KB Brookins is a writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. KB’s poetry collection Freedom House (2023) won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s memoir Pretty (2024) won the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Emerging Writer Award. Their writing is published in The New Republic, Newsweek, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. KB is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
On the first day of second grade
nobody wanted to sit with me, &
when the tsunami started welling up
In my insides, wave after wave
crashing on the craters of my face, I
pulled out a journal & started writing.
*
Were you also a church girl? I spent
every service praying for destruction
& still came out of all those Sundays
mostly unscathed.
*
When I was 15, got down on one knee
& asked the sun “will you marry me,”
I now know was asking her to give me
oblivion or give me to you.
*
Change is the most natural thing.
Water, soil, people — it all morphs
from one thing to another in time.
So why do they want us to stay
the same?
*
The holy trinity is every sterile band-aid,
every steady hand holding my leg still,
& every needle which is a sanctuary,
a vessel that brings me closer to God.
*
KB Brookins – Page 2
Through college, I wrote the
raunchiest fanfic scifi. You & me,
girls-turned-something else
entirely, were always my endgame.
*
Can a pretty man or a handsome butch
or a “wow” from a crowd of self-made
gender fugitives or a letter of rec
From god or an earth that isn’t
Punting us off of it like a football
Or a policy that keeps me safe—
Can any one think keep my mind
From tussling with the past? Can
I have our childhood back?
*
God must be the liquid in my T.
I praise Them every time
I’m brave enough to pry
myself open.
*
Don’t they know that a body
is a dancefloor? We are bliss
-filled blisters dancing
on the face of every bigot.
*
I’m lucky. My desire to die,
though larger than any gavel in
a court that tries & fails to
write us away, has never
outweighed my hope.
I stopped trying to outrun
the clock of my life then
KB Brookins – Page 3
started catching up to you.
*
You are the only way I know I am alive.
Instead of hacking myself off of myself
(what those with no “you” to write to
think transition is), I’ve been waiting
to say: thank you.
