An Open Letter to Performative Allies Asking Me How To Help
A Poem by Jay Kibble
Torch the damn buildings down & speak with your whole throat.
Sometimes relationships are not worth keeping, even if there are fond memories
attached.
Make your actions meaningful, the profile pic filters and memes are embarrassing at this point and don’t mean shit. (I’m so sick and tired of having to teach people how to show up for me as if I’m a new element on the periodic table that humankind has never encountered before.) Show empathy. Show up. Show people for the assholes that they are. If you don’t speak up for us, you might as well be silent for everyone. Fuck politeness politics, put others in their place. Do big things. Throw tantrums. Consider a reverse Uno of January 6. Give us our flowers while we are still here. Create safe houses, speak our names in rooms of opportunity, host board game nights and barbecues and invite us, dammit. Fuck up and try again. Build community, build trust. We are desperate to feel the joy vibrating in our weary bones. Kill the part of you that thinks you’re doing enough, that thinks speaking up is not your place, that now isn’t the right time, that this is not a hill to fucking die on or a worthy cause because Nex Benedict, and San Coleman and Meraxes Medina and Alex Franco and Cocoa and Honee Daniels and Kassim Omar and Redd (also known as Barbie) and Tai Lathan and Vanity Williams (also known as Chanel Williams) and Dylan Gurley and Monique Brooks and Shannon Boswell and Kenji Spurgeon and Pauly Likens and Liara Kaylie Tsai and Tayy Dior Thomas and Jazlynn Johnson and Kita Bee and Andrea Doria Dos Passos and Starr Brown and Nevaeh “River” Goddard and Tee Arnold and Diamond Cherish Brigman and Reyna Hernandez and África Parrilla García and Sasha Williams and Kitty Monroe and the 5,000 beautiful souls taken from us since 2008 would disagree if they were here to breathe.
Die for us so that we can keep going.
Die for us so that we no longer have to.
Jay Kibble (he/they) is an emerging queer, trans, autistic writer living in Richmond, IN. He's the current social media editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and holds an MA in creative writing from Ball State University. Mostly he writes nonfiction but he's working on a hybrid memoir that seeks to honor his personal journey to authenticity and the life of his late cousin. This poem is a simultaneous submission and his attempt to process continued performative allyship in this second Trump era.
