UP CLOSE EVERY WHITE MAN IN SOUTH JERSEY LOOKS LIKE RICHARD SPENCER ❋ Linette Reeman

okay, this isn’t technically true
maybe i just mean every white man
looks like they want me dead
“customer service” means i have never
turned down a flirted insult
i know death like a back-row
note-passed / a trans person is
killed and my friend’s friend’s name
disappears from the roll-call
i know worry like a phone call two
minutes later than expected or /
another Nazi / and i won’t call them
something quieter / tells me he wants
my body as a necklace / hung / and
i hear an ex’s belt unbuckling / there is
not a white man who touched me before
i asked who did not also think i
owed it to him for his imagination of
me / i know fear like being fired or
stealing food or my girlfriend runs away
holding a loaf of bread and the joke is
this is exactly like the French Revolution /
shouldn’t we be singing? / but even in
the dramatised fiction they could not save
the sinners / and every white man hears
me laugh and perhaps it hurts him to know
i am alive because the worst is already
in me / and it has been / according
to them i was born awful and fit
only to be wooed into slaughter
yet a song crawls shaky-legged and
newborn out of my mouth and i
have not left my pepper spray in the
break-room since Richard Spencer’s spit
lived in the air / i mean the enemy
of my enemy is just another motherfucker
i won’t let live to piss on my grave /
i mean i sing into my lover’s back
and it might not save the future but
it is keeping us breathing until
another night empties its restless
stomach into the morning.