LGBTQ+ Poem: Lessons from Club Q, by Samuel Fishman

That we must work and mourn,
for mourning is the work of living
as our loved ones would have lived
and should have lived.

That there is so much to mourn,
the young people who are stolen from us by hatred
and the elders worn down by hatred,
that we must account for all aspects of mourning
and hatred for us to build ourselves up.

That hatred can kill and eat us at any moment.
That it has receptive ears poured into
from voices in all directions. That hatred asks questions
about who queer people are and who femme people are
and they seem respectable and decent
and too many people try to answer them, but hatred
does not care about our answers,
it only asks its questions to speak for itself
and keep our voices, loud though they may be, from being heard.

That hatred uses its body and voice to shut queer people
out, corral us into breathless spaces, and demand us
to stay quiet. That when we don’t, when we take these spaces
and make them our own, hatred kicks the door down
and shoots us, that hatred believes that not even in spaces
we call our own do we deserve to be alive.

That hatred cannot be negotiated with,
coddled, or disenfranchised. That every queer person
is a fighter for themselves and all others, that the fight
is about grabbing hatred from behind,
slamming it to the ground, seizing its firearms,
and smashing them into its face until it’s bloodied
and out of profanities to hurl at us.

That nothing else speaks to queer people better
than a trans woman on the Transgender Day of Remembrance
at a drag show in a queer bar in Trump country
stomping on a bigot’s face with her high heels.