Signed

a poem, for Pride, after June Jordan's "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies".

scribbled on cardboard 

a sign no bigger 

than a shoebox width

or outstretched forearm

is spelled plainly

dykes for resistance and return.

The dykes are for 

so terribly much.

Ringed keys and endlessly mutual aid. Masturbation a palette of bottled water.

Microplastics out of dildos, the US out of everywhere.

Dykes for prison abolition and

dykes for playing in the fountain.

Dykes for reading Assata Shakur’s words about her incarceration, just before she was freed by the Black Liberation Army:

“Here, the word lesbian seldom, if ever, is mentioned. Most, if not all, of the homosexual relationships here involve role playing. The majority of relationships are either asexual or semi-sexual. The absence of sexual consummation is only partially explained by prison prohibition against any kind of sexual behavior. Basically the women are not looking for sex.

They are looking for love, for concern and companionship. For relief from the overwhelming sense of isolation and solitude that pervades each of us.”

Dykes for irrigation ditches,

for polyculture done by monogamous farmers, composting, and

for land managed by indigenous peoples.

Dykes for raving, but only if it means they are for leaving the forest more beautiful

than it was found, for the technological traps of capital trashed and bent,

for squatted warehouses going unmarked on police scanners,

for dancing birthed soreness which builds itself into functioning muscles of affinity,

knots of connection inside the movement,

for anything less is just partying.

Dykes for disco, techno, espresso,

any scenario if it’s messy enough,

their ex’s homemade chorizo, crisco, but dreck; no. 

Dykes for liberatory power,

dykes for power tools worn on leather belts,

dykes for nationalized hardware stores,

dykes for screwing and nailing and

hammering and installing new gutters.

Dykes for handling fistfuls of everything.

Dykes from far away

love braiding a rope of harried feeling across Turtle Island,

dykes for distance

for moving vans

for the colonies’ seams suffering dehiscence

for creaking tendons stretching out in the morning under eastborn light or the moon.

Dykes for telling the NYC Dyke March to fuck off.

Dykes for telling any act of political cowardice to fuck off.

Dykes for wearing masks,

dykes for cruising across the eye contact they find buried beneath goggles, a keffiyeh, a black bloc headwrap, gloves, Narcan,

for the supplies needed to keep fellow dykes alive.

Dykes for the unknown etymology of dyke

for morphadike, a dated term for androgyny or hermaphrodite

for dike meaning canal, supposed slang for vagina

for diked out or out on the dike, terms for a well dressed man

for always remembering the unknown dyke stuck within the archives of a 1921 prison physician in New York City, a physician who wrote that the imprisoned dyke "stated that she had indulged in the practice of 'bull diking,' as she termed it. She was a prisoner in one of the reformatories, and there a certain young woman fell in love with her."

Dykes for prison abolition (again, it can’t be understated) and

dykes for the abolition of the psychiatric hospital and

dykes for getting friends together to buy a PCR machine to test

dykes who don’t have health insurance and

dykes who survive the record breaking heat.

Dykes for unhoused queer people

low emerald domed wood palette living rooms

cards tented together of hearts, and clubs, and queens, royal

ghosts sheltering atop the floating remnants of Christopher Street’s piers

reef wide as open homes

with full refrigerators

in a garden sprung from their hands.

Dykes for Sylvia Rivera, who was banned from the The Center after she demanded they use their space to offer shelter,

for Sylvia Rivera who apocryphally said that one of STAR’s main goals “is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign” for impeding liberation in favor of liberal inclusion

for Sylvia Rivera, who loved Julia Murray, and who refused to call herself a dyke:

“I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am.

I take my hormones. I’m living the way Sylvia wants to live. I’m not living in the straight world; I’m not living in the gay world; I’m just living in my own world with Julia and my friends.”

Dykes for trans people who fucked beneath the word’s hollow bough

before outgrowing its canopy,

and dykes for those who are no longer, once were, or might still become.

Dykes four by four,

dykes for bi girls figuring it out,

dykes for byes that don’t stretch on for another hour.

Dykes for this and that.

Dykes for love, when you’ve run out of dykes for desire.

And on the other side of the cardboard sign,

written in the same wan scribble, is 

fags for the end of empire.