my gender is my race is my gender

shuffling between family dinners & queer parties, disparate spaces & paradigms, where often it feels like all the indian people are cis & all the queer people are white. the collapse of history & language & memory that engenders this moment. the relentless & exhaustive ritual of asserting that we have always been — to the white queers who call their genders new, and the indians who call heteronormativity home. but i know my gender is my race is my gender is my family is my queers is my soiled makeup wipes in the car on the way to my mother is my lipstick, fecund, ready to bloom on the way back.

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