About the Poem

Writing "On June 2024 Usú Buys a 3 Year Storage Space For Her Future Grandchildren at a Fertility Center Because Her Trans Daughter is Undergoing Medical Transition, is Mentally Unstable, and Can’t Afford to Preserve Her Will To Experience Motherhood Someday, Somehow," required pause. How can I take the debris of a receipt from a fertility center and build a speculative world, one where the past, the present, and the future can exist in simultaneity? This is the intergenerational time grappling for a diasporic detribalized trans woman surviving the imperial northern americas. Craft wise, I’d never written a poem where the title was suffocating yet gripping. How could I depict my grief without drowning the reader in forthright emotionality? I corrected a lab document of gendered language and signed it with a letter to my future progeny I may or may not ever hear call me mother. Ultimately, the luxury therein lies in having a mother willing to immortalize me, someday, somehow, in a time when my livelihood is questionable every time I enter the public sphere. My mother’s credit/capital is what bought us time, possibility, and hope, quite literally. Additionally, I felt it imperative to implore a gradation technique to fade the scientific language and bring into focus the prose title and couplet ending to further reflect the ephemerality of documents and preservatories when it comes to surviving death and preserving a future biological legacy as a womb-less body. I first experienced the gradation technique from my friend and colleague Moni Brar whom I met at Tin House 2022.”