IN THE QUEER UTOPIA ❋ Aeon Ginsberg

In movies of utopic states we are convinced of two things:
regardless of anything else in the film power is necessary and
naturally sought after, and the supplication to power
is what helps utopia maintain itself.
In the queer future I am sent invitations
to an award show in which we crown
the best trans corner girl. How admirable it is
to sway hips with such a magic it keeps you alive,
to hide knife and bat in thin air
and why would we not award this. Is it not utopia
when we all have a home to get to, and get to do
what makes us fullest in the process but in the queer future
cis people aren’t allowed to look at me
unless they are using everyone’s correct pronouns
and in this future the graveyards get so big
and green and beautiful, we grow empty caskets in the soft earth
filled with dead names and I am only seeing articles
about the successes of trans women of colour.
“Ah yes, another articles about a trans owned business”
and how unnewsworthy that will become,
how every trans owned business is successful.
In this queer utopia I dream of there will be
a 24/hr Popeyes and no one will work and once
in the queer future a half-dead white man, which
I mean to say is that his mouth is filled with dollars
I will never taste, and his skin coppers pennies and
for this I know to not trust a thing I have to give away
before I too love it, this corpse wearing a stomach fuller
than my grief and resilience will tell me to thank him
for choosing to speak to me, and in the queer utopia
I will live in, I will be in a claw foot bubblebath sharpening knives
as his body decays on the sidewalk.

I dream for the queer future most of all that exists,
Where concern is not staying alive but living life
in a way that adds constellations, where
trees grow out of the earth and there are no borders,
there are no barriers keeping us from what we love most.
I do not think we will speak English in the queer utopia,
how will the rest die off when we still speak a language
built on the bones of children, this colonisers tongue, despite
how it sits in a trans mouth will not sit at the table
as history will neither forgive nor forget, will
wait for an apology before hearing a voice worth listening too.
This too is part of my utopia, where the surprise of black boys
smiling hotter than the obituaries seeking their name
will be as much a brightness as ever and will flood the timelines of the internet.
There will still be sadness in the queer utopia I dream of
though, something that swims in the skin and creeps along
the eyes of us all because so few will have made it,
which is not to say the houses will not fill and the joy will not be
an unending road, but that there will always be construction upon it,
bodies mending broken hearts and struggle and sore muscles
and this too is utopia, to fight for so long and still have a chance
to recognise what tension is carried,
and in the queer utopia I want to live in,
I will only be anxious of counting the stars,
and not of how many years we have left to live.