I went to (the new) Stud for the first time on Saturday night. More than four years since being inside the bar, which was not the same bar, but a different revived thing with the same name. When I got home that night, I couldn’t sleep. I wrote this at 3 AM, edited it, and then read it at Paradiso on Sunday. It’s in a similar vein as the other ‘single sentence’ works I’ve been doing. Thank you Noah & Claire for inviting me to read, thank you Kim & Alli for being incredible fellow readers, thank you Joan & Sophie for your outspokenness on Palestine and your incredible music, thank you to the 10 other people in The Stud wearing a mask on the dance floor. Long live the martyrs. Long live Jabalia and the refugee camp, birthplace of the First Intifada.

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I heard some funny gossip at The Stud last night (whipstitch or ear bled, bear stuffing politely spilling plastic aerosolized animal fluff as I shuffled across toes and claws toward thrum): it was about a friend getting married, a wedding and goodbye party ahead of their newlywed move to Tennessee, told to me by a man who looks perpetually post-schvitz, so I lent myself to the sound, the entire night about noise, thankful that i’ve learned to appreciate silence in the mix, the moment when a two hour long baton slips from one fingered nod to another feathered hand and the bass rumbles brings us all up again; sonic’s children, too bored to suffer in the stultifying ether of time and instead choosing to waste trying here, children peeled off the absent gap in a crescent moon to be deposited, trenchant knees bobbing against thin genre line’s rocky shores – some pink some hard some green but all barely butch sugar candy – the night escalating, fisting a land grant handful of claim to a slice of unbroken sky, opening still until I brick the last track, asphalt heat or desperate connection, once aflame heart now spent until dawn, the whole mix mellowing until the compressed air of 1988 drum machines throb the room into prom; it’s high school, so of course it’s both nostalgia and a joke that only transsexuals will intimately understand, hallmark trade secret of this aging queen: pumping hormones into the fog, dumping wrath like pleasant change onto unsuspecting grooves in the wood panel; I wish the song was Time After Time, I wish you would say “Go Slow” but you fall and I waste catching on another motion, lost looks seeking the only respirator strapped pile of silicone in this dark room; no, instead, the song is Goodbye Horses, the trans woman on the stage bending fetish’s synonym legacy over knee before history submits for a moment to us as the crowd sways, finding hands on hips, I memorize the hollow space of teenage romance once denied, no other closet case to intwine with, no Craigslist Casual Encounters to desperately scour once my sweat has dried, no we skirt the psychic cluster of straight seventeen year olds tonight, stare down a slow dance with pathology, the canon, identification documents, another bombed refugee camp, cracks in the sidewalk, fentanyl, another bombed refugee camp, manual labor’s blister, calls for escalation, taken buildings, occupied buildings, liberated buildings, and another bombed refugee camp – at the one Catholic school dance I attended we had to leave a gap which empire filled – instead, air is crushed between torsos, I hear the husky nasal of testosterone voice and it sings me home, I break nothing but a promise between my fingers and bury a word until it seeds here, a sapling learns to live on a diet of vodka and foot slick sweat dance floor in SoMa, I swish past an Ugg Pride Advertisement in the shape of a person – tragedy not being love, no aphorism to flatten the equation like ‘tragedy is tragedy’, lining your pockets during a genocide with promises of validation ranks far below ‘having a well watered lawn in a drought’ and inches closer to ‘they/them war profiteer’, I read that death toll figures “don’t distinguish between civilians and fighters killed” as if the puppet arm of policing which animates all city budget meetings distinguishes, makes distinctions, provides guidelines, offers recommendations, splits an atom, does anything but divide and conquers, as if two thousand brutal pounds of heavy wet explosive device from cents on the dollar transactions differentiates, my more bruised knees burying in stretched gap, wrist deep whole body soaked inside of bruising varnish, freedom’s name is the husk of an OPD car, is the charred skeleton of an SFPD van, is the curled rigor mortis spider legs of an NYPD cruiser, is a downed LAPD helicopter gutted for parts, is a trash compactor put to good use

is the language doing anything good 

is the front popular

i befriend the popular and front my knowledge 

and i close my eyes and see pinwheels

and i wheel my clothes and pin seas too red 

and i close my eyes and see a hand in the rubble 

and i hand the rubble my eyes and glass myself staring through the screen

and hands rubble myself until i stare through seeing 

and I fly over you

and I fly over you

and I test a young woman’s coke for her

and I ask what splinters or gum disease or a slow march will do if left untreated 

and I hear the word ‘magic’ in a dark bar which once dominated my youth, bringing her to heel

and I ask if this is all there is 

and I dance like it’s enough.