Poems from Master of Intersectionality

By Micah Wolfgang

Sometimes, I’m Political.

Sometimes, I’m political. Sometimes society likes to debate my identity like I’m some far-out entity. Sometimes, I’m political. It is not on a daily that I rant about the way my truth is weaponized against me. Sometimes, I’m political. It isn’t always that I’m minimized, to what is or isn’t between my thighs. Sometimes, I’m political. Sometimes, people like to remind me of who I am and who I am not. Sometimes, I’m “I have never dealt with someone like you before.” Sometimes, I’m “I’ll get used to it, I need time.” Sometimes, I’m “How do people, end up like… end up like…” “Who? Me?” “Yeah, you?” Sometimes, I’m “It’s cool, I just don’t like Black men.” Sometimes, I’m “It’s cool, I just don’t like trans men.” Sometimes, I’m “But what’s your real name?” Sometimes, I’m Politics. It is not every day that it is unavoidable, and it makes no difference to me to watch them take our rights away. It makes no difference for me to hear their hate on a daily. It makes no difference to me when society, tries to silence me. Sometimes, I’m political. Sometimes, I pretend Politics doesn’t watch me at night nor meet me in the morning when I wake like I’m stuck to invisible weights operating as dense chains. Sometimes, I’m political. Sometimes, when I get mail with my dead name, there is a certain rage and I get real political all the way to the car as my sister listens with lots of love, but little heart. Simply because she can’t relate. No one near me can. So few near me know. Sometimes, I’m political when no one hears me. Sometimes I’m political when the world hears me loud and clearly. Sometimes I get political online. Sometimes, with friends. Sometimes, with lovers. Sometimes, with my mother, but most often, with myself. And sometimes, I yearn to be freed from the chokehold of Politics; but only sometimes, never always.

m. a. wolfgang

Me Duele

I could have never been ready for the propaganda

That was ready to meet me 

before ever learning my alphabet.

They tell me who I am,

And tell me who I am not,

They say I am not Black; I am mixed.

They say I am not Hispanic; I am Black.

They say I am too light skin to be Black,

They say my skin is too dark to “be” anything else.

When I was a lesbian dyke, they told me I was not a woman.

Now, as a queer trans man, they tell me I am not a man.

And it all hurts, just a little.

Tell me then, what I am,

And where do I belong then?

When I tell them, I am Black and Puerto Rican,

They contemplate which one they weigh me in more at,

And then they see my ma’s white skin and long red hair

And immediately begin to debate my kin and snatch my

Blackness from me.

This, I admit, hurts just a little.

When they discuss my existence like I should not exist

Or do not exist, it hurts just a little.

Me duele on the nights when T packs a

Punch into my two-and-a-half-inch ever-growing rocket,

Always hungry, always hardening.

And no amount of my own self-love could cure it.

I don’t get laid as a disabled black trans man,

The way I did as an abled cis black dyke.

And the truth is, it sometimes hurts just a little.

The way matches on tinder dwindled by more than half,

And the way people consider me a special occasion,

No life partner. I often wonder if my mocha skin, 

and my great, grand body  

In its fatness, its hairiness, its ever-evolving newness, in its

Androgyny, in its Blackness, in its queerness,

In its transness, in its disabledness and its weariness,

That I could never be loved by another.

As if my journey of authenticity

and self-love is a promised destiny of 

Aloneness. Though, I regret none,

I may say it hurts, just a little.

m. a. wolfgang