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GREYHOUND ❋ Aeon Ginsberg
This work comes from the collection Greyhound, which was shortlisted for The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors.
Money moves through the body
of people and all there is for me
to grasp is myself. I am grateful to
have the means to become
myself, grateful to have the
ability to move forward, to open
up. The body of genders is one of
expenses, why do you think there
are so many anti-capitalist trans
persons? My body, my gender,
my movement, is against borders,
against prisons, against it’s
accomplices: money, power,
civility. I’m told not to get off of
the train or bus between
Hamburg and Berlin, that it’s
white supremacist territory, but
also that it is beautiful.
There is nothing beautiful about territory run by white supremacy.
There is nothing beautiful about having to closet yourself
to survive a stint of transit. There is beauty in surviving,
but it is a type of beauty that is fleeting and fixed.
Once I entered a room feminine and felt wonderful,
before I entered a room hunted and felt prey, but
got to be prey because I was pretty so I should feel lucky
Once I had a job that let me be who I am,
and then the job showed me if I were to be assaulted
I would be at fault for bringing that onto myself.
How lucky I would have to be to attract death.
Yet, that’s all we do as trans persons,
move from fixed point of safety to fixed point
until our ability to reach is diminished by something
someone would call luck.
The movement that runs
tandem with
containment is
movement that will never
allow me to be trans. The
lawless state of transit
has been both haven
and prison The
movement from fixed
point of safety doesn’t
run on asphalt, but
through time. This fixed
point of clarity will be
met with an abstract
point of confusion.
I want to be on a bus or a train that takes me
to a fixed point rooted in persons.
I want to find the place
where the body of genders
becomes itself an abstract
point of clarity,
take me there Greyhound
take me there Amtrak
take me there roads.