Meet Me In 811

Proof

     Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan 1, 2026, NYC.

You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too
Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/
Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then
Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name
To invisible?

You’ve got to imagine:

Who heard your name
And refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch
And said “not now”?

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,

New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,

Where there is always soil
For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.

In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.

City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,

You have to imagine:

An Army that wins without
Firing a bullet,

A joy that wears down
The rock of no.

Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear/up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.
You have to imagine:

That space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit, on its way.
This moment is our proof.

■

Queer Trivia Night

     for Nica, Mary, Ryan, et al.

A friend on a rival team confesses
they’ve always been into it.
As a kid, they locked themselves in a closet
to read Trivial Pursuit cards.
They wanted to know everything.

Their team is named Shooting Nudes.
We are Butch Believers.
The next category is Famous Dykes.
The whole bar is packed and smells like
bike sweat and Cosmo slushies.

Our best guess is that it was Audre Lorde
in ’89 advocating for Palestine.
On the fly, we struggle to spell
Stormé DeLarverie, but we’re hoping
bad handwriting hides it, huddling closer

so no one hears our answers.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service
erases the letter T in twenty places
from the Stonewall Monument website.
Slime mold? Whiptail lizards? The category is

Queer Ecology. Now, a federal directive
threatens to cut gender-affirming
care for youth in our city.
The category is Gay for Pay.
Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank.

Cleverness I know can feel exclusive
but here I lean into my friends’ literacies,
their wisdoms my shelter.
The forty somethings know the local lore,
the bygone parties: Donny’s, Pegasus,

Operation Sappho, while The Gen Z kids ace
the tech round, scribbling the name of
a translesbian hacktivist on a canceled sci-fi show.
It turns out being an autodidact is
the unspoken prerequisite for being queer in America.

Will we nerd ourselves into futures
of intergenerational knowing?
In our time, the Press 3 option
of the youth suicide hotline
was created and deleted.

In booths with curly fries,
we turn to each other and say:
Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger.
Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.
Truths our bodies internalized arise

in quick crescendos like this one:
Bernard Mayes founded
the first suicide prevention hotline
in the country. I know this because
he was a dean at my college and the first

audaciously out educator I ever met.
Monthly he held a donut hour,
I was closeted then, so I showed up early
to squeeze onto a cramped couch
and listen: In 1961, he leafletted streets

with a phone number safe to dial
and then waited by a red rotary phone
certain that many would call.
The category is Gay Rage.
Name the band and the song:

Bikini Kill, “Suck My Left One”
Bronski Beat, “Why?”
Princess Nokia, “Tomboy”
Planningtorock, “Get Your
Fckin Laws Off My Body”

■

Maps

     for Marcelo

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—

■

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

■

Memory Poem

I am a child
of wonder again and
rain tells me to watch
for snails and slugs.

I gather dirt, sand, and sticks
for the terrarium
where I make a safe home
away from footsteps, fast cars, and ditch water.

I don’t want them to die
so I make them
a space for living.

I ask my ma to buy lettuce
because in the book I got from the library
I learned they will eat lettuce.

I am
greedy to learn
what keeps everything alive.

Their spiral shapes leave shiny trails behind.
I imagine I am a snail leaving
magic everywhere I go.

■