Voices from the fringes: Something else like that

You know when you’re in your teens—maybe starting in your tweens—when you’re trying to figure out who you really are, and your body’s doing all kinds of crazy things, and you’re stretching and shrinking, and nothing feels like you can just be? I rather think that trans-gender and non-binary people are that in spades. They must look at the binary-dominant world and wonder WTF all the time.

And then we have Republicans and evangelicals who take time out from their ordinary race and misogyny grievances to become the toilet Taliban. Gawd.

Today’s National Poetry Month entry comes from Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, born in Riverside, Calif., in 1987. Actually, I’m giving you a tweet—which I find both profound and amusing—and “Things Haunt”, which describes that sense of wanting to exist in a world that really can’t deal with those who don’t fit the perceived norm.

“Things Haunt”

California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.

Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.

When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say No, I’m something else
like that though.

A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.