This poem is a eulogy for a time when everything felt possible and every author could be killed. It was worldmaking, and it was euphoric anyway. Gender refracted in on itself. It became infinite. This was so liberating and so illusory: the alternate universes, the rewritten endings, aestheticisation as an armour.

These three stanzas move through different eras. The early thrill of being online is a frenzy. The real world leaks in as the Harry Potter fanfic which is gay but nonetheless copaganda. Think: quizzes to assign genders, the hottest M&M. Youth made queerness separable in a way that was fake but so deathless. The latter stanzas return to something disillusioning. They remind that the fascism was never excisable. I guess this is to say that there’s no such thing as a queerness that’s desire for its own sake. The only queerness that’s ever existed is the queerness that people fought for and died for. We cannot imagine queer possibilities in the death of possibility. We cannot have a gender infinity under mass mortality. Queerness is abolitionist; is borderless; is a free Palestine. Queerness is a political responsibility. Queerness is the inseparability of gender from the infinity of everybody else’s lives. 

This is a eulogy but also an ode. It’s not about reality’s obliteration of the possible, but about what the fantasy of possibility taught me about reality: how it’s ugly; how it’s genocidal; how it yields like a mirror.