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After all references to transgender Americans are scrubbed from government websites…

By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

After all references to transgender Americans are scrubbed from government websites, I only love you more, dear, you will not disappear

__ October 29, 2018

for you are made of light & flesh, voice & shimmer
no amount of scrubbing will eliminate the shine, you

luminesce, your tired heart
lingers in the dusky dawn liminal, blue

is the color of your name, a shade
in view now, harnessed in the eye centuries

of sky & sea & wine parsed out, there
on the blank wall your footprints your voice, bursting

in laughter I tilt my face toward you to warm by your radiant, many
days & years & the sweep of delights we’ve shared, here

together here we are, here I see you & your many hearts, bright
with every stitch & wound & smile winding, up

now to the fury & its many mountains, that place
where we never need mirrors or a fascist’s pen, spilled

out over here is my hand & your name on my lips, sweet
day all day your name on my lips, on my lips your name

& every beautiful, oh
do you know you are my reference you are, one of the ways I measure

the intensity of light or how I come to know I exist, as well
because ain’t nothing like this kind of brilliant so trembling, yes

so mighty & flame now, nothing can erase you,
        you                 you             & you   
             you                             you
                          & you             
                                                     & yes, you, too
so permanently. here lighting. a way.

 

 

 

 

Listen as heidi andrea restrepo rhodes reads "After all references to transgender Americans are scrubbed from government websites, I only love you more, dear, you will not disappear"
Added: Monday, September 9, 2019  /  Used with permission.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx poet and scholar from California. Her first poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The collection is a meditation on inter-generational and collective inheritances of historical memory and post-colonial trauma, the responses they elicit, the forms of refusal, life, and love, that emerge in their wake. Her poetry can also be found in journals such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Raspa, and Nat.Brut. A doctoral candidate in Political Theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), she currently lives in Brooklyn.

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