The Visibility Game
A Poem by Tia Credle
Who gets to assume a body? Who gets to assume the integrity and security of that body? -Che Gossett, “Blackness and the Trouble of Trans Visibility”
Faces mold with decay
as corpses piled into stacks inside
homes to sinners strapped
to chairs in
hospital rooms with electricity
violently shakes and tingles their bodies God’s will
morphs them into
their natural bodies. I saw my
sisters on the TV screen
glowing. This is
her form, a
home yet strange
silhouettes where
old pale hands
with gold rings and
the other, wearing
white hospital glove
trespass and claim
ownership. bigot's vetoi.1
You don’t
own
her,
you don’t
belong
here.
Tia Credle is getting a MFA in Creative Writing, particularly Poetry and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at New Mexico State University. Tia has been writing stories and poems since the age of nine and recently has been submitting her works to literacy magazines. She has previous work published in Polaris Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Scarab Magazine, and Yuvoice. When she is not studying or teaching English Composition. She enjoys listening to music, watching YouTube videos, anime, reading and writing. She dreams of being a published writer and an editor for a literacy magazine.
Mentioned in “Undermining Gender Regulation” by Dean Spade: A policy that allows the misunderstandings or biases of a general population in an institution to excuse the exclusion of a person with a characteristic that marks hir as different.