5 Powerful Queer Poems to Read and Watch for Pride Month
Celebrating Black and Brown Queer Identity, Resilience, and Joy Through Poetry
Wishing those around the world a happy Pride Month. Originating from New York’s Stonewall rising on June 28, 1969, a popular dive bar named “Stonewall Inn” is where we see a historic riot aimed at ending police brutality against transgender and non-confirming individuals. During this time period, there was a law in place that the Police would use as an excuse to raid bars throughout the Manhattan area, and arrest those who were not wearing gender-based clothing according to their ID card. This particular night, when the police came in to raid and arrest, the patrons of Stonewall Inn had had enough with the unfair usage of brutality. They rioted, they raged, they remain in the history of every person that has ever said ‘enough.’ We are in the 57th Anniversary of such a historic event, an event that took 30 years later for it to be commemorated in 1999 by Bill Clinton.
The LGBTQIA+ community has always been a welcoming, talented, creative, and overall powerful amalgamation of individuals who find acceptance and peace within their lives. Unfortunately, we live in a world not as accepting of love. A world that condemns, would rather brutalize bodies that have not asked to be here, but want to find a semblance of happiness with other bodies. The following poems deal with celebration of identity, as well as the difficulties of navigating through acceptance, heartbreak and commentary on life by friends and family.
We look at the many beautiful people, all black and brown, and celebrate their vulnerability and identity through the poems they provide us.
unfortunately, or blessed, it could have been
hours, or years, but it was hours
we disappeared into, touch i shouldn’t
savor, not this day, not while missing you,
not this deep in love, but a year ago,
or was it days, we said i do
which under it laid dozens more commitments,
one being our commitment to pleasure,
to touch, to the touch of others, so i do
but also i will continue to do it, that it,
with people that are not you—love,
believe it, or not, lives in that promise
too, i love the sounds others pull from you,
i love your ecstasy even if i’m not around
to engineer it, and here i am, on the other
side of the promise, on the other side
of the world, underneath this person
who i have promised nothing
but my attention and effort until it’s done,
and it was, done under the moon
until the rain started and, then, done
under the rain, i am ashamed to say it,
but i must say it: i would have asked them
to stay, to do it again, to touch me forever
had i not, and thank God i did,
placed my forever in you, but amor,
amor, you should have seen it, us:
beneath the rain, a storm,
under the promise, my loaned breath.
what do I do with the boy
who snuck his way inside
me on my childhood playground?
the day other kids shoved
my body into dirt & christened me
he appeared, boy, wicked
feral, swallowing my stride.
the boy who grows my beard
& slaps my face when I wax
my mustache. he was there too
the day on Ben’s couch, wearing
my skirt, ranking the girls
in class. again, his legs slamming
concrete, my chest heaving
when we ran from cops
the night they busted the river party
again when I smashed the jellyfish
into the sand & grinded it down
to a pink useless pulp. together
we watched it throb, open & close
begging for wet. he was there.
I have a boy inside me & I don’t know
how to tell people. like when
that man held me down & we said no.
& my boy, my lovely boy
he clawed & bit & cried just like
we were back on the dirt playground
scraped wrists & steady pounding
his eyes wide, until
he stopped making a sound.
any way you slice it i was born for a good time
some of my primary interests include pomp
circumstance
occasion
and carousing
love a kickback and a kiki
very much love a tea
weddings
graduations
meg’s monday night birthday function i stayed at waaaay too late for a monday night
i’m mariah carey on qvc repeatedly describing herself
and everything she loves as “festive”
i’m andré leon talley specifying he wear a caftan
for his cremation
my dearest ellery said he can’t remember a boring day in his life
i’m free will agnostic
but with each conscious choice toward that ethos
the need for sleep
the need to labor
two little devils strapped to my back who synergize
to ruin quality time
just rude
needy
and greedy
depending on who you ask
i’m going to hell and all my girls are too
i’m afterlife agnostic but if some kind of something comes next
what else to call it besides the afters, the very last afters
and if my girls are there with me
i’m good
we’ll know who to haunt and do it well
dressed to the nines in maggot-drenched couture
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
Donika Kelly
The Moon Rose over the bay, I had a lot of feelings
https://poets.org/poem/moon-rose-over-bay-i-had-lot-feelings
Phillip B. Williams - And Now Upon My Head the Crown
1.
In the first place—I wanted him and said so
when I had only meant to say. His eyes
opened beyond open as if such force would unlock me
to the other side where daylight gave reason
for him to redress.
When he put on his shirt,
after I asked him to keep it off, to keep putting off
the night’s usual end, his face changed beneath
the shirt: surprise to grin, to how even the body
of another’s desire can be a cloak behind which
to change one’s power, to find it.
2.
In the first place
he slept, he opened the tight heat of me that had been
the only haven he thought to give a name:
Is-it-mine? Why-you-running? Don’t-run-from-it—as though
through questions doubt would find its way away from me,
as though telling me what to do told me who I was
