MY GENDER IS COMPROMISE
when i am feeling extra brave i get ready and leave the house and go out into a public that wasn’t meant for someone like me. the idea that i could be a person crowds around me as people hop from one feeling to the next. i hold on. the fear of being seen swarms through the pain of loneliness. cars pass. faces laugh in the hot sun. i’m craving the love of smiling skin, begging my enemy to kiss me. i’ve remade myself in the shape of a stop sign, my red lips, my long dress, my willing teeth all suggesting a sort of peace. it’s a lie. i’m only pretending to make this much sense. i'm bowing my head and offering this to you as long as it will keep me alive.
Three Poems by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Image by Rick Payette. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.
Ode to Barely Getting By
The most underrated flavor is the one that keeps you alive. I’ve licked at the dirt in the ugliest of times and I’ve spoken no words for months on end to keep from entirely losing myself. You can cover your body in anything and still say what you are. No one can stop you from disappearing into the earth. That isn’t true. I was forgetting about power again, as I often do when I want to breathe. There are always hands against us. We learn to savor the sweat left on our lips. We don’t dare imagine the taste of any blood but our own. That’s a lie. We do this all the time, but remain unwilling to look for any meaning in it. When I chewed apart the inside of my cheeks I wasn’t thinking about god or hope or music. I was thinking about my mother and you and all the faces I might one day come to see. I was thinking of the word we and all its beauty and its terror and its nothingness. I was thinking of the word I and the way it falls like snow over sleeping bodies. I was thinking of the way I never slept as a child because of the name I was given.
I'm going on tour with Sister Spit in less than a week!! If you're on the west coast please come see us! Here are links to all of the events: Arcata, CA (March 1st-2nd) Olympia, WA (March 3rd) Seattle, WA (March 4th) Portland, OR (March 5th) San Francisco, CA (March 7th) Fresno, CA (March 9th) West Hollywood, CA (March 10th) Long Beach, CA (March 11th) Los Angeles, CA (March 12th) Riverside, CA (March 13th) Los Angeles, CA (March 14th) Palm Springs, CA (March 15th) Hope to see you there!
THIS IS A TIME FOR FIRE
This is a time for fire I gathered myself in bed and screamed until the broken glass put itself back together and made windows for me to stand behind but nothing changed and I went silent All the light in the world will not save us All the love and empathy you feel for dying bodies will not stop the blood Too much has happened and there are no words to be said about it We must destroy this world
thetinhouse-deactivated20180604
My First Love
by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
My first love was silence. I built myself from scratch and no one listened. This was the best time of my life. I used to carry the clothes to the laundry room and pray for all the fog in the world to surround me. I’d let my thoughts catch rides with passing airplanes. All that womanhood caught in the roof of my mouth was like honey. I knew it would never go bad so I never said a word about it.
COMING OUT DAY
I wrote a letter. I started drinking and I didn’t stop drinking until one week ago. I remembered all the fires that used to threaten our house. How we’d have to pack up and leave and hope we’d be returning to something other than ash. How you’d pray. How I’d tell myself god would do whatever she wanted and we’d just have to deal. I don’t think god would like what you’ve done with her. She was a dream at the beginning of time who never could have imagined all this blood. All these names for things. All these bodies trying to forget themselves. I told you how I wanted to die before everything happened. This earth was always too small to hold the sound I make. You said there were answers in prayer and you were right. When I inhale I am praying. When I get dressed I am praying. When I climb the mountain and let the wind fuck me up I am praying. When I call myself a woman I am praying. When I cut loose every inch of hell that was woven through my body I am praying.
A Theft
a girlhood was stolen from me. the chance to hold my body and feel it becoming. closeness. sisterhood. the lengthening of time. the love that rests in a name. the comfort words bring when they describe something, when they make sense of the chaos. the signifier and the signified slow dancing together in a small room, drunk on meaning. the dizzying lights of my insides spilling out, unencumbered by a physical form. all this loss does not have a name. it can hardly be described. it is only felt in the deepest parts of the chest, where no thoughts go. what have i become? a gnarled thing approximating woman. a river overflowing with regret. a sky hanging in place by fraying string. not a girl, not yet a forest fire.
- Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her first book i’m alive / it hurts / i love it was released by Boost House in 2014.
poem from my new collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS, available here- http://amzn.to/2aRbXYo
today marks the official release of my full-length poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS! it is available here i’m extremely proud of the work in this book and so excited to share it with all of you! if you’ve enjoyed my work and are in the position to purchase it, i would be incredibly grateful—i’d also be overjoyed if you could share this with others and help spread the word. thank you all so much!
BEING ALIVE IS A MIRACLE
being alive is a miracle but it’s one of the shitty ones like when god made a rainbow appear after killing most of the planet. ironically, being alive is not like the miracle jesus performed in bringing lazarus back to life– dude got to experience existing and then not existing and then existing again which must have given him a stronger appreciation for being alive than the one he had the first time he was alive. the rest of us aren't given that. we get rainbows. we get a windy day every now and then. we get sometimes waking up early enough to see a sunrise. occasionally we get our bodies to listen to us. we get these tiny moments of peace. we say “wow, what a miracle” when something finally goes right. we come to realize the true miracle of being alive lies in the moments when alive becomes a thing we can stand to be.
This is like a life. This is lifelike.
I climb inside a mistake
and remake myself in the shape
of a better mistake —
a nice pair of glasses
without any lenses,
shoes that don’t quite fit,
a chest that always hurts.
There is a checklist of things
you need to do to be a person.
I don’t want to be a person
but there isn’t a choice,
so I work my way down and
kiss the feet.
I work my way up and lick
the knee.
I give you my skull
to do with whatever you please.
You grow flowers from my head
and trim them too short.
I paint my nails nice and pretty
and who cares. Who gives a shit.
I’m trying not to give a shit
but it doesn’t fit well on me.
I wear my clothes. I wear my body.
I walk out in the grass and turn red
at the sight of everything.
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, “It Is Important To Be Something,” published in The Offing (via lifeinpoetry)
one day i will be absorbed into the sky and the sky will be gayer and more beautiful for it
TRANS ISLAND
i feel most scared when i have nothing to say. my hands fold together in mock prayer. there is sunlight pouring down from above and god is not listening. she is busy hanging clothes to dry in the garden, humming whatever song is always stuck in my head. when the gun goes off everyone hears it and no one cares. i’ve wanted to smash the world into nothingness and then shape the nothingness into something else but now i want only to be left alone. give me one rock to drape my body over and i’ll be okay. let the sky soak me up and recycle me. i’ll survive. or maybe i won’t. maybe all those times in grocery store bathrooms wondering if this was the end were predictions of a day to come. the soft glowing walls close in and whisper sweet nothings. there is no escape velocity that will take you away from this life. men will be the death of me while women cheer it on.
hi i'm one of those scary Radical Trans Activists and my beliefs include Please Stop Murdering Us
isabelle adjani in andrzej zulawski's possession , 1981