## The Loom of the State

The ink is a fence, a jagged line,

Drawn by a hand that forgot the pulse,

The way a body carries its own light

Without asking for a signature or a seal.

They call it a bill, a cold, numbered weight,

Designed to hold the door against the wind,

But a person is not a draft to be edited,

Nor a ghost to be hushed by a gavel's strike.

To erase the law is to mend the cloth,

To let the threads breathe in their natural hue.

We are more than the boxes they carve for us;

We are the steady rhythm of a heart that knows its name.

## On the Ground in Texas

Beneath the wide, unblinking sky,

Where the heat shimmers over the limestone,

A person stands as they are—whole,

A soft rebellion in a world of hard edges.

Bodily autonomy is the soil we walk upon,

The right to bloom in the direction of the sun

Without a stranger’s shadow blocking the light,

Without a law demanding we wither for their peace.

We are trans, we are non-binary, we are many,

And every one of us is a miracle of bone and breath.

The state may try to draft a script for us,

But the spirit is an unwritten, glorious thing.

## The Weight of Names

If you strip away the legalese and the fear,

You find a human sitting at a kitchen table,

Wondering if their joy will be a crime tomorrow.

HB229 is a silence they are trying to plant,

A way to make the vibrant world turn gray,

But gender is a language we speak in color,

A symphony of 'I am' that no ink can drown.

We are humanizing the spaces between the letters,

Refusing to be narrowed into a simple 'yes' or 'no.'

Our bodies are our temples, our homes, our own,

And the only truth that matters is the one we live.