Leopold Crow

Leopold Crow (he/they) is a trans writer who can generally be found painting, embroidering, or talking someone’s ear off about Star Wars. More of his work can be found at https://leopold-crow.carrd.co

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU HAIBUN

cw: transphobia, swearing, mild body horror 

this pride is about fuck you, I can have as much lavender growing between my tits as I damn well please. I'll plant a whole garden there just to spite you, make it all hydrangeas pretty in pink to match my imaginary mullet. this is about honey-thorn eyes. this is about queer as in mouth full of thorns. there is a place for the dishwasher demons with their whispering lulls and red eyes in the night right behind my back ribs and a place for eyes without eyelids. does that scare you, mum? are you afraid of me? are you afraid of me yet? I have a body and I imagine it filled with eyes and burning with phosphorus. that's the thing, I'm something you can't control, I'm someone who has pockets of something too big and powerful and angry for you to grasp, someone with middle nails painted purple, something full of poetry and fuck you's and I love you's and thorns. I am queer as in I love you and queer as in fuck you 

and queer as in mouth
full of teeth smiling and fanged
and ready to bite. 

dead daughters 

you're not supposed to be writing poems about your mother
or the time she told you to fix yourself / she says it's not artful
or lady-like / to have spitfires roar in your heart
so loud in the downpour / or to have the fight burning
so deep in your lungs but

dead daughters gorge themselves on pomegranate and lemons to cope
till the juices run thick down their face and arms / hands stuck deep
in blood-red cavities to hold friends together / they delight
in the art of breaking chains and glow-stick bones
for the love of the all things holy and 

the dead daughters did not die
and don't have time to be broken
dead daughters have dead names and
are still alive and are screaming to be let free—  

you're still writing poems about your mother sitting in
the spaces between parentheses / and you're not artful
or lady-like and you're still screaming in spite of yourself
because the stories of heroes aren't written in the cloud rolling in down the coast
and your mother forbids you from writing them on your hands too
(so don't get any ideas, okay?)