The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon (BOA Editions Ltd. 2023).

content warning for violence against trans people, gun violence, murder, racial slurs, and racialized violence

Justice: An Acrostic

(A Catalog of Trans Murders in the First Half of 2020)

Just driving a taxi in Oklahoma was deadly for Dustin Parker, 25.
Using the women’s bathroom killed Alexa, homeless in Puerto Rico—
social media led her killers to her. Yampi Mendez Arocho’s profile—Fuck love—
tells his story; dead at 19. Monika Diamond, honored LGBTQ mothers through the
International Mother of the Year Pageant: misgendered, deadnamed, 34, North Carolina.
Caught with a stolen wig, in Harlem, Lexi, “Ebony” Sutton, 33, loved poetry and
everyone she met. Johanna Metzger, 25, self-taught musician who could play

just about any instrument, stabbed in Maryland. Serena Angelique Vasquez, 31,
using vacation time to visit her friend Layla Pelaez Sánchez, 21, in Puerto Rico, both
shot, their bodies burned. Then Penélope Díaz Ramírez, in the Baymon Correctional Center,
time done in a men’s prison. Nina Pop, in Missouri, 28, stabbed in her apartment.
I love myself now . . . looking at the pictures before I transitioned, Helle Jae O’Regan, 20,
cleaning the barbershop in Texas where she worked; stabbed. Tallahassee police accosted him
even though he had no weapons, said Stop moving, n----r, ending Tony McDade.

June 9, Rem’mie Fells, pulled from the Schuykill, legless; she lived her truth so loud
u could hear her a mile away. An 18-year-old boy and 14-year-old girl led by an adult man
shot Riah Milton, home health worker, 25, in Ohio. Jayne Thompson, shot by police,
troubled in her transition in Colorado. Bail was refused for an 18-year-old student
in Chicago, who went home with Selena Reyes-Hernandez, and learning she was trans
came back later mad as hell, and shot her nine times. Brayla Stone, 17, Arkansas,
evidence of hate crime absent, was left in a car by another teen charged with a prior death.

Just an hour ago, arrested while I’m writing, the man who killed Merci Mack, 22, Dallas,
unless she released a video of them together, shot her multiple times. One of five found dead
since the start of July: Shaki Peters, 32, Amite, Louisiana; Bree Black, 27, July 3, shot
too. Summer Taylor, white, non-binary killed after a car drove into a crowd of protestors
in Seattle, Washington, on July 4 at the Black Femme March, not yet ruled a homicide, because
driving a car into a group of protestors, on Independence Day, is apparently
excusable or—what? Manslaughter?—binary loophole that says: not woman, not murder.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory, is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Library Journal’s list of Books to Read in 2023. She’s the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including The Diode Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Ghost City Review and others.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.