Sritama Sen
Speculative poetry that is an allegory for trans lives lost to institutional violence. Locates trans history.
Silver bubble sibyll
bellies up, willow-lashed
floating to a brackish place
we like to call our home.
there, the elliptical lake
there, the march of spectral signs
bodies fattened. salt and blood
all of us, alone.
*
we were here.
we go back years.
(pleistocene,
fare thee well)
we gorged on dragonflies-
now: open wound. opened.
concrete canker, jewel fin
hungry for a strip of sky
snatching at the city mice.
we wonder.
*
we were here.
before you came,
iron-dry, pale-cheeked
mud crack land gods
spitting slurry laws
what is and is not,
a love for sanding things,
our hair snared in your net
our blood against your jaws.
we remember.
*
we are not hunter’s bait
we are not half and half
you think in smoke and gangrene
we think in river song
we were here: in tidal pools,
we’ll be here when cities fall,
iridescent, onyx-eyed
thousand banded, thousand strong.
we will stay.
*
we see them sift
bony knees on shallow flats
cupping metacarpals,
wondering at each ritual ring
we watch them dust
time from teeth and skull,
victor’s loss. what pity,
to have never heard us sing.
we are not dead.