"[my students call me old and I pray for my future self]" by Cai Sherley
[my students call me old and I pray for my future self]
my students call me old and I pray for my future self, his gold and cherry maple walking stick. the teen in my office says I wish I had more Black queer elders to talk to and I think me too before realizing I am the one they’ve been waiting for. I still hope to outlive our dead. I hope all of my friends are killed by kinder plagues than our uncles’ first loves. I pray that this morning’s headline never buries Amari or Amir or Kelz or Ezra. I pray my students always find the right poem for the moment, blood-soaked as it may be. I am prayerful to no god. I am prayerful like a desire paving itself. like a bird with a twig. like a trans boi looking at an AI generated image of what synthetic hormones might do to his will to live. I am an elderly twenty-nine and I pray to one day be ancient. I pray back in my day to have other voices to corroborate because I say a lot of shit. when my GG turned one hundred years old she was surrounded by the children of the children of the people she loves and I pray I never outlive my groupchat. I pray I die among my beloveds, their hearts full of blood. I pray a cadre of old fags to kiss goodbye after the cake is cut. I pray we each get to lick the icing off our lives. did you know the greatest sign of privilege is to be statistically insignificant to the survival of your kind? to brink nothing but forever? my girlfriend majored in Marine Biology and she tells me I’m sorry but lobsters can’t live forever soft belly boy a lobster is not immortal but it can live a long life if we let it and that is what it’s like to be Black and Trans in America. I want all my dear ones rolling up to the nursing home banagrams night claws still in bloom armed and ready a risk a pod a murder a consortium a pack a flutter a troop a caravan a drove a convocation a mob a horde a thunder a dazzle a barrel an army a pandemonium of life. what do you call a group of Old Black Trans Guys all linked up under the flaming moon? is there a name for that yet? have there ever been enough of us to find out?
Cai Sherley (he/him) is a Black trans poet-educator with roots in Boston, MA. Cai is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work published or forthcoming in Best New Poets, swamp pink, Peach Mag, and Tupelo, as well as the anthology I Feel Nothing Like Good: Poets Against Genocide from Taylor & Co Books. He has found homes at The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, Tin House, LAMBDA, the Chicago Poetry Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center, and is a member of the Crossroads Writers Collective and Trans Corner Poets. His debut chapbook, Out of Yearning, is set to be released in October 2026 by Sibling Rivalry Press. You can find him on the internet @crsed_poet or his website, www.caisherley.com.
“I wish I had more Black queer elders to talk to and I think me too before realizing I am the one they’ve been waiting for.”
My goodness. How this moment happens to all of us. The need and power of mentors is no joke.
Amazing. Thank you.