How can you hate trans people when you hang out at the Taco Bell//KFC? Or after you and your first grade classmates watched a bunch of furry caterpillars knit themselves into green bundles, and emerge as flying patterned pollinators after the mystery of metamorphosis? My grandmother said they are the messengers between the living and the dead. Once upon a time, we were not slaughtering one another, our blood running through the streets like rainfall, and once upon a time we were. We are now, is all I’m trying to say. And the brutality has my hair standing on end and falling out and the T makes me sweaty but the prospect of losing access to it makes me sweat the more, and all the songs on the radio sing TONIGHT TONIGHT again, and I used to be able to down a Number 8 Supreme & Large Baja Blast at 2 in the morning after dancing to that at the club for six hours, but I get bad heartburn now if I’m up and eating in the middle of the night. All I’m trying to say is that I haven’t been sleeping; I lie down and fire rushes into my throat, all my dreams are full of ghosts who went searching for love and found only catfish or death and who are searching for love still and forever will be. I dream of what may happen to me should I find myself in another jail cell. My time awake is not much better, every minute, hour, weekend that passes, the soft shell of the world cracks a little more, Taco Bells split from KFCs in massive arguments at Thanksgiving Christmas Easter dinner, crumbling under a barrage of icy YESs and peaked signatures on sheets of Very Official Presidential Paper, and the house of cards gets taller and flimsier and more flammable, and there is no more disaster insurance to bail us out if we collapse. But the people who wants us dead or slaves in their machine will eventually run out of cards to build their tower to Mars or some other planet full of resources. A little known fact: The standard American deck has only 48 cards. This is because America has NO KINGS.