RJ No
"I'm a transmasculine person who works in mental health and loves words. I guess the background of the poems is, with most poetry I write I cut up other things to construct poems from them, and I find this easier than coming up with the words myself. Like recycling. I did this with Sweetness and On Queer Joy. With Just Like Old Times I based it on memories of a relationship I recently left."
IG: @rj_the_shrimp
Sweetness
I have mad miracles in me
A little shaking treasure
Of a revolution.
In hard cruel voice
We make ourselves
But the thing you learn is:
That kind of existing
Is not enough.
Verbal as in spoken
Actual as in true.
Perhaps we could have loved sweetness;
Made the dangerous nothing
Safe.
But life in such spaces
Is a scar.
On Queer Joy
Granted, life is only constant days.
People shifting and staring
Focussed in their reaching
Stifling transition with complaints
And husbands.
The performance of cisgender
Indistinguishable from blankness.
As you battle for safety in this world
Find peace amongst the confusion
And fruit beneath the trees
Experience this laughter
That red silk something
That haircut
Dance on the world
So that even the sky
Blushes in its pallor.
Haven't you eaten the figs,
Bones swarming with freedom?
Been perceived outside of gender?
Burned with desperate want
For something taken from all of us?
That strange and intimate fever
Which comes with really being.
Just Like Old Times
Am I misremembering
Or fabricating the light
That glanced off the rings
Above your knuckles?
You rapped them on the tabletop
Matching my heart for speed;
A skull, a snake, a dagger
Keeping time.
The hairs rose on my forearms
In the humming air
Moths tapped against the lanterns
Strung high above our heads.
The smallness of sound
Belying the violence on those
Delicate bodies;
The gentle plunge of a blade
Through waiting skin
(I am waiting
And I am not.)
When I looked back up
From the bottomless pit of
My golden drink
You had disappeared.
The rhythm of your knuckles
Replaced by the gentle percussion
Of fragile life attempting to
touch hot death.