Alé Cota: Confessional Poetry and Queer Expression
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Alé Cota (She/They) is a trans Latiné performance artist, educator, and poet. She holds a B.A. from Carleton College in both Latin American and Gender Studies. Her work primarily focuses on poetry narrating queer and trans experiences through a framework of place trauma theory. Her confessional style anchors despondence with an inclination toward triumph. She explores memory, nostalgia, and the poetics of violence within intimate, familial structures.
We are pleased to showcase a sample of Cota's poetry below:
Plucked
Originally published in Switchgrass Review, 2021
Ma, there is a winged girl atop your rooftop. Enveloped in
Night, she exhales a birthing cry. Death is cyclical like that
Remember?–the first must be the last. She faces forward,
Her toes curled on the stone edge.
Goodnight never comes softly to womanly silhouettes.
The gossip of bustling cars & doors shut from overtime appears
Mute to her volume of hair–wearing your scarlet feathered dress–
Lifted and swaying.
It’s layered, folded to hold past selves, shelves of mangled men.
Men who solicited her to throw away. Find myself another tranny.
They spit, erasing her. But there is a witness tonight.
The cement waits for her–yearns for salacious pigment–
Her splatter to color his hunger. Ladybird
Takes a downward flight. Passes windows filled with
Men holding different lives, men
With different wives.
Falling is to become, Ma.
The ground catches her flesh–bursting.
She figured out the meaning of life, mid-flight.
Maybe to be alive is to be half
Half-empty
Half dead.
Halved in two,
Against gravity, is the
Situation. The memorial, crimson-feathered.
Another
Trans woman murdered,
Another man fed. Ma, maybe the
Bird does not sing but
Bleeds in half-flights.
The Teeth of the Night
From Poem/Video Essay/ Collection "The Teeth of the Night" showcased at When Cement Hails, Upstairs K-Space Studios April 2024
