Crip Infinity
If my cane is a limb,
Then so is my pen
– Maranda Elizabeth
1. my friend asked her facebook feed what apocalypse would be too much for us. What we would
really want to not live beyond. Folks mentioned cannibalism, the end of the whales, I stubborn
said nothing.
I already died three times and came back,
I don’t fear death, I know her.
I trust this world’s mean gorgeous unrelenting surprise
Like the best top,
she’s taken me to the edge of death
and brought me back
over and over, transformed.
but if this world was sterile scrubbed held down of crip genius
I would not want to survive that
I would not want to live in a world where my people had been eliminated
for our own good
2. my goal is to make the revolution irresistable, so listen close:
in the infinite crip crazy future, I am not eliminated
and neither are you. We stand sit lie limp freak out
infinite.
There are kinds of crazy that we ain’t even thought of yet.
We are the walking dead the dead femmes walking
There’s nowhere you can hide from seeing all these birth defects,
I mean people. I mean us.
We really are everywhere
puffing, drooling stimming
The quality of our pain has changed
because no shame is the most effective anti-inflammatory
When an autistic kid is born people jump up and down
and scream quietly, in our heads. We are so excited to find out
what we can do.
The best stim toys and futures are made by our kind
who focused and focused and focused
til we made something the most beautiful
and every one gasped with admiration
but never surprise
Nothing horrible happens
You are not taken away
I am not left to die
We take care of each other forever
Our crip femme brown love is something studied in school
How we loved towards each other, again and again
– how a million ideations couldn’t end this
We are an epic love story
We are one of many
All of us are worthy of study and grants, in fact
I don’t mean the abled studying us,
but us studying ourselves.
We study ourselves
we check each other out in the mirror
We are the beauty standard.
We didn’t end.
Our wild minds make the future
I not in need of a cure
I my own amazing future
and yes, I ask:
what will we know about the queer crip body?
what do we know about the divine?
Persistent like virus
and as holy
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger / Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish / Roma ascent. The author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap and Consensual Genocide, she is also, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit, and Octavia’s Brood. Currently a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, she teaches, performs and lectures across North America. Primarily, she is a weirdo who writes about survivorhood, disability justice, transformative justice, queer femme of color lives and Sri Lankan diaspora sitting in her room.