Tonguebreaker

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781551527574
• eBook ISBN: 9781551527581
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire. Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer kin, and the rise of fascism while falling in love and walking through your beloved's Queens neighborhood. Building on her groundbreaking work in Bodymap, Tonguebreaker is an unmitigated force of disabled queer-of-color nature, narrating disabled femme-of-color moments on the pulloff of the 80 in West Oakland, the street, and the bed. Tonguebreaker dreams unafraid femme futures where we live&emdash;a ritual for our collective continued survival.

1. femme futures

Femme futures

Where does the future live in your body?

Touch it

1.

Sri Lankan radical women never come alone.

We have a tradition of coming in groups of three or four, minimum.

The Thiranagama sisters are the most famous and beloved,

but in the ’20s my appamma and great-aunties were the Wild Alvis Girls.

Then there’s your sister, your cousin, your great-aunties

everyone infamous and unknown.

We come in packs we argue

we sneak each other out of the house

we have passionate agreements and disagreements

we love each other very much but can’t stand to be in the same room or continent for years.

We do things like, oh, start the first rape crisis center in Jaffna in a war zone

in someone’s living room with no funding.

When war forces our hands,

we all move to Australia or London or Thunder Bay together

or, if the border does not love us, we are what keeps Skype in business.

When one or more of us is murdered

by the state or a husband

we survive

whether we want to or not.

I am an only child

I may not have been born into siblinghood

but I went out and found mine

Made mine.

We come in packs

even when we are alone

Because sometimes the only ancestral sisterlove waiting for you

is people in books, dreams

aunties you made up

people waiting for you in the clouds ten years in the future

and when you get there

you make your pack

and you send that love

back.

2.

When the newly disabled come

they come bearing terror and desperate. Everyone else has left them

to drown on the Titanic. They don’t know that there is anyone

but the abled. They come asking for knowledge

that is common to me as breath, and exotic to them as, well,

being disabled and not hating yourself.

They ask about steroids and sleep. About asking for help.

About how they will ever possibly convince their friends and family

they are not lazy and useless.

I am generous—we crips always are.

They were me.

They don’t know if they can call themselves that,

they would never use that word, but they see me calling myself that,

i.e., disabled, and the lens is blurring, maybe there is another world

they have never seen

where crips limp slowly, laugh, have shitty and good days

recalibrate the world to our bodies instead of sprinting trying to keep up.

Make everyone slow down to keep pace with us.

Sometimes, when I’m about to email the resource list,

the interpreter phone numbers, the hot chronic pain tips, the best place to rent a ramp,

my top five favorite medical cannabis strains, my extra dermal lidocaine

patch—it’s about to expire, but don’t worry, it’s still good—I want to slip in a P.S. that says,

remember back when I was a crip

and you weren’t, how I had a flare and had to cancel our day trip

and when I told you, you looked confused

and all you knew how to say was, Boooooooooo!

as I was lying on the ground trying to breathe?

Do you even remember that?

Do your friends say that to you now?

Do you want to come join us, on the other side?

Is there a free future in this femme of color disabled body?

3.

When I hear my femme say, When I’m old and riding a motorcycle with white hair down my back.

When I hear my femme say, When I’m old and sex work paid off my house and my retirement.

When I hear my femme/myself say, When I get dementia and I am held with respect when I am between all worlds.

When I see my femme packing it all in, because crip years are like dog years and you never know when they’re going to shoot Old Yeller.

When I hear my femme say, when I quit my teaching gig and never have to deal with white male academic nonsense again.

When I hear us plan the wheelchair accessible femme of color trailer park,

the land we already have a plan to pay the taxes on

See the money in the bank and the ways we grip our thighs back to ourselves

When I hear us dream our futures,

believe we will make it to one,

We will make one.

The future lives in our bodies

Touch it.

Crip fairy godmother

Hi, baby crip

I know, you feel like a ton of bricks just hit you. They did.

But I’m your crip fairy godmother

and I’m here to tell you what’s going to happen.

I hate to say it, but it’s a cheat sheet called, they mostly don’t care about us

Because this is exactly what’s going to happen:

Your able-bodied friends will stop calling.

It’s going to be real cute for a minute,

but then there will be other things to look at on Instagram

They’re going to wish you a “speedy recovery”

and they will be so surprised when there is neither

speed or a recovery.

They will say, “oh, you’re not disabled, sweetie, don’t call yourself that.”

They will laugh uncomfortably when you state simple facts about your body

They will tell you to hurry up

every way they can

with every deep sigh, every it’s fine,

every time they’ll walk ahead of you so fast

they don’t even notice you’re gone.

There will be expectations of gratitude!

There will be, “Hope you feel better soon!”

Most of all there’s this:

they will forget you

You have to know this, they will forget you,

over and over again.

They will fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Thanks and acknowledgments
• Preface: the epistemology of breaking/how you make a book
• 1. femme futures
• 2. sacrum
• 3. bedlife
• 4. rust will cut you
• 5. ritual prayers: performance texts from mangos with chili
• 6. cripstory