Pride Month

Shinya Suzuki/Creative Commons

[Image Description: A rainbow flag is in the corner as a sign is held in the air with the words "Love is Love"] 

A function more fun
than the type overrun
by queer folks free
            to be all of who they be
joined with ones given
           temporary permission
                      to live their fantasies
Does. Not. Exist:
Its dance floor Queer Audiotopic Elysium, its Gods
enby soft butch O P U L E N T trans
high femme stud genderfuck QPOC swirls
whose twirls for their lives her lives our life
conjure just enough pluck
from party beat-pounds
for the late night trek back home

Exiting shrinks worlds back to one.
Pride month don't change
how it feels to leave the club          looking dangerously gay.
Some Brooklyn creep
follows three of my friends for blocks
           till he yells about his box
cutter              and they yell about cops
Some D.C. dweeb glares at my sunflower crop       
asks why I have on a woman's top
so I pick up the pace. Chop-chop.

All those LGBT.V. shows could make you forget
that blurry gender still screams threat
that none should stress about donning a dress
that fear of any harmless “weird” is weird
          Sometimes I hear we should just be grateful, you know
          gays are thrown off roofs elsewhere,
          as though Western soil lies unfertilized
          in queer torment erasure murder
          like routine                     by forces
          eyeing weeds where we eye faces

Pride month don’t change
a year of queer. Some of us damn near die
just to spectate and be washed pink
in beads pins fans,
selfie fodder spoils.

Still, better worlds can spring out
from the right party of dance
dance dance              the room streaked
with our sweat
         molten quartz

         lustrous in flashing beams
a constant in change raised and To-Raise

---

Kyle Lopez is a queer, Black Cuban-American writer from Montclair, NJ, and an incoming poetry student of NYU's MFA program. His writing has appeared in Afropunk, GUM Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on Instagram for more poems & fashunz.