Autumn Rose Barksdale is a fat, queer, trans femme poet and public speaker based out of Lake Worth, Florida. Her poems have been published in The Offing, The Jabbercat, Crabfat, and in an upcoming issue of THEM.
Creation Myth
It goes like
this, his hands
strike my thigh.
A field of
violets bloom
where palm met
tender skin.
In this myth
He is the
creator.
His fingers
making lines/
rivers in
the ground. My
body is
a shore-less
sea, until
Suddenly
there is land.
Notes On Lovers I Have Consumed
This morning I
woke up and
spit up the
dead boy from
the back of
my throat. He
squirmed back to
life, (what a
miracle.)
I wish I
cared to watch.
I tried to pry
you out of
the gaps in
my teeth. Such
a stubborn
little herb
lodged between
my gums. Just
a ghost to
haunt my lips.
I guess I
deserved such
a nuisance.
A Girl, As Told By Herself or Why Trans Women Should get To Tell Their Own Stories
in this telling
she is not
a boy
in a dress
she is not
a set of
lungs made of glass
to be filled with
another man’s
smoke
she never starts to
twitch, or cry, or pray, or run.
she never tries to
breathe under the
river of her
father’s hands.
she isn’t a faggot,
her body doesn’t
become basement, or flat-line, or ghost
like the rest of the stories said she did.
this, the more honest rendition,
closer to truth
less a fable and more of
a memory, where she gets to
be
herself and
beautiful
again.