This heartbreaking new poem by Loma, written in the aftermath of Orlando, fuses love and outrage into a refusal of violence through the embrace of vulnerability, tenderness, passion. It centers the identity of queer people of color in the face of not just one isolated, horrific and horrifying tragedy, but in the ongoing history of what Claudia Rankine evokes with her chilling line “And still a world begins its furious erasure—” Since Sunday I have felt lost without wits to make sense of what has happened, is happening, with the news of this most recent event. Yet Loma’s words are a miraculous act of grace and solidarity that permit nearly everything that the media world would forget, ignore, repress.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
ALL THE DEAD BOYS LOOK LIKE ME
for Orlando
Last time, I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez
A 17 year old brown queer, who was sleeping in their car
Yesterday, I saw myself die again. Fifty times I died in Orlando. And
I remember reading, Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed
I was studying at NYU, where he was teaching, where he wrote shit
That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible. But he didn’t
Survive and now, on the dancefloor, in the restroom, on the news, in my chest
There are another fifty bodies, that look like mine, and are
Dead. And I have been marching for Black Lives and talking about the police brutality
Against Native communities too, for years now, but this morning
I feel it, I really feel it again. How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native
Today, Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves
When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? Once, I asked my nephew where he wanted
To go to College. What career he would like, as if
The whole world was his for the choosing. Once, he answered me without fearing
Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father. The hands of my lover
Yesterday, praised my whole body. Made the angels from my lips, Ave Maria
Full of Grace. He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral, in NYC
Before, we opened the news and read. And read about people who think two brown queers
Cannot build cathedrals, only cemeteries. And each time we kiss
A funeral plot opens. In the bedroom, I accept his kiss, and I lose my reflection.
I am tired of writing this poem, but I want to say one last word about
Yesterday, my father called. I heard him cry for only the second time in my life
He sounded like he loved me. It’s something I am rarely able to hear.
And I hope, if anything, his sound is what my body remembers first.
