I stand in my orange
bricked Brooklyn Apartment.
Age: 12 Queer but not out.
Not even to myself.
I hold my hand to my thin
chest to feel every beat of my heart with closed eyes.
With every pump that I feel,
I hope that it’ll give me a clue. Or maybe even an answer.
Or possibly, It’ll speak to me in some kind of
spiritual dialect only I can decipher.
With every thump of my young heart, I beg it’ll help
answer the question
that’s seared onto my tongue and
imprisoned with my teeth:
“where do I come from?”
Even now, Age: 21 Queer and very much out, that question still
coats my throat like melted honey. It almost chokes me.
This inquiry, similar to my Blackness,
is frozen in amber.
Like a thread unsewn to yards of fabric,
I am connected to broken roots that I must weld together (slowly and with care)
with my blood and
anxieties to form a map to a buried lineage.
A buried lineage that will open the gates to Home.
But what is home?
It’s
simply
A
destination
that
never
stops
moving.
My Blackness will forever be trapped in
a cultural purgatory, where the air is thick with
Question marks and the water tastes of salted ancestral tears.
However,
in that state of stuckness, dialects were constructed by big
beautiful Black lips and smooth vowels and consonants that
sit in the very air we breathe.
Food traditions were passed down through eyes and memorization.
A cultural garden has bloomed in
soil that has been denied water for centuries
to form archaic genetic webs that grow and thrive in the lungs of Black bodies alike.
And whenever the question “where do I come from” comes violently scratching at my skin,
I simply reply, “from everywhere and nowhere because
I am historically connected to a diaspora that is in constant motion and
to a heritage of electric kinship”
