Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

The latest from the Lambda Literary Award-winning poet, about the way we survive, revolt, and thrive in these desperate times.

Tonguebreaker

This was revolutionary and formative for me.

What is it like to create as a poor, disabled-neurodivergent, queer, femme of colour artist? How can we share the weight of subsistence and be in concrete, practical and healing solidarity (not the Anglophone abstraction as the trend has been)? These are the questions I start with on this journey for the last couple of years. A period of time seeped thoroughly with depression and anxiety and pain flares, gilded by a false hopeless future where my education stops here… but out of the glass and dust and sand, I think all these happenings have played out the way they are supposed to, that all those rejections and failures and cancellations were all for the alignment of these chances to find me and nudge me closer to the people I love, to care and love them in every impossible way.

The crip fairy godmother has alighted in my dreams and asked me: 

fairuza hanun

POETRY AS ADAPTIVE DEVICE LET'S GAUR!!!

This was revolutionary and formative for me.

What is it like to create as a poor, disabled-neurodivergent, queer, femme of colour artist? How can we share the weight of subsistence and be in concrete, practical and healing solidarity (not the Anglophone abstraction as the trend has been)? These are the questions I start with on this journey for the last couple of years. A period of time seeped thoroughly with depression and anxiety and pain flares, gilded by a false hopeless future where my education stops here… but out of the glass and dust and sand, I think all these happenings have played out the way they are supposed to, that all those rejections and failures and cancellations were all for the alignment of these chances to find me and nudge me closer to the people I love, to care and love them in every impossible way.

The crip fairy godmother has alighted in my dreams and asked me: 

‘What
can you do?
What
are the magic tricks
you will teach me
that I don’t even know yet,
that will be
what saves
my life’
- from ‘Crip fairy godmother’

Tonguebreaker

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