Our Dangerous Sweetness

By Amir Rabiyah

When I hear the news,

another one of us has been killed

my heart constricts

I reach with a frantic grief

towards a soothing balm, difficult to find

 

And I can’t help but think of

all the times my own life has been threatened

of all the people I love, and their own lives

 

I am tired of being afraid

to speak my name

to unbind my chest

to be feminine and masculine

 

to go outside

 

I am tired of being afraid

of being brown

 

I am tired of being afraid

of my own existence

of revealing my full self

for fear that if I do, I will be killed

 

Here: I am the living impossibility

like so many of the people I love

who have the audacity to embrace themselves

 

Each day,

I feel departed souls swirl surround me

I feel thousands of hands brushing away my tears

They say: do what you were born to do

 

To write these words down

To write myself into wholeness

To write myself away from vengeance

 

They say: listen and so I listen

For a long time, I listen

 

And then they say speak

to those that are still here

& so I speak,

to those of you still here

 

 I speak to say:

My Dear Beautiful People,

Each time you are broken, I break, I

 break,      I break a little more

then un-break,

 

I am piecing myself back together

with the care of a potter’s hands

I clay phoenix

 

I feel the heat

of our resurrections burning

to glaze our skin into glow

my fire and my kiln

 

are these words, this space

the intimate threads

of our connection

 

my prayer: we remember

ourselves as entwined in this struggle

my prayer: we undo the knots we have tied around ourselves

 

we breathe

we remember can be bound together

& free

 

I write because I feel the pulse of us

chanting the names of those who have died

 

Our own names

Our essences as holy

 

I envision us going on

to eclipse, building, bigger, bigger, bigger

more luminous

 

So bright

 

My beautiful people

our breaking is our making

& if I strip all my other identities away:

 

I am simply a poet who listens

To God,

To the dead,

To the living

To all left behind

To all the places in between

 

I am simply a poet

who writes these words because I believe in us

because I know a faith uncontainable by an alphabet

 

My beautiful people let us dream towards

what we want

beyond survival

 

Let us dream towards loving ourselves

till we become love over and over again

 

My beautiful people

I can taste our honeyed victory

 

My beautiful people

our dangerous sweetness

is our rebellion


Amir Rabiyah, "Our Dangerous Sweetness" from Prayers for My 17th Chromosome. Copyright © 2017 by Amir Rabiyah. Reprinted by permission of Sibling Rivalry Press.