EDITING A NATIONAL JOURNAL WHILE MESSY & DEPRESSED

This summer, I found myself barely capable of editing Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with the Lambda Literary Foundation.

I spent my last couple weeks in NYC displaced from my house before moving to Cali (where I couch surfed with friends for a while). Housing was unstable for a few months.

This affects how I sleep, breathe, eat, think, act.

After two months of couches, I finally found a room to sublet. My first night subletting, about fifteen shots were fired outside my window. I hit the floor and crawled into the living room…. In the morning, I heard that police killed my neighbor, Antonio Clements, in Oakland.

As I’m writing this, it has been ten days since that incident.

Last afternoon, I heard that the police killed another person ten blocks from where I live. I don’t know their name yet.

Last night, I went to sleep nude then woke to a fight (at the liquor store) near where I sublet. The man at the liquor store was saying, “You got a gun? YOU GOT A GUN?!??”

I slowly, quietly stepped away from my bed and put on my underwear.

I was thinking, “If a stray bullet comes through this window, I don’t want to be found naked and dead.”

In a couple of weeks, issue two of Nepantla will launch… I’m moving back to NYC in a couple weeks too and will have more social and professional support there, I think.

My mind has been disassociating from the violence that surrounds me. Jackie Wang has this poem where she says something like “melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.” Right now, I am suffering. I will name that.

Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon.

Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon.

Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon.

Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon. Healing will happen soon.

While completing grad school at NYU, I told my classmates, “If you don’t know how to worship the fact that I am alive, in this room, and creating work on a national level, then I don’t have time to talk to you.”

I knew my own fragility. I still understand my own fragility…. As if I am always one misstep from death, homelessness, vanishing into… I don’t have time….

If possible, I would like to keep writing poetry and editing Nepantla.

Right now, my head is so fucked up I can barely write this nonsensical essay.

Dear God, if I don’t get better soon, please have Danez Smith and Ocean Vuong finish my first poetry book for me. Have Eduardo and Conrad and Eileen and Solmaz and Javier and Rigoberto and Emily and Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Lara Lorenzo, all the people whose work and company I love. Have them tell you about the things I could have been. The revolution that I was fighting for.

I almost forgot about that…. The revolution??

As soon as I can, I’m going to keep writing, working // so that

brown faggots like myself can go to sleep, without fearing

death. //

so we can keep editing journals, writing poems.

POEMS.

—

Editor’s Note: The second issue of Neplanta has since launched. You can read it here.

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latin@ punk poet & prison abolitionist. Their first chapbook “Sad Girl Poems” is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press. They cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign with Javier Zamora & Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in 2015. They’ve interned at the Poetry Society of America & received an MFA in poetry from NYU. They edit Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. Originally from the Los Angeles area, they now live in Oakland.