after Gwendolyn Brooks & Erykah Badu

We won’t pick up the phone. We
‘re gone away for college. We
close up shop on our hearts. We
loose from the family chains of queerphobia. We
sing hotep songs walking to the Fort Worth club. We
lose all people that love us badly. We
visit each other’s hands when dancing silly in the club. We
visit our family when they guilt-trip us enough. We
introduce our college friends, make them make a friend stew. You
smoke til your eyelids can’t keep up with you. I
fill the flask & free cups past the brim. We
sloppy-sing What’s Yo Phone Number til the air is smoke & unsaid truths. We
tell the truth, but they have to like us first. We
’ll have babies if we’re still lonely at 30. We
end the night making ourselves pretty spectacles. We
going straight to hell if it’s queer & got decibles. We
end the night drunk in love and real special. We
bend each other out of shape.

KB is a Black/queer/transmasculine poet, essayist, cultural worker, and Artivism Fellow with Broadway Advocacy Coalition. They write to tether themselves to the history of folks like them and to validate the experiences/personhood of Black, queer, and trans people. KB has pieces published with Huffington Post, American Poetry Review, Teen Vogue, and other places. They are the author of How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023). Follow them online at @earthtokb.

(Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash)