They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

The only thing promised in this world is that it will, oftentimes, be something that makes living seem impossible. And I hope, then, that a child who blessedly knows less of the world’s evils decides to laugh with his friends in a place that reaches your ears. I hope it carries you back to the fight, as it has done for me. Joy, in this way, can be a weapon—that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or months, or years.

poets, the elegy is a type of currency. So many of us are, especially now, speaking to the dead, or asking the dead to speak again, or apologizing to the dead for the lives we still have. Particularly for poets of color, queer and trans poets, the contemporary elegy often exists as half-memorial, half-statement of existence. Something that says You have taken so much from us, but we are still here. As we are being asked to come to terms with death, again and again, I consider the elegy and how empowering it can be. Even then, though, I think of my own work, and of how rarely I find myself speaking to the living.

I can’t take it to her and place it in her living hands and say look. look at what I did with the path you made for me.

was very out of character for me, but I was rebelling against the feeling of anything but grief. When you allow something to grow a shadow at your back, anything that distracts you from it is going to need severing. I think, perhaps, that the key is never letting the sadness grow too large.

Obama, as much as we sometimes imagined him otherwise, was a politician. He was an American President, which means that he was tied into all of America’s machinery, which means that he was operating with a proximity to some level of violence at all times. But he was more than this, too, a complex and fullstoried person. The problem with the way visible and complicated people of color and their histories are approached by the world around them is that they are, all too often, not afforded the mosaic of a full and nuanced history.

when you grow up with punks, the kind of kids who listened to Richard Hell records and then found more like that, it’s easy to feel some distance from the kind of optimism that we’re taught to lean into during difficult times. Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.

grow up poor, especially with any proximity to wealth, real or imagined, is to think sometimes that money can save you. To think that money can pull you and the people you love out of the feeling of any grief, or sadness.

anyone who has ever loved someone and then stopped loving them, or for anyone who has stopped being loved by someone, it’s a reminder that the immediate exit can be the hardest part. Admitting the end is one thing, but making the decision to walk into it is another, particularly when an option to remain tethered can mean cheaper rent, or a hit album, or at the very least, a small and tense place that you can go to turn your sadness into something more than sadness.

A lot of the people I knew who dismissed “emo” while the genre was at its peak did so because they believed emotions were things that should be sacred and unspoken, not screamed out to the listening masses. I push back against that, both in personal practice and as someone who has seen the other side of that coin, or known people completely eaten alive by the hoarding of sacred emotion.

Twisting anger over heartbreak into something, well, cute, is easier for some genres than others. In emo, particularly during its heyday of attractive frontmen who fancied themselves poets, the misogyny was seen more as process than problem. Who among us, regardless of gender, hasn’t scrawled something in the silence of a notebook about an ex-someone? It’s a part of the coping, at least to a point. The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And, ultimately, the problem becomes when those men don’t age beyond the adolescent heartbroken temper tantrums that we all have before we learn better and start to know better. It’s not a measure of being morally superior to this band on stage, or not failing in my own politics around sadness, gender, and anger. But it’s the difference between trying to chip away at the emotional debt one has accrued versus piling on top of it.