The Total Femme

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, sick, and disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.

This generous, brilliant femme gifts the world with her wild and gorgeous prose and poetry, and well as editing, performing and doing social justice advocacy. She has been published in a whole bunch of anthologies like Femmethology and Octavia’s Brood and her own books include Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home and Lovecake. Please read more about this prolific, inspiring femme on her website, http://www.brownstargirl.org/, and whet your appetite for more of her essential queer art with the sample below.

Deep Gratitude to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha!

Femmes are film stars

in the movies of our lives

Instead of dishwater we choose danger

grab belt buckles, smooth lip gloss

and make eye contact

We put Bollywood to shame

We’re the stars of our own danger-filled whirlwind

There are dramatic plot twists and more edge-of-the seat moments

than you can believe

and suspensions of disbelief?

Girl, you know we suspend disbelief

do shit ain’t nobody supposed to be able to pull off

We’re our own romantic epic

like Frida in Paris

Audre in Mexico

standing on two tree-trunk thighs

planted firm and swishing

When we’re girls and someone said diva

we breathed in that word

and it turned into a glimpse of a woman we saw once

on a multiplex screen

a beautiful lady

who shone in her skin

and rose out of it

Maybe it was our favorite aunty

or our mama when she was young

Maybe it was Frida or Rosario

Maybe we’ve never seen the one that could be us yet

but we make her up

we make her up outta thin air

outta brilliance and ass

from “femmes are film stars” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Visible: A Femmethology Volume Two, edited by Jennifer Clare Burke

Every Friday, I will showcase a queer femme goddess. Suggestions welcome!