drum

call me when you become a room.
when you stretch the skin tight enough
to yell. i promise i will help you.
my uncle had a drum that hung
on the wall of his patchwork side of the house.
premiered walls. a hole he punched
when he was full of whiskey. alone there
i would drum while he was at work 
at the battery factory. lead blood.
lead soul. i come from a long like
of heavy men. men who sink in the bath tub.
men he feed sharks with their hands.
the drum drummed me. the drum 
took up my parent's house. i sometimes
escaped with the drum & we both
turned into men. it was terrifying. it was red.
then when i put the drum down 
i felt dizzy. time travel is actually very mundane.
the drum always landed me inside
an acorn's dreams but once i was 
the memory of lady bugs as they crawled
through the walls of the house. 
a nest is a place without a drum. i promise
myself i will never purchase one.
like tarot cards, your gender is 
something gifted. here is your drum.
here is your throat. beat it until
everyone comes home. the living
& the dead & the in-between. 
there is not much to do when the world is
too loud to think. i am telling you though.
i will be there with a shoe full of candy. i will
hold your hand & wait for you to transition. 
i vibrate with you. i open all the windows
so your face doesn't get trapped 
like mine did inside the hunger 
of a palm. a half-broken plate. 
the bell tower chiming. it is time candles.
it is time for dust. 

antennae love poem

i swear i can hear the future's marmalade.
as a child, i loved to feed the ants.
first in the yard & then in the house
& then pieces of my body:
finger, hand, lung. their antennae twitched.
i tried to grow my own. 
attempted planting twigs 
into my skull. tried removing the television's.
instead, that just made me listen 
to policeman speak: everything about order
& meatloaf.  i had to shake it from my body.
i had to eat nothing but lemon custard 
to become a human again. 
then there was the problem of still
not being able to speak to the ants.
their order was not like the policeman's.
instead their order was like a quilt or like
the way a fern knows 
to grow fronds. i craved to hear
the color of a zephyr or the mother noise
of rising bread. to crawl on all six legs
& reach towards a queen's infinite shoulders. 
i still want to be an ant most days
as i did when i was a child. i was jealous then.
sometimes i killed ants out of that envy.
wiped their stories off
on my thigh. each a little punctuation.
period. period. period. come to the end
of my hunger. i have lawn chairs.
i have lemonade. the policemen are far away
writing a ticket for a wound in the sun. 
o how i love to be guilty & whole.
i buy a whole bag of sugar
& pour it out in the front yard & wait. 

accordion graveyard 

don't be sad about the end 
of the world. on tv tonight
we watch a show on "dark tourism."
the host visits a japanese coastline 
where a tsunami swallowed people's lives whole.
he walks in a graveyard & says,
"the stones were the only thing
too heavy to be washed away."
one of his crew members takes selfies
by the rubble. what do the dead know
about reverence? i once had a friend
who found an accordion at a flea market.
it belonged to a dead man as all accordions do. 
he played it poorly week after week.
sat on the stoop outside our dorm.
whenever he played i could see the grim reaper.
he waltzed slowly & all alone.
i imagined stealing the accordion 
& burying it out behind the houses on main street.
there i could begin an accordion graveyard.
what do you tell yourself,
trying to make it true? as if it were a spell?
mine is the do not being sad
about the end of the world. i guess it is
already here & we are already making 
our homes in it & we are already walking
in accordion graveyards. the ones 
beneath our feet & the ones in our throats.
sometimes i open my mouth
to see rubble. to see a man taking a selfie
& his sunglasses. reflections of 
a powdered moon. the grim reaper 
living in every window. my friend, now a flock
of geese. now a fallen tree where no one
has heard it. at the end of the scene 
the host man says, with regret in his voice,
"this place is so sad" as if he thought
he would find something else
visiting a site of destruction. the ghosts laugh at him. 
sky greys like a mouthful of feathers. 
spirits get our their accordions & play. 
don't be sad about the end of the world.

supplement 

they can force anything into
the shape of a pill. i saw a jar
of cantaloupe pills & another jar of quail eye pills.
in place of the moon, drinking
a great big glass of milk. i feel sick 
to my stomach about the sci-fi future.
where is the beautiful bomb?
where are my forks? when are you going
to turn & ask me, "should we start
considering a life on mars."
we're driving & i ask you if we should
learn how to fly. you think i mean airplanes
but i mean wings. we should learn
some more skills for survival. in the morning
i take a supplement for the sun &
another supplement for grief. 
the grief piles one on top of the next 
& i want to keep feeling but i feel like
a parrot eating saltines. crumbs fall
like snow. i just want to stay alive
& then i am weeping over a video
of a tarantula trying to sing. how do you 
prevail through your own smallness?
i do not know. sometimes i live
whole weeks inside a pill. i'm someone else's 
100% daily value of degeneration.
take me to where the acorns go
to talk about god. i want to know what 
they believe in that spurs some of them,
still, & despite everything, to decide
to become trees. i am most often less brave. 
i swallow it down with water. 
smooth & sterile. they will try to tell you
breathing comes naturally. 

star cookbook

you must go out with bare feet.
shave your head into a felt hat
& carry the strands as an offering.
the stars begin to tremble
when the night is made of glass.
be careful to step around the wounds
in the dark. when you are ravenous 
what part of yourself do you consume? 
i used to eat my fingers. then, i would
swallow my tongue. tooth by tooth.
everything grows back. demands to be alive.
i often marvel at my own resilience. 
who is this body? surely, it is not me.
then i remember the knowledge of how
to pluck stars & shuck them from
their husks is sewn into my blood.
i come from a long line of searchers
& seers. we know that stars are a lot like tofu.
they take on the flavor of the fight we give them.
caramel & cardamom. sugar & splinter.
there is no cookbook for this work. there is 
just my baby teeth & their roots. little 
ornaments in the skull of a nebula.
this is how i make them. gloveless,
holding the deepest kind of fire. 
dropping them in the cast iron pan
with oil & garlic. stirring with 
the wooden spoon. the night is a scar inventory.
a scar is where the star is planted 
when the feast is done. tell me, when you find
the end of your hunger, who will you 
call out to? what mirror will you use
to watch your tongue grow back 
like the plucked leg of a harvestman? 

tongue fire 

every time i cut my tongue off 
it just grows right back.
the tail of a lizard. i am talking like scabby tree sap.
i'm talking like a sidewalk lighter. 
when i try to tell you why i do not want
to be the pineapple machine
all that comes out are sea gulls. i want to be
loved like sourdough bread. i want to be tucked 
into your pocket & taken to the moon.
have you ever been someone's secret?
i have. i have kissed inside an envelope.
i am have met on the side of the road 
& heard them say, "we have to be quick."
a boy in the driveway. a boy on mars. 
tell me you think of me not as an aloe plant
but as a violet or a lily. tell me that you love me
even as you set fire to my tongue. there are
stories in the bible of men filling
their mouths with fire so that they could speak
to anyone who passes by. these are a story 
of how if you empty enough of yourself
anyone else can rush in. my water lovers.
my garden hose-mouthed sweet melon. 
i know you have a special box of matches 
you use just to burn your clothes 
when you get back from loving me. 
i would like to crawl into that little cardboard coffin.
have you reach inside with you plum fingers 
& lift me out. i would say, 
"go ahead. let me be your flint." 

the first window

we watch it blossom 
in the flesh of your chest.
ribs moving. topiary elephants.
the whole nine yards. dear god
how holy it was. we kneeled. 
light shown like stadium forevers.
a cheering man in the sky. 
we thought greedily. we thought,
"guilty guilty guilty" not enough frenzy
& not enough forest. i said,
"here is how we'll invent birds."
you wept. your tears streamed across
the glass like a rain storm. like a simile 
yet to be born. we did nothing else
but look at your window for weeks.
maybe even years. the seasons changed.
men jumped from buildings & 
we saw them plummet past. 
begged you to open it to let in 
a gust of breeze on a july night. 
you hogged that private delight.
we stood on the ceiling 
to antagonize you. walkie talkies
that reach ghost channels. 
"hello?" i asked. the voices said,
"we hear you have a window."
you button-up shirt. oh i am so sorry.
i know i only loved you for your grease
& your willow tree view. 
the dead horse who we say is just sleeping.
there is no escape plan. this is the body.
this is the ghost. get me a rental boat.
water floods the kitchen. 
i wanted mine to bud so badly.
in the mirror i would stare at my expanse 
of blank flesh. come on come on come on.
instead, a fire escape grew 
& then an alarm to pull. your window 
widened until you were just a frame.
no longer a boy i loved.
still i lean against you & say,
"let's not worry about the sun yet,
let's just be orchid-faced & dew-hungry." 

myrmidons

who am i to disband the ants?
we are all born of a colony. 
zeus with his echo fingers & coin-laden teeth
telling me, "come forward."
i saw my folds compress.
skeletons into skeleton. still, at night,
when the fire talks my old language,
i remember what it was like to have fragments.
to build the ant hills & lift 
the dead flesh of animals into our city. 
now, i open my palm to shadows. i ache 
with the desire to search out sugar.
to devour a rose & tell no one.
i was created to be a warrior. to destroy until
the sky falls down in stained glass eyelashes.
hungry as any child though, all i dream of is sweetness.
the legs i was & two legs i have become.
my fantasy is my unraveling. the exhale 
of becoming soil & escape. instead, 
i must hold tight to this body. it is a man's body
or so i am told. i often wonder
if i would have preferred to be a woman.
how do you make peace with one form
when you are myriad? i sometimes 
catch my reflection in a pool of water.
i think to myself, "there we are, the ants
of the island."zeus feasts on the guts of 
a fallen wing. tells us, "you are 
my perfect workers." whenever 
he departs i take that time to weep. 
pluck a flower from the water's edge
& eat it fast as i can. 

potholes 

we drove in the city of cavities.
you with your dashboard face & me with
my dreams of husband-life. i can't remember
if it was raining or if it was just a creamy fog
or if i just wanted it to be raining. 
in total, i think we only kissed eighteen times. 
how a body is a rosary. measuring a distance
back to salvation. o holy crater. 
snow plow. motorcycle. angel shovel. 
red lights in the dark. the eyes of gargoyles.
you talked about graffiti you'd done
on the hips of dead buildings. i was filling
every single pothole in. each a little shadow box.
my baby shoes & my girl pictures & 
my boy pictures & pictures i took with 
other lovers. i was comforted too that the city
was as pockmarked as us. this night,
like stepping through an archway 
in a forest of unlived lives. we went to aldi.
ate untoasted bagels in the car. 
tried to laugh about a man mistaking us
for girls. the pothole is a site of truth-telling.
they all spoke to me, saying, "you are not
going to build a life with him like you imagine."
i kept filling them. kept saying,
"how do you know?" a dead pigeon. a dead rat. 
no no no. "you know it too," they all said. 
hitting one pothole so hard my car lit up,
every single light on the dashboard. 
you were frightened & so was i. i said,
"we will be okay." praying to my 1996 volvo
that she would restart. that she would
just take us home. she did. 
honking all around us. 
then, pulling up in front of your apartment. 
"i'll text you," i said. you did not reply.
was this the last time i saw you? 
maybe there were others. i drove home though
avoiding as many potholes as i could.
i wept there were so many. they spread
to my face & to my hands. rain water collected.
children came to fill me with flowers.
in bed, i promised myself to try & stop
making us something we were not. 
in the morning all my car tires were flat.
you hadn't texted me. the moon stayed out all day. 

By Rain Black

I am writing this because I feel so frustrated with systems “designed for the greater good” failing to even meet basic standards of protecting the community they serve.

I am a disabled, autistic, mixed indigenous trans person and it is my opinion that people like me, especially those of us experiencing or who have experienced abuse are not welcome, centered, or protected by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. I held a position of power at this institution as their Senior Development Manager and was, in my opinion, pushed out of the organization by an increasingly hostile work environment. I feel this was also compounded by impossible goals, lack of staff and support, zero protection from my abuser in the workplace, and lack of accommodations or understanding around autistic people.

While this is my story, it isn’t the only one that occurs at the center and it won’t be the last given that, in my opinion, nothing meaningful was done in my case and I continued to experience episodes of abuse from my abuser during and after employment. I am honestly so tired of being hurt by this place which is supposed to be a safe place for people like me. 

For my story, I need you to know a few facts that might impact your understanding of the events that take place:

1. There was a domestic violence policy in place prior to Krista Brown-Ly’s employment that was removed. 
2. One was adopted again after fellow workers fought for it after my situation and me leaving the center. 
3. Ashley L. Coleman said it was a “personal issue” rather than something that needed to come up in a leadership meeting, when Robin Gow tried to bring up the need for a domestic violence policy. 
4. My complaint under the domestic violence policy and the code of ethics policy were closed because the events occurred prior to the policy’s inception 
5. Pennsylvania has an at will policy for employment which has been utilized many times at the center for far less. 
6. Ashley told me many times that Krista does not do anything unless she approves of it and can’t act unilaterally. 

I hope this information informs your understanding of my story and my opinion of what happens in it. I will also be including any and all evidence I have. 

When we were interviewing Ashley for the Executive Director position, I was so hopeful and excited. She talked about wanting to be a radical queer organization that centered our most marginalized members. She talked about restorative justice and how we would change things together. Ashley talked the talk, but I feel her actions did not align with those ideals that she espoused. 

Krista, while not the head of the organization, I feel had been acting as such prior to Ashley and influencing how things were responded to. An example is a Black neurodivergent person was fired and she recommended to our interim ED to call the police during this firing. Her exact request was to “call the city liaison,” which if you don’t know is still the police. She has not apologized collectively to staff during when I worked there for endangering any of us or what many of the staff and myself feel was a racist event. An apology was requested multiple times by myself and others. 

She made working with her incredibly difficult, as I was the grants manager and she worked primarily in finance and HR at the time, and would make any collaboration or request for information difficult and unpleasant for me. She would also take mundane events as personal attacks, such as another employee asking me if I wanted to move offices and them offering to tell her about it or people taking it upon themselves to do something kind, like Ashely telling our facilities technician that my door was broken.  The reason I know how she felt is that she told me herself in a one on one meeting moderated by Ashley that I requested because of these repeated issues and disagreements.    

Another piece of information which may or may not be related is that Krista in that meeting with me and Ashley told me that she felt personally attacked by my union involvement and that she felt negative feelings about me because of that. She also engaged in ableist rhetoric about me during that meeting. She said that she interacted with me the way she did because of my union involvement when she felt that I didn’t qualify to be in a union. At that time, I was a grants manager and had no employees underneath me. I managed grants and not people. I also wrote the inclusion and exclusion policies for the union and was the only one who identified themselves to management because I wanted to shield other people from retaliation. At some point Krista was given access to our union chat and also brought it up in that meeting. She called me rude and unprofessional while being visibly angry and raising her voice significantly during the meeting. I sent a follow up email to Ashley as I felt that Krista had engaged in prohibited activities regarding union retaliation, and I don’t feel as though I am the only one that experienced this retaliation either.

The center also recently adopted an anti-bullying policy and it mentions 21 behaviors as prohibited, I feel I experienced all but 4 of the types of bullying identified on the list from Krista. 

During this time, I had been experiencing increasingly violent and frequent episodes of abuse from my then partner, who still works at the center, and I communicated this to Ashley on multiple occasions. These episodes became more frequent after he cheated on me but had been present through our entire relationship. I had to flee my home twice during the year it took me to escape the abuse and was unsuccessful both times due to manipulation from my ex using my dog Gomez and not having a sustainable option for housing. I was eventually successful in getting him to leave my home at the end of July 2023, though I weathered a lot of verbal, financial, and emotional abuse during that time. I spent much of that last 2 months either out of the home at friend’s homes or locked in my bedroom with my dog for our safety. 

The first time I fled, he showed up unannounced to the first location and also texted me the entire time I was gone saying that my dog Gomez missed me and various promises to change. I felt guilty for leaving my dog behind, which was not my choice, so I went back. 

The second time, Ashley was taking a smoke break sitting on one of those large cement plant pots near the center towards the post office and I was trying not to break down. I told her I wasn’t safe, and I needed help. She talked me through staying with someone who he did not know where they lived and she asked if she could tell Krista, to which I said yes. I also shared my location with her and talked to her periodically while I was at this friend’s house. This friend was a previous employee of the center. Ashley also said that I could leave early from work so that I could grab my dog and a few things and run without him knowing I was gone. This was so he couldn’t follow me to where I was staying. He left me alone for a moment, but I received a wall of text about how he would change, and I just wanted to sleep, which I hadn’t been able to do since leaving. 

That’s a common occurrence for me during stressful times in my life, I can’t sleep because my mind races replaying the things that happen to me to try to process them. I don’t understand why people are abusive and I spent a long time trying to understand. I have also experienced those sorts of nights because of how Krista treated me that day at work or a rude email I would receive at 10pm at night from her. At this point in time, I thought Ashley was helping me, both with Krista and my abuser. 

Because of my ex’s abuse, I had also experienced a number of non-verbal episodes leading into workdays which occurred because of sustained verbal and emotional abuse late into the night. I had to borrow an iPad to communicate with others during meetings because my abuser took my voice from me. This, unfortunately, will not be the last time this occurs, but it happens more figuratively.  

My ex, once he no longer lived with me, continued to have to work directly with me, as I was the Senior Development Manager and had no staff at any point during my tenure besides a part-time grants manager who I got shortly before leaving. My abuser was the only one besides myself trained in any of the development procedures. I feel no meaningful effort was made to make different arrangements or protect me. When I would have to work with him, and it was one-on-one he would insult me. As an example, during one occasion, he told me what a horrible sight it was to see me. He would also sit with the lights off next to my office, even though we work on different floors and none of his duties required him to ever use those offices as there were available rooms on his floor. I reported these events, but at this point, I had given up on Ashley or Krista doing anything and I had decided to leave the organization. 

During my last two weeks, Krista and Ashley had no conversations with me about my work or sustainability of the position. It felt almost as if it was being ignored that I was leaving, so I just finished out my last two weeks. I kept my head low and endured anything that happened. Ashley hugged me on my last day and told me I was the center’s joy and that I would be missed. This was the first time she had spoken to me the entire two weeks and it felt hollow to me. I tried to move past it and just forget the center.

I still had a joint gallery show planned at the center that I felt might repair some of my feelings about the center and I had five pieces about the domestic violence I had experienced that fit together with a caption explaining the feelings surrounding the pieces and their meaning. They allowed my abuser to take my pieces off the wall and hold them in an undisclosed location. 

I asked my fellow artist in the gallery show to help me find them and then Robin and I tried to talk to Krista at the end of a meeting Robin had with her. She told us that they had taken down things before, and I reminded her that captions had been altered once and I was there when that happened. It was because they were transphobic, racist, and ableist, which wasn’t what was happening. She said we would look at them together and we tried to schedule a meeting. She did not schedule a meeting with either of us and she went into Robin’s office between his meetings to look at the pieces and caption. She and Ashley refused to meet with either of us and told both Robin and I that there would be no discussion. 

I was told via email that I was harassing him. 

To you the reader, I would ask, how do you harass someone with their own words? With describing feelings and events that you experienced? Any identifying information had been removed from the caption and the pieces prior to hanging them, so again I ask you, how do you harass someone with their own words and actions? I am sure they are not nice pieces for him to view, but discomfort does not equal an attack.

I responded to Krista that harassment has a legal meaning and implication of a sustained series of events. As my abuser had done that to me during our relationship and during my employment there, his taking down my piece would constitute that. Krista then stopped using the word harassment.

As an aside, this also happened during domestic violence awareness month which I don’t think was planned, but just makes this situation worse. 

The pieces that were not allowed in the show included elements of my abusers’ own words and the caption of me talking a bit about my experience and my story. It was anonymous and included no identifiable information. Because they were not allowed in the show, I posted them on my Instagram and talked about them at the reception because I wanted to take back some of my power in this situation. 

I tried one final time to give the center a chance to do what I feel would be the right thing in any of this. Once they adopted their new code of ethics and their domestic violence policy, I made a formal complaint under them.

After my leaving the center, Robin, while he still worked there, was told that nothing happened because I made no formal HR complaint. This was said even though there was no mechanism in the handbook for this, this was never communicated to me, and at this time, there was no domestic violence because it had been removed. I had expressed multiple times, verbatim, to Ashley that I was experiencing abuse in the workplace and at home. I expressed that I didn’t feel safe and that I was coordinating with Robin to not be alone in my office by myself as that is when my ex would invade my space, corner me in my office, and start fights at the workplace. 

I filed the complaint because I want to try to ensure the safety of my fellow community members because my ex is a facilitator of community groups in addition to being an administrative contact for donors and other community members. People who go to the groups are potentially vulnerable to him because he is in a position of power and “deemed safe” by the center due to his employment. Do you, my dear reader, not automatically trust that people employed at nonprofits and other social service areas have your best interest at heart and will not harm you? This trust is dangerous for an abuser to hold.

I don’t think any of this is just about me, I think it sets a dangerous precedent.

My complaint was closed and I feel no meaningful interventions were done. It was denied because the policy didn’t exist during the abuse that happened at the center. This reason for denial was overheard by someone who still works there, so I am certain it will be refuted, but which is it? I didn’t report it the right way or there’s no policy?

At every turn the center failed me and it sets a precedent to not come forward. The bar for getting an organization to do any action is so high that your abuser will be allowed to not only continue their abuse, but it will be sanctioned as allowable. In my case, the only thing that actually gave me any protection was my coworkers and trying to not be alone in the center. This is an incredibly dangerous practice and mindset as for people like me, trans autistic feminine disabled, our abusers kill us. I was just lucky.

My abuser is up for a promotion, still has access to vulnerable people in the support groups and I feel has received no repercussions for his behavior in or outside of the workplace. By being allowed to remain a part of the center, the center is implying that he is safe and has authority amongst the LGBT community. This is literally how abusers find another victim and they might not be lucky the next time. I do not mean to be alarmist, but the risk is real and we see this reflected in domestic and interpersonal violence statistical data.

I have known no peace at the center and it continues to haunt me now that I am on the outside. I desperately want to stop talking about the center, but I feel compelled because my silence has never kept me safe and I feel like if I scream this from the rooftops, someone might be spared what I went through. I believe that dragging unjust practices out into the light allows them to fend for themselves versus them thriving in the darkness.

I would ask that if you believe me, my story, and care about domestic violence, reach out to the center and ask them to do better. Ask Ashley and the board to ensure the safety of those who visit and expel abusers from their walls. All of them.

Email Ashley and the board and tell them to stand by survivors of domestic and interpersonal violence. Tell them that your safety matters. Not for me, but for all of us that have experienced DV/IPV because there are so many of us.

Four out of ten (37.1%) of the respondents to the 2022 PA LGBTQ+ Health Needs Assessment had experienced this kind of violence. If the respondent was trans or gender non-conforming, that number goes up to 39.8% and if the respondent was disabled, the number goes up to 58.5%. If you represent an organization, I would recommend no longer working with the center until they change their practices and center survivors. 

I’ll leave you with one final question: 

If the center is not for us, not safe for us, who’s it for?  

Evidence

Kleintopl@moravian.edu – Liz Kleintop, board president

Acoleman@bradburysullivancenter.org – Ashley Coleman, Executive Director