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WITH LOVE, FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

Year Published: Unknown - Author: 

It has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of color that the end of the world is nigh. A wave of right-wing and openly fascist governments have been elected to power across the world. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of brazenly corrupt few. Climate change and mass extinction are ravaging the earth, largely unacknowledged by those with the political power to do anything about it.

Sometimes it seems like the most painful cuts of all come from within my own
community: Call-out culture. Lateral violence. Puritanical politics. Intimate partner abuse. We know so much about trauma but so little about how to heal it. What would “community” know about saving us from the apocalypse?

In 2016, I turned 25 years old and published my first novel. I became “queer
famous” that year. This was also the year that broke my heart, which has been
right on breaking ever since. This was also the year that Trump was elected, that millions of people were displaced in the Syrian refugee crisis, and that 49
people — most of them queer and brown — were shot to death in a nightclub in Orlando. In the intervening years, more disasters and atrocities have followed.

All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis — psychological, financial,
medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of 35 is the norm.

In the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love — the feeling of love,
the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love — is the only good option in this time of the apocalypse. What else do we have?

I mean love that is kind but also honest. Love that is courageous and relentless
and willing to break the rules and smash the system. Love that cares about people more than ideas, that prizes each and every one of us as essential and
indispensable. I mean love that is compassionate and accountable. I mean love that confirms and reaffirms us as complex and fallible yet lovable anyway, love that affirms us as human. I want to live in love and believe in love. If I have to die, I want to die in love. This whole world might be coming to its end, or it might be in the midst of an enormous and terrifying change that leads to something better. Either way, I want to go through it in love with the people I love.

Love that might not save us at the end of the world, but that might make it
possible to live. I hope we choose it anyway.

I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A TRANS GIRL’S NOTES FROM THE END OF THE WORLD by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019).

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Lady Lazarus

Year Published: 1965 - Author: 

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Year Published: 1969 - Author: 

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

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Gettysburg Mourning (excerpts)

Year Published: Unknown - Author: 
Open Attached Document

Critical Inquiry, Fall 2018

These are excerpts from an article written by Jonathan Lear for the Fall 2018 issue of Critical Inquiry. Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, professor of philosophy, and Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.

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Excerpt from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Jackson’s Dissent in Korematsu v. USA

Year Published: 1944 - Author: 

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived. […] [H]is crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one’s antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign. If Congress in peace-time legislation should enact such a criminal law, I should suppose this Court would refuse to enforce it.

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Phenomenal Woman

Year Published: 1978 - Author: 

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing of my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
The palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

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