More Americans Believe They’ve Seen a Ghost Than a Trans Person & Quars Poetica by Ally Ang
More Americans Believe They’ve Seen a Ghost Than a Trans Person
“Nothing is more frightening than looking / and loving what you see.”
-Franny Choi
two ghosts are making love
in the gender neutral bathroom of a gay bar
atop a throne lined with toilet paper
and grime. a cacophony of limbs
so beautiful, the concrete walls shudder
with envy. you’ve learned all the names
for this: a spectacle, a revolution,
a disgrace, but you never learned to be-
hold what you see before you. two ghosts
heaving their aliveness against
the fractured light, gasping all
the good air into their profane
lungs, sweat stippling
brown throats. breathtaking
as a forest fire. queer
as an unmarked grave.
Quars Poetica
By Ally Ang
Because last night I dreamed I ran
into a friend in the aisles
of a used bookstore, touched
his arm as though neither of us
could die. Because I’m as lonely
as a swan is mean, so lonely
that I would kiss the putrid feet
of anyone who glanced my way.
Because as a child, I hid my smile
in photographs so that my eyes
wouldn’t crinkle into ugly slits, trained
the muscles of my face to stay taut
and demure, wide-eyed, never revealing
too much. One could almost
imagine my brown irises blue. Now,
I wear my gibbous-moon grin
like a rhinestone necklace, gaudy
and astonishing, unafraid
of my slant-eyed joy, a rare thing
to come by in the bowels
of this insatiable empire. Because
the dead burrow into the spaces
between each word I write. Each line
broken and unbroken. I wrap my body
in a weighted blanket meant to imitate
human touch, bask in the SAD lamp’s
artificial light, write another poem.
Delete. Begin again.
Ally Ang is a gaysian poet hailing from the unceded lands of the Western Nehântick people and an MFA candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle. Their work has been published in The Journal, AAWW's The Margins, Muzzle Magazine, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and elsewhere. Ally's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Bettering American Poetry. Find them at allysonang.com or on Twitter @TheOceanIsGay.
Art by Russ Rubin