Our Dangerous Sweetness — 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
