on my 50 th birthday
May 6, 2025
on my 50th birthday, I have my 50th birthday
with my autistic demi-polycule where no one is normal, my two
autistic DJs spinning and all my autistic friends
I blow out my autistic double coconut birthday cake
with my autistic masked face, I write this autistic poem the next day
after I lose my autistic verbal speech after six hours of autistic on autistic birthday
And point at things as my autistic friends load up our cars with the flowers and clean up the
Autistic trans party space. I get autistic adorations like a
giant dunkin donut thermos and two sorry for have great tits and correct opinions
T shirts that are just slightly different, so I can work them into my
autistic uniform lineup of 10 black miniskirts and a bunch of t shirts that say shit like this
I go home to sleep, a childless cat non lady, diagonal in my autistic
bigbed with my cat purring, after getting a midnight kiss
from a lover who said they could always claim adhd but not autism
til last year bc they were like, well, I can sort of survive capitalism?
None of us are surviving capitalism that well and I almost didn’t have this party
because the asshole in chief was going to launch the insurrection act
but corny as it sounds, yes we are an insurrection-
this shout of unregistered autistic trans joy, screaming the stevie wonder
happy birthday song through our masked autistic faces, loving on
my masked autistic 50 year old surviving ass as I blow out all the autistic candles.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer/poet disability and transformative justice movement worker and renowned hot freak bitch forever 38 looking baby illder of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park MIlbern Liberation Arts Residency, as far as they know the only writers residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and llps.substack.com. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in Lenapehoking/Philly.
BACK TO ISSUE