smoke signals
Updated: Mar 28
A ball is, the very word, whatever you want to be, you be.
In a ballroom, you can be anything you want.
— Paris is Burning, 1990
1.
the childhood bedroom won’t recognize me
anymore. two truths and a lie: my body used to be
a history of fear. i’ve forged the ownership papers
to this life too many times to count. i’ve lied
enough in my life. truth and truth again, the first time i went
to the gay club was in itaewon during a summer that cracked
open like a yolk—our shadows running golden
on the pavement. the butch girls wearing their sleeves
rolled halfway up, femme queens dripping
glitter down the basement stairs. blurred chaos
every friday night, the longing of it & the longing
to become it, love through relentless homage.
2.
burning was the first
controlled chemical reaction discovered by humans;
no wonder it’s the oxygen that animates our lungs
which also feeds the flame. we have always been
here, burning. we have always been queer.
i pull a spark from the fluorescent body
of the lighter and inhale.
3.
my mother used to tell me i could be anything
i wanted but mostly i chose to live. there are nights
where i want to dream in a language she understands
so much that i think do. but nothing’s loved me as much
as the clippers that licked up my scalp, sixteen
& godless shaving off my hair. or the needles
biting through my cartilage or the blood-candied lip
or the bound chest or the monolid eyeliner i had to teach
myself like survival. i want & want to become
the drag queen sliding across the grimy floor of the stage,
lashes cut like the scythe-moon outside. we call her
royalty for a reason. we learn by doing, in
transgression. when the bar door bangs open
onto the cold crush of dawn i return home:
prodigal daughter, extravagant child, hanging
herself on the family tree.
4.
in my mother tongue, the word for oxygen sometimes
means mountain-grave. to make this connection,
i had to dislocate my tongue first. i breathe out
and the pyre ignites. the ancestral bodies rust in their grief.
i’ve built my own lineage enough times
to know there’s no return to sender for this body. girlhood,
like the ballroom floor, is a city that’s burning: shorter and younger
and more flammable than i ever thought.
Editor(s): Alisha B., Uzayer M., Blenda Y.