When my partner asks me, what did you dream about?
Dreamt of the woman who birthed me.
Her hands shiver, clutch her face, her shrill
like a dropped glass. My mama’s groan spreads
everywhere, thrashing the floor. I am not grounded
with her gone. Afterall, she’s an ancestor now and
her sighs loop on replay. Now, when I look in the mirror,
I find her: Half-moon cheek bones, dimples like
shooting stars, feet fleeing from dictatorship.
The rivulet of my dreams are everyone I cannot touch.
Miss them like Aunty Yoly’s summer dress swerved
to wind. Miss them like lolo’s lapel baptized in sweat.
Miss them like the child I once was, squinted on
the stoop, budding. I’m no better than wired US
dollars to Pesos; an inconsistent exchange. Rate me
a privileged scrimmage, a problematic poem. If I tell
you about inheritance, it’s bonds of high blood pressure
and grief like a hurricane. My aunty Yoly taught me to
pack a bag for my mom when she would go to the ER.
What does a stanza do but respond to emergencies
too? Can I pack enough caesurae to siphon safety
back? Can I cypher my family and remember vibrance?
The night exists in shapeshift. All the hours crawl
to my elders. Every morning my throat is a rusted
coffee can, something hidden, something hopeful,
simply waiting, saving up. The ancestors in my family
spit like lychee seed. The ancestors in my family
howl in the darkness like a precipice. Like there’s
never been an entire ocean wailing between us.
Audio: Kay Ulanday Barret reads “When my partner asks me, what did you dream about?”
Image description: A brown, round queer performs at a microphone with transgender and rainbow flags in the background. They wear a gray blazer and glasses.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are a 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow by United States Artists and Ford Foundation + Mellon Foundation. They are the winner of the 2022 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, winner of a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell. They are a 2024 Baldwin for the Arts Fellow and 2023 Millay Arts Artist-In-Residence by Lambda Literary. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have featured at The United Nations, The Museum of Modern Art, The Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, The School of the Art Institute, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Columbia University, Yale, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. They've served on boards, panels, and committees for The Transgender Law Center, The Leeway Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Trans Justice Funding Project, The Wallace Foundation, Res Artis, The Trans Justice Funding Project, and The Poetry Foundation. Their contributions are in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, The Literary Hub, The Lily, Poetry Unbound, Yahoo News, The Advocate, The Rumpus, NYLON, them, Al Jazeera, & more. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes and live in Munsee Hoking and Lenape people’s land in NJ. with their jowly dog.