“Parliaments on the Stoop” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (from ROOM 41.3 Queer)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
What does it mean to survive the many ongoing crises of our times?
For our 2025 Asian Heritage Month feature, we’re revisiting Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “Parliaments on the Stoop,” first published in ROOM 41.3 Queer.
Parliaments on the Stoop
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
for Fatima, after Orlando
There’s nothing like being two kinds of sore-hipped brown femmes
a week after a hate crime,
smoking Parliaments on the stoop
outside a queer Black femme birthday party
with lots of glitter house looks.
It’s safe to be
inside, soft, but we come outside
to be bad brown femmes looking at the moon
smoking in the bushes like we trained for at every wedding we’ve ever been to.
We’re watching the Islamophobia meter go up,
tracing frequencies of hair pat-downs and panic attacks,
saying, It feels just like after 9/11, girl,
saying, I think the government paid him to do that shit, he ain’t ISIL.
He’s probably some closeted gay cousin who’s an asshole to his wife
like we’ve known plenty of in our lives.
The queer Muslim healing gathering was in the basement of an inaccessible bar,
we left after five minutes.
Bad brown girls always cluster in a bush
sucking fire and blowing smoke at the moon,
at what we never know how to survive
but somehow, sometimes, do.
Check out our Asian Heritage Month statement and reading list here.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a writer, older cousin, cultural and memory worker, divinator, writing teacher, space creator, low-tech survival technologist and structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Telling a story is still their primary form of tech An Aries/ Taurus four horns compulsive maker and documenter, they are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, The Revolution Starts At Home (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has been widely anthologized and published/self-published, including recent work in Eater, Disability Visibility Project and The Massachusetts Review but with a long-ass CV before that. They make marvelous things/ performance/ ritual with other disabled mostly BIPOC creators/family, most recently Kinetic Light’s Wired and the i wanna be with you everywhere crew.
A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, Piepzna-Samarasinha won Lambda’s 2020 Jeanne Córdova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/ disabled/ femme experience.” Since 2009 they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School (2005-2009) the QTPOC floating cabaret and performance tour/ art apocalypse Mangos With Chili (2006-2015) and Toronto’s Performance/Disability/Art (PDA) (2014- present.) A 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow and YBCA 100 member, they are currently building Living Altars, building power and space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers/creators.
They are Jackie and Anna’s grandfemme, from Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Rom lineage, sick, disabled and autistic, a nonbinary femme on the stoop, a survivor and a grown up runaway making home and family. Raised in Worcester, MA, they are a new Philly resident after being a long-time visiting cousin. They are powered by hyperfocus, the silence, the cackle and the couch.
