By Button poetry
.
.
K McClendon, performing at Icehouse in Minneapolis, MN.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
Is a name dead, really,
00:05
if it still lives in the mouths of the family that raised me,
00:10
if it still conjures my response like a back-porch dinner bell?
00:16
Can I call it dead if I am alive
00:19
and it is written on the certificate that says so?
00:24
There is no girl here to return to,
00:27
no boy in the distance who wants to bend my name into a mask.
00:32
They ask for my gender,
00:35
want to be able to lift my skirt and say, “There.”
00:39
They want me to pick sides.
00:42
But this is not kickball.
00:44
We’re in the grandstands now.
00:46
What is a pronoun, if not a stage, if not a rodeo,
00:51
if not the horse’s legs and the will to start bucking,
00:54
my gender in clown makeup,
00:56
my gender clinging to the stirrups?
01:00
A Black, a gay, and a man walk into a bar,
01:03
start playing country music.
01:05
The joke is they are all the same person.
01:07
So a billboard calls it “pop,”
01:09
making the first cowboys white like their Jesus.
01:12
Meanwhile, the whole wide west learns the words “a nation,”
01:17
wearing black cowboy hats, boots stomping on the two and the four.
01:22
When Lil Nas X comes out as gay,
01:25
my gender, black as a funeral procession, peeks through its fingers,
01:32
sees a part of itself trending on Twitter for once,
01:35
because it is so alive.
01:38
My gender forgets it had a name once,
01:43
considers a reality where they walk into the living room
01:46
in front of our father and he does not flinch, or hiss.
01:52
While I was leaving work today,
01:54
a man, white as the light at the end of the American dream,
01:57
walked towards his office and ended his phone conversation with,
02:01
“I gotta go. It’s time for me to get back to this slavery,”
02:06
the white of his collar, a small spangled banner wrapping his neck.
02:12
A white man slaving must be the burden
02:17
of bare cotton fields and clean hands,
02:21
acres of land that do not know the sweat of you
02:23
but made your pockets and lined them for you, too,
02:26
must mean he bought the horse, but calls himself “Trainer,”
02:31
thinks “Master” is a strong word.
02:34
Language so often fails me,
02:37
a gender that fits in the mouth of no one,
02:40
a lineage created for consumption.
02:43
Can you hear them?
02:45
Hooves pounding earth, steady like a war is coming.
02:49
My name says, “Start the song.”
02:52
Thank you.
02:54
(cheers and applause)
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video