Lazarus & The First Books They Burned
Francis Waguespack
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Lazarus
The morning after the floodwaters recede,
my neighbor’s chickens are loose on our street,
red hens stepping gingerly over debris,
unexpectedly dignified. The elder next door,
Ms. Josephine, calls out from her porch:
“They survived! Look at them struuuuuuuttin!”
Her voice carries across the mud-slick pavement,
the scent of wet oak and diesel in the air.
Her laughter more valuable
than anything I managed to carry upstairs.
Mid-point of the twelve-hour committee hearing—
my testimony scheduled for hour nine.
Texts light up my phone: We’re watching.
You’re not alone. Bringing sandwiches at 4.
In the Capitol bathroom during recess,
three of us huddle by the sink,
exhausted from being spectacles, sharing mints
that taste of artificial wintergreen and solidarity.
“We look like raccoons,” my friend says,
pawing at my face, and our manic giggles
bounce off institutional tile,
a sound they cannot legislate away.
The night forty-seven anti-trans bills
are introduced nationwide,
we project Paris Is Burning onto the side
of an abandoned Dollar General,
someone’s generator humming along
with the ball scenes. When the cops come,
they just watch for a while, then leave—
even they can’t find the energy to stop this.
Our bodies lean into each other in the dark,
my head on Dee’s shoulder, their cologne
like cedar and black pepper. On screen,
Venus Xtravaganza says: I would like to be a spoiled,
rich, white girl. They get what they want, when they want it.
We’ve all memorized the line. We whisper it
exactly as she says it, a small spell against time.
After the sixth bill hearing,
Coming home to find my housemates have built
a throne in our bathroom—ancient alleyway armchair
draped in gold fabric, plastic crown on the seat,
sign reading “YOUR MAJESTY.”
The absurdity breaks something open in my chest.
We take turns sitting on it to pee,
royalty in the most contested room in America,
laughing until our ribs ache
with the release of being ridiculous
when they’ve tried to make us tragic.
In the community garden after the flood,
pulling waterlogged debris from the beds,
Troy finds a tomato plant, somehow alive,
tangled in fence wire carried by the surge.
We replant it in the center plot,
christen it “Lazarus,” bring it water
in a procession of mismatched containers.
By August, it produces exactly seven tomatoes,
each one shared between twenty neighbors,
sweet-acid burst against the tongue,
the taste of what refuses to die.
The night they passed the ban,
we drink blue liquor at The Levee,
tongues stained like water test strips.
We commandeer the ferry
when Andy’s cousin’s shift is over,
guitars, camp chairs and empty bottles
of Mad Dog crossing the Mississippi
over and over til dawn. “Closer to Fine”
ping-ponging the battures, our voices
carrying beyond the riverbanks, dogs
in Sunshine and Plaquemine singing along.
On our camelback rooftop during the blackout,
all of South Louisiana dark except for
occasional generator lights, like lightning bugs.
The heat unbearable below, but up here,
a breeze. Someone passes a joint,
its ember briefly rivaling Mars.
My chest is bare in the darkness,
scars silvered by starlight.
Tomorrow, we’ll search for ice, for fuel,
for news of when power returns.
Tonight, we find Orion’s belt,
steady as ever above our fragile grid,
a constellation of unchanging stars
naming nothing about us
but witnessing everything.
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The First Books They Burned
I. Acquisition
On May 6, 1933, they carried torches to Opernplatz—
Berlin’s stone heart. What burned first
were not Marx or Lenin, not manifestos
of revolution, but the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.
Footage from that night: young men in suits,
backs bent under the weight of knowledge,
sweat-shined faces lit by purpose.
They feed twenty thousand volumes to the pyre.
The crowd’s collective inhale as flames catch.
The sharp tang of burning glue and leather,
chemical smoke from developed photographs
curling, blackening, gone.
Case Study #37: Elsa K.
Age: 27. Occupation: Dressmaker.
Status: Post-operative, day 7.
Sutures itch beneath white gauze.
Pulse rate: elevated.
Notes: Patient shows remarkable recovery.
Prognosis: Favorable, pending follow-up
appointments now impossible.
II. Processing
They designated our bodies “degenerate archives,”
each heartbeat a dangerous index.
While books turned to carbon and ash,
Hirschfeld—who had fled to Paris—
watched newsreel footage from exile,
the celluloid truth of flames
consuming his life’s work.
What I know: his handwriting was precise,
he collected 10,000 questionnaires
on sexual orientation and gender,
developed the first modern vaginoplasty,
his patients called him “Aunt Magnesia,”
and he never returned to Germany.
He died in Nice two years later,
his heart finally giving out.
Meanwhile at Gestapo headquarters,
officers alphabetize patient records salvaged
from the institute’s metal filing cabinets.
Names become warrant lists.
First the books, then the bodies.
First the evidence, then the witnesses.
The smell of carbon paper and rubber stamps.
The metallic click of typewriter keys.
III. Deaccession
I think of Opernplatz when lawmakers hold up
printouts of trans healthcare research
from their elevated bench, looking down
as they read selected passages aloud,
stage-lit, surrounded by polished mahogany,
their fingers trembling with rehearsed outrage.
I think of those burning books when they pass laws
prohibiting my healthcare, when they scrub research
from government websites,
when they strike the word “transgender”
from medical guidelines,
when they tell doctors my body is illegal.
Last week in Tallahassee,
a clerk in the Department of Health
sits in a climate-controlled room,
backspacing through years of gender-affirming care protocols.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
The cursor blinking like a hand on fire.
IV. Preservation
Each night, I build my own archive:
testosterone cypionate in olive oil, 200mg/mL,
needles (23 gauge, 25 gauge, various lengths),
bloodwork results stacked in manila folders,
referral letters signed by gatekeepers
who made me perform the correct narrative.
I press photographs between acid-free pages:
Before. After. During.
Evidence of survival, evidence of change.
I document each synapse-bright surge
when I recognize myself in the mirror,
each moment my body becomes
legible to itself.
My body: an archive they cannot burn,
a book that publishes itself
with every breath, every step.
A text they cannot fully redact.
We are the descendants of ashes,
the children of burned books,
the embodied evidence
that survived their first deletion.
Like wildflowers pushing up
through charburnt fields,
we grow in the aftermath
of their forest fire.
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Francis Dylan Waguespack is a writer and visual artist based in Chicago. They’re a tenth-generation Louisianan and proud New Orleanian. They’re working on their debut collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives.
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