
Illustration by Glori Tiutt, courtesy of Forward Together, https://tdor.co/art/we-have-never-asked-permission/
Beloved queer trans people, I see you, in the streets, on Indigenous land, with rain on your face or sun in your eyes, with wind blowing teargas away so you can breathe. I see you putting paint on the walls and asphalt, blending your megaphone song with the cries of crows. Black, Native, Brown, Asian, white, but above all Black, young, fierce, fighting for life, justice, and the kind of deep transformation we know in our trans bodies, seeding the abiding kinship forged in the intensity of clashes with cops. I see you with hearts open from reading and making Black queer ecology, black feminist strategy, Black trans visions, and strategies for Indigenous-Black solidarity that disrupts capital’s violent moves. This list is not exhaustive, but allusion. It’s flowered so far beyond a list, like the peonies that open and wilt on my table through all the days and nights of the rebellion. I see you already winning, seizing the discourse and the media narrative, rolling out profound and exquisitely crafted policies that begin with defunding police and end up creating actual space to breathe in the face of white supremacist and settler colonial policies that mere weeks ago seemed to be gathering momentum. I see you erupting out of quarantine like leaves beneath melting snow, like a swarm of bees above a city street, like salmon surging up past a demolished dam. I hear your horns and beats and above all your voices making chords with the voices of birds, coyotes, cats, rats, stray dogs, raccoons, all the vibrant and sometimes also devalued life of urban ecologies, and with the wind and sirens and breath of the earth itself, in counterpoint with the words, prayers, and dreams of those who stay inside, elders, disabled, sick, kids and their caretakers. You all changed the world and the world, the land, the sun-ocean-wind-rain cycles that make the climate, the stars and the cooled off stars that became rocks, all these queer ecologies are always and forever with you on the side of life, we can feel them binding us together in ties of responsibility and reciprocity.
No prompts this time, but I’d love to see what you paint in the streets or write on a sign to hang in your window.