Poetry: Selections from Robin Percyz

IF THE WORD FOR YOU IS DYKE

I’ve got a folder in my camera roll called Dyke Roots.

Created as a tongue-in-cheek joke for what made me queer

is now a technicolor manifesto of what saved my life.

It’s chock full o’ DYKONS, dyke-adjacent people, and pop culture artifacts

with cues on how to love, who to love,

and how to wear dyke like a bad bitch with style.

Never underestimate the power of visibility,

even if it was invisible to you as a six-year old.

Do estimate the years added to your life

because a Black, butch guitarist named Me’Shell Ndegeocello

rocked your world harder

than John Mellencamp in the Wild Night music video.

Do thank 90s NYC for blessing you with RENT on Broadway,

a queer rainbow of otherness having an orgy

teaching you that love wins, decades before love wins.

Oh yeah, and that sex can look and feel different

than your Ken and Barbie missionary tales of yore.

Measure your life in love.

Measure it in how many years you’ve been sober

because you fell in love with P!NK at 15

and she’s still saving your 38-year-old life.

Do bow down on your knees to the Black trans women before you.

Bow down to Marsha P. Johnson and the Stonewall Riots

for laying the bloody red carpet of freedom that you skip on.

I believe in the unconscious knowing of queerness.

That we navigate the streets and look up just as a fellow queer is within our gaze.

Gays!

It’s not happenstance, it’s magic, because we are. Like a superpower.

When we lock eyes, squint, and do the gay nod that

silently screams we see each other,

laser beams bind us together in a cotton candy universe

straight out of a Lisa Frank animation,

where we are saddled on unicorns, flying through clouds of rainbows,

landing gingerly on a golden, glitter-flecked brick road

staring head on into the eyes of another queer.

You are safe here. You are home.

It sounds fantastical and mythical

because that is what queer acceptance is after being locked in a chamber of shame,

muzzled, gagged, and drowned by alcohol.

I don’t hide anymore. I don’t limit myself to the either/or,

the femme/butch binary of lipstick lesbian or diesel dyke.

We’re a world within a world on the dyke spectrum. You can have it all, be it all.

I scream femme dyke

from the bottom of my cunt

to the tip of my boxing glove.

Get you a dyke who can do both:

beat her face with red rouge,

then beat another’s with a nasty right hook.

If the word for you is dyke,

wear it like a bare chest without a bra.

Wear it like a first-choice word: don’t say lesbian

to make them comfortable if that’s not what feels right to you.

Wear it like your high heels or Doc Martens

are stomping the patriarchy with every saunter.

Wear it in a skin tight mini dress, a three-piece suit, a tight lineup

on your butch, masculine-of-center head, or anything in between.

Wear it like a woman, trans woman, or non-binary

HUMAN who rejects TERFs.

Wear it like a pussy riot against governments that want to erase

your love, your rights, your identity.

Wear it like an Alcoholics Anonymous chip

after 17 years of sobriety, a badge of honor.

If the word for you is dyke, stop what you’re doing,

and create a folder in your camera roll labeled Dyke Roots.

Laugh. Then cry as you add artifacts of people and things that saved your life.

Laugh that cis-het people don’t require the privilege

of a folder on their phone dedicated to being a superhero.

Beating death over and over throughout life.

I don’t believe in religion, but I believe in dykes.

And if there is a God, she’s a Black, butch Goddess who saved my life.

If the word for you is dyke, I fucking love you.

I love us.

THE FIRST TIME I MET MY THERAPIST

I told her how long I went without eating.

Her eyes widened like a window I could jump through,

Then slammed shut

to protect me like her child.

In hindsight, I’ve created mythical stories

about how sick I thought she was.

How my miles on the track were hers.

That we were looking in a mirror,

not the video screen that cleaved our faces.

So when her best friend Facetimed me to tell me

she dropped dead,

I now imagine myself contorted on the cement

after running 20 miles because she couldn’t close the window

for herself. I wonder if the email I sent that day landed

before or after her body.

It’s so narcissistic to make this about me,

but isn’t that therapy?

I can’t help but think of her fueling the fires of my life

with her own clinical notes.

How the mantra, everyone’s healthy, everyone’s safe

that we built was a safety net

painted on the ground, nothing to catch the body

when her heart decided the race was over.

My jaw won’t unclench the anger

that runs laps around my head.

Laps that lapsed

her last breath.

At her funeral, the Emily Dickinson prayer card read,

If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain,

or help one fainting Robin unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

My name is Robin and I still can’t believe

the first time

I met my therapist

she was in a coffin.

WHAT MATTERS

The soil is stacked with death toward the heavens.

The only graveyards being built are in the news.

I don’t know the mathematical figure

to name the slain

babies who are stone-stiff rigor mortis

on the ground.

Children wailing in a new language

called genocide

learned with magic dust from fumigated

families sprinkling their heads.

They grip their tattered blankets, not their mother’s

dismembered arm. Entire nuclear

family martyred

in the name of what?

Invisible lines in dirt?

Whose God is better?

I don’t know a thing in life worth more

than desecrating

the minds of innocent babies beyond repair.

I don’t know a God

who would bless or redeem a religion

of a people capable of this.

Planes flying overhead

see a field of white, gauzed fingers.

Descend lower and they’re dead bodies.

Imagine all of the fingers, hands, nails resting.

Imagine the body.

The life within that body.

Those hands chopped vegetables and stirred broths,

lifted spoons to feed their children,

washed faces, wrote letters, built skyscrapers,

performed surgery

on conscious bodies

numbed only by shock.

Those hands brushed teeth,

covered ears and eyes of children

from growing up faster than the bomb

could plummet into their bathroom.

They pressed the backs of their loved ones toward their chests,

becoming one heartbeat,

life flashing faster than

rockets overhead.

Martyr is a word worn by mothers

like a medal

who can bury

themselves and convince babies it’s just fireworks.

They embraced, a final act.

Asleep and cemented into the rubble.

They loved.

We don’t tell their stories,

we show limbs and ligaments.

Their lives dust demolished,

bones burned with bed frames,

scattered far from home,

deleted from the news across the world.

Just bodies in numbers.

The babies and children who survived know.

Their veins pump the aftershocks

like oxygen to their hearts, to their fingers

clenched. Echoes of their parents

leak onto their pillowcases, waking them

up into the nightmare, alone.

Point a rifle at a little boy’s

face and then wonder

why he grows up with

artillery strapped to his back.

CRUMBS

There are so many ways to feed people.

Lately, I’m most satiated by the crumbs.

The crossing guard asked for my name

after a year of blowing smiles

at one another. Hi Fred!

Toothy grin swallows my face

and doesn’t fade

after he does. The kind of smile you have to force

the doors of your mouth to shut.

To hear your own name attached to someone else’s joy.

How easily we forget that we are here.

I’ve had indigestion in my brain for a while now.

The acid burns my body into the couch for days.

Then a friend tells me they want to be unalive.

I imagine my hands resuscitating them,

how they’ve practiced

bringing something to life,

kneading dough, needing them.

We say, I love you.

So much depends on the I

in I love you, that you refuse to abandon

yourself first because you can’t help anyone

if you’re not here.

I love you.

It’s a richer, meatier offering.

You pour yourself into it.The crumbs,

the caramelized bits of daily minutia.

I want to suck the marrow

out of life

render it down, the deep flavor

from the bottom of the pan.

It craves to be devoured.

The crumbs are the I in

I love you.

DIG

Maybe we say we lost

someone after death

because we’ll be searching

for them for the rest of our lives.

An old pair of socks buried

deep in the back of the drawer.

We replay their eyes, their laughter

like movies

in our heads so as not to forget.

Study it so the details don’t change,

but the story is being told by a new narrator,

a version slant with each retelling.

Have you ever seen a dog dig on a wooden floor?

Furious nails scrape for artifacts

trapped.

They don’t rely on vision.

The odor lingers in their gut.

Remnants of something, somewhere.

That tenacity is love looking

for lost love.

We say dumb dog and laugh at their failure

to know the floor is finite.

If you’ve lost someone, you know that the floor

won’t stop you

from searching.

There is no floor.

You’ll dig.

You won’t know how not to.

IT’S CHRISTMAS AND I’M SAD

It’s Christmas and my halls are decked

with vacancy. Everyone else adorns

their feelings in multicolored

joy until you can’t see the vinyl façade.

I’m always the Jewish kid, lights out.

I feel it decades later, even now drinking

coffee at 6am with a pine tree on the carpet.

I’ve been spiked harder than eggnog,

almost woke up to the sound of tubes

climbing down the chimney

of my throat, Santa pumping my guts

with families that are not mine.

It’s easy to hide under the loud costume

of shiny red balls, bells, and booze.

I haven’t seen a home that didn’t fa la la la

fake it through the sad music

in their heads. It silent nights

our souls. I wish we were honest about the dark rooms

that guzzle us.

I miss people who are kind

of here and kind of gone,

old ornaments in the attic.

I line up the toy soldiers,

tick them off the table

like the people who aren’t here.

Look how easily they vanish.

I want you here.

We are alive and maybe wanting one another

in the basements of our memories.

Maybe at the same time in the early morning,

while drinking coffee and wondering

why life hurts most in December.

The dying year.

Why do we remove people like holiday decor?

I find myself running toward the pain now,

beyond the liquor stores and shopping malls.

I could wrap myself up in crinkly paper and ribbon

but I never wanted the gift of loneliness.

A box full of myself.

Like caroling, it soothes me to hum.

I don’t expect the Christmas miracle

and I don’t need that much.

I just want my hands to hear yours calling out.

The song is so much fuller in harmony.

Maybe you’ll join me

out here in the snow.

We can sing together again.

CUNT

The provocative of the ordinary arouses me.

How we can talk about fingers but not cunts.

How the whiplash of that word blows harder

than the fist,

how it gags you

as you consume its four letters.

It’s just a body.

You can suck the sex

right out of a cunt if the body

is dead.

The provocative of the ordinary compels

fingers be swabbed,

litigated with equal rights

like cunts.

Let’s talk about fingers tearing into

legs and open spaces that are not theirs, inserting

ownership with the tip of wet

ink signed into laws. Fingers deep,

grip around the necks of babies, forced

to enter a world that rapes them of safety.

Women and children in the lifeboats first, they said.

Second only to bear arms.

Let’s talk about fingers clutching guns,

pointed head-on at children

in elementary school.

Mothers sleeping unmothered will cradle

that day a still born. The bullseye minute their fetus

was just a bullet in the wind.

Let’s talk about fingers grabbing

them by the pussy, then golden-crowned

45th President.

Fingers that moved on her like a bitch,

just kiss her, don’t wait,

when you’re a star, they let you do it.

Let’s talk about fingers trans-

lating who has a pussy.

The trans language has always been spoken.

It needn’t be transcribed

by fingers who banish them

in the margins, in graves.

Let’s talk about fingers inserted into

gymnasts, pulling out

nothing but their dreams, their trust in a doctor.

What about fingers sliding

down the small

of a woman’s back in the office?

Fingers that force their weight, mounting

a high school girl, grinding.

Fingers that smother her screams, sucked

the breath from her lungs

then bestowed a lifetime term

as a Justice on the Supreme Court.

Justice.

Cunts don’t sound so bad after all.

Let’s talk about cunts.

I’d like to hear

what the cunts have to say.

Robin Percyz is a queer writer living in the New York Metropolitan region, spending the majority of her career as a Content Manager. She has overseen content staff at online marketing and website design firms and has served as a member of The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research. She was invited to present her piece, “Boxing and Bleeding” at their Conference “Re: Cycling” where Gloria Steinem was in attendance. Robin was a competitive amateur boxer for four years. If she can help others feel visible through her work, she will consider that a success.