For Trans Day of Resilience, Envisioning the End of the Systems That Killed Layleen Polanco

Layleen Cubilette-Polanco, a 27-year-old Afro-Dominican trans woman and member of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, was found dead at Rikers Island Prison on June 7th, 2019. It was the first week of Pride Month, marking the 50th anniversary of the infamous Stonewall Riots.

Layleen had been placed in solitary confinement after fighting with another inmate. She had a history of epilepsy, believed to be her cause of death. She’d been ordered released after being picked up for a misdemeanor in early April, but was held because she’d missed previous court dates for prostitution charges.

Her bond was set at $500. She didn’t have it. New York recently passed a bail reform law ending cash bond for non-violent offenses, but because it does not take effect until the new year, it did not protect Layleen.

Her family—both blood and chosen—mobilized to demand justice for her death. The city responded not by acknowledging the host of systems that worked together to lead to her demise, but by offering  “expanded protections” for incarcerated trans and queer people.

As a Black, gender-nonconforming poet and former member of the ballroom scene, I wanted to honor Layleen for Forward Together’s Trans Day of Resilience, an annual event that commissions art and writing from trans and queer artists across the US. For my poem, I hoped to uplift her story, highlighting the insult of expanding incarceration in the name of a Black trans woman whom the prison system had killed.

I imagined what it might look like to reject the city of New York’s response to Layleen’s murder by rewriting it. I imagined crossing out the official language, and replacing it with the measures that would truly honor Layleen. My poem evolved into a palimpsest—simultaneously a record of the violence done to Black, Brown, indigenous, immigrant, trans, and queer women by the police and prison systems, and a declaration of a clear vision for a world where those systems no longer exist:

The New York City Council will pass a package of legislation, 
expanding services for transgender, gender-nonconforming, 
non-binary, and intersex inmates       will turn out its pockets, 
never sign another ransom note

What does it mean to “expand services” for Black trans people on the inside, while harassing and intimidating us, closing our schools, shutting down our clinics, and pricing us out of our historic neighborhoods on the outside? What does it mean to invoke the proper nomenclature for our identities only to lock us down more persuasively?

All officers with trans inmates in their custody will undergo 
a competency training       will have their badge numbers 
etched off with diamond-tipped acrylics, aquamarine

In Chicago, soon-to-be-former Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a budget hearing earlier this month, “I don’t think we can train [our officers] out of racism, but I think we can make them more professional.” In New York, officers continue to use the illegal chokehold that killed Eric Garner, despite the city spending $35 million to teach them not to.

Competency trainings won’t stop police from continuing to harass, assault, and murder Black trans people. Our survival is dependent on a commitment to resourcing our communities, not our jailers.

New beds will be added to the transgender housing unit
       beds of wildflowers will erupt from lots that were not
vacant, just holding their breath

Prisons are containers not for dangerous people, but those capitalism has rendered redundant. When people—like the land on which they live—are no longer valued based on their usefulness to the market, what was once seen as “vacant” is revealed to be teaming with an untapped capacity for joy.

Counselors will be made available to all trans inmates       we 
are each our sister’s counsel

Imagine a world where one doesn’t have to go to jail to see a counselor. Imagine a world where Black trans people are so surrounded by healing and support that we maintain the bandwidth to hold spaces of healing and support for one another, in ways no one else can.

The Board of Correction will convene a task force       will 
be tasked with something useful, like beekeeping, or collecting
rainwater

The arguments relied on to denounce prison abolition mirror those once used to oppose the abolition of chattel slavery. While prisons are big business for a small elite, they are a disaster for the many, and not only those on the inside. Prison abolition requires a new relationship to economy, as does the survival of our planet.

Sex workers will have their cases diverted to Human Sex 
Trafficking Intervention Court       will spray paint the words
“we are the intervention” on the courthouse rubble

Many mainstream feminist organizations continue to conflate all sex work with nonconsensual sex trafficking. In mid-October, the National Organization of Women rallied its membership to testify at a historic forum in D.C. to oppose the decriminalization of sex work—drowning out the demands of Black, trans, and queer sex workers in their own city.

The push by the wealthy to criminalize sex work not only ignores the bodily autonomy of poor and working women, it bolsters the trend of denying them life-saving resources, funneling them instead into the death-making prison system. Innumerable survivors of violence have ended up like Layleen, put there by those who claim to be their saviors.

The Rikers Island compound will be replaced by a series of 
smaller, borough-based facilities       will slip into the rising 
Atlantic, the ribs of our dead prepared to cage it

The artist Tourmaline reminds us that the Atlantic is a sea of bones. What better place for Rikers to be laid to rest than in the phantom stomachs of Layleen’s ancestors? #NoNewJails save those that incarcerate the old ones.

Trans elders will be held in solitary confinement for their 
own safety       will have their charcoal locs retwisted in
chosen hands

The carceral state continues to insist on solitary confinement as a form of “safer” incarceration—especially for trans and queer women of color, immigrants, and asylum seekers. This practice ignores both that solitary is torture, and that incarcerated trans and queer people are at a heightened risk of violence from prison staff, not just from other incarcerated people. Solitary isolates trans and queer people from their allies, under the guise of protection.

Layleen should be here. Her hair should be allowed to grow gray. And she should be able to name the hands that plait it for her.

This legislation will take effect in the summer of 2020
       we have never asked permission to sing

We will sing the vision for our liberation in unison, from the inside and the outside, with every dip, cackle, chant. We will keep singing, no matter what law is passed or revoked, no matter what new edifices of social control are erected. Our song’s reverberations will live in the water long after we’re gone, no matter how we’re taken.

Rest in power, Layleen.