, white, borrowed souls.
It spills and evaporates into the air--
unfresh, close, and thicker than before.
It sprouts decayed, bone-thin fingers that wrap around my throat.
My eyes water at the existence of it.
I go to gasp, to sing, to fill my lungs with anything else,
but she hushes me.
The rest of them-- they laugh and they sip.
It's bitter, it must be so bitter, but still, they sip.
Disgust lingering behind their teeth,
they've accepted that "this is just how things are."
This is just the way things have always been.
Unchanged, uneducated, unfit for survival,
they simply wait for whatever comes next, and they sip.
But here I sit, frantic, searching.  
There is no way out. The clouds descend,
and I realize
I was raised until I raised myself.
My mother, she taught me kindness,
she taught me patience; how to take turns,
but she did not teach me how to breathe... in this.
I
taught me how to speak the oxygen of tolerance
in the presence of green, noxious bigotry.
I
chose to live beside the oppression of race, gender, and ****** preference.
I
do not blame these white, straight, borrowed souls
for fearing what they choose not to understand.
But mother,
I
will no longer
be quiet.

There is a boy that lives
in my closet.
I keep him in a Nike shoebox
next to my skeletons and
other things I’m trying to
get rid of.
Day by day I guard the door
to my closet
in fear of what you’ll say
when you realize
he’s not another thing
you can control.
I beg and hope that he’ll stay
inside my
claustrophobic
closet
but each time I let him out
it gets harder to keep him in
because now he knows
there’s something outside his
confined life.
Because now he knows
there is a world of dazzling color
and loud laughter
and he isn’t satisfied like he used to be.
So each time I leave my home
he escapes into the way I talk
or the binder on my chest
and it scares me that I can’t seem to
hide him anymore.
There was a time when I
wasn’t afraid
to let him be seen.
We used to play together,
back when we didn’t realize
you were staring at us in horror,
whispering my difference in each other's ears.
But just because he was visible
doesn’t mean he was seen
instead all you could see was a confused girl,
a “tomboy”.
But you say
I’m getting too old
to be a tomboy.
Last night you crept
into my closet
a gun in your hand
and uttered those ten painful words
I could not bear:
“You’re going to high school
as a girl next year.”
And for each word
there was a bullet wound
bleeding water from my eyes
and screams from my throat
I woke up to find locks on my closet,
a reminder that
all the courage I’d worked up to tell you
about the boy I was hiding
was a wasted effort.
The boy pounds his fists
against the empty walls
but I can only helplessly cry
for the person I wish I was.

In Nebraska, they are murdering transexuals
those with necks red as blood and lipstick
     This recording is the last of the words which are me
     -Play on the air for all to hear
or smash them between these two bricks
these two red bricks of earth and stone
     In Nebraska, they are murdering transexuals
which you may think is funny
when their lipstick gets smeared ridiculously
across the macadam
until you see their blood the same as yours
until they come for you
those "good old boys" with fists like bricks
and necks engorged with hate and spit
warm beer, **** and vinegar
sun beating down on their angry, little brains
 
     This is the final transcript
of all that I am
embellished with sequins and such
scrawled in *****
     These words are my lover's breaths
floating in darkness above cold ears
lost in cartoon-balloon blurbs
a drama of gasps
a flurry of snow and chipped nails
upon the pavement
across the prairie
in Nebraska