Two Poems by Jordan Muscal

 

Darling I Want My Gay Rights Now: A Cento 

 

Loving anybody and being loved by

anybody is a tremendous danger, 

a tremendous responsibility.

I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail 

I thought, didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

 

 

It is difficult to be despised, in short.

I’m saying I have nothing to prove,

the world also belongs to me.

 

I want the elegant 

hinge of your wrist. My body

writes into your flesh

the poem you make of me.

I’ll stare down

at my wounded beauty,

the cheap luxury of you

just turning your face.

 

Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.

I wanna be somebody. 

I mean, I am somebody. 

I just wanna be a rich somebody.

I want to take Vogueing 

not just to Paris is Burning. 

But I want to take it to the real Paris. 

And make the real Paris burn.

After all, is a real Hell not better

than a manufactured Heaven?

Will we be tired

dives, the strangest and gaudiest

of Harlem spectacles?

 

To love is to tell the story of the world.

In one of the oldest,

Patroclus died because he could not see

what he really was inside his lover’s armor. 

Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once,

the wings of inner menageries.

 

Here’s to our own 

empire of dirt, the way you

were always both body & bird,

the ashes that formed a mound 

on the forehead of the boy 

who wanted to kiss me.

 

We are never just here.

Night is never just a

meeting time,

no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.

Darling, I want my gay rights now.

 

With Writing From: 

James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Willi Ninja, Ethan Luk, Langston Hughes, E.M. Forester, Andre Achman, Octavia St. Laurent, Frank O’Hara, Marylin Hacker, Jericho Brown, Tarifa Faizullah, Nomi Stone

 

 

on language, tea leaves & quicksand

 

you will say family’s an ocean,

i will argue something more intimate:

a bayou, the water in a kiddie pool…

i will show you the yellowed photographs

of women with sharp chins, men looking past the camera,

enunciate my last name

 

i will tell you today was a good day,

my dimple easy as a mother tongue,

the way my cousin has two

(i am working to be grateful, only ask from language

as much as it will give me)

 

i will tell you this country fits

like quicksand but i am calm &

time will tell anyone they belong, tug tight

on ankles, scrawl the family tree that looks half-barren

 

i will tell you all the myths

i scraped my elbows on, the old blacktop & wax wings,

my father’s ESL teacher,

a neighborhood pool, oversaturated,

the Israeli beach next to a power plant

 

you say identity should fit

like an old sports bra, a little too tight around the lungs 

but today is a good day

 

so i will tell you i didn’t know

it was a test, brought my sister

like an explanation, a rusted mezuzah, a snaggletooth

 

i will tell you the tea leaves are growing

anxious, & all lessons lost in translation

are birds migrating somewhere warmer

Jordan Muscal is a sophomore in the creative writing department at HSPVA. Her work has been published in Octopus Ink, the Buzz Magazines and Youth Be Heard. Besides writing, Jordan enjoys hyper analyzing her favorite books and movies, thrift shopping and trying new foods.