some days i can't figure out if i'm upset that i'm trans
or just mystified that some people aren't. footsteps
echo on pavement like the drumbeat of a thousand
definitions that i mostly did not ask for—the discourse flooding
with split-second theories cast off on the wind—
some days i ask for people's opinions when
they were never my problem and technically still are not

and maybe it's the morbid fascination of it all, keeping one eye
fixed on the doomscroll toward a
softer apocalypse, one made on hundreds of televised papercuts
and my friend says that fascism is a tall building made of thin material
easy to knock down so long as you try

not to get too freaked out, but that's
long been a foregone conclusion, seeing as
getting too freaked out is my personality.
and some days my gender is the smallest stronghold of all time
unintimidating but at least still
somewhat impervious.

mk zariel (it/its) is a trans-masculine neuro-queer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at mkzariel.carrd.co, creating conflictual queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.