Plan to marry
Go to the county records office
Wait in line until the security guard beckons you
Raise your right hand and swear to an apathetic clerk
Raise your right hand and turn eyes at your partner
Use white out to correct
Use white out to correct incorrect form data
Learn that you cannot keep your maiden name and add a new one
Mourn that familiar designation’s good sound
Repeat your new name to yourself
Your partner’s father has beautiful hands
Knuckles like balloons, fingers crowed
Your partner will leave his “New Surname” section blank
Look at him and sadden a bit that he is a man
Love the things that man him but still
How will they know your queerness now
Femme that you are
How hard it was to be seen before this
Even as you made hands on a lover’s body
at the dyke night dance party
You love him and also
say often: I would kill every man
Including you, if I had the power
Sadden that this is not yet a love poem
Pay one hundred and some odd dollars to the clerk
Forget if you ordered a copy of your certificate
Later, order another one so that you can become
Yourself on your goddamn social security card
How easy it is to be old and white and have a cane
Think that to yourself in the social security office
How different it is from the benefits office
No babies
So many men with hands like your father-in-law
You’re married now
Did you not mention that?
You got married to your partner, wore a red dress
You felt like a god, drunk on nothing
At some point you noticed you had no shoes on
The palms of your feet were sticky with some little flower
The sap of its nectar
And isn’t that love
And isn’t that murder
The flowers and their dead gummed lips
They were not meant for the palms of your feet
But you are a god called by a new prayer
This is your marriage
This is your name
God that you have become
Flower-footed that you have become
Watching the death of that different you
Her, with shoes on and some other name
NAIMA YAEL TOKUNOW (neé Woods) is an educator, writer and editor, currently living in the New Mexico. Her work (and life) focus around interrogating black femme identity & privilege, social justice and black futurity. She is the author of the chapbook, MAKE WITNESS, published in 2016 by Zoo Cake Press. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a TENT Residency Fellow & has attended The Home School workshop. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol. New work is published or forthcoming from Bayou, Glittermob, Nat. Brut, jubilat, Diagram and elsewhere. She is blessed to be black and alive.