National Poetry Month Day 5: Alan Pelaez Lopez

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Questions To Ask After Your FFS Consultation:

Who were you before the discipline began? 

Does heaven exist?

If so, will others recognize you?

Who was the first person to ask permission to kiss you, all of you?

Can you say your name out loud three times?

How about again?

Do you recall the last time you touched your body?

What is freedom?

For whom is your joy?

What are the uses of grief?

Is hopelessness a trap or a peg into the future?

Can you remember the first time you looked into the mirror and didn’t recognize yourself?

Has that ended?

Do you believe in magic?

Do you believe in dragons?

Were they once lonely too?

Do people fear their size and their fire, or do people fear the fact that their size and their fire      cannot be contained? 

Why do we dream? 

 

 

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Author photo courtesy of author

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the intimate kinship units that trans and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. Their debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien(The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook "to love and mourn in the age of displacement" (Nomadic Press, 2020). More from this author →