DescriptionThis Isn’t a Funeral engages with the poetics of social death and the ongoing conversation between legacy and memory complicated by inherited enslavement. Many parts of This Isn’t a Funeral function as an open letter to self and family, enacted as an elegy of the self that suggests what lies inherit in all elegies: a profound desire made real on the page. In the work, I argue against and around ideas of my body: my body in medical transition, my body as the site of politics regardless of my consent, and the memoratic parallels between what transition denotes about my body and what my Blackness denotes about the bodies of my ancestors without their consent, both in the past and in the present. Thematically, my manuscript speaks to the practice of Black male gathering; the work creates and witnesses a space in which Black men can come together and be held in the truth of their experiences. The speaker imagines conversations and meetings between Black men and their families separated by war, Emancipation, alcoholism, death, transphobia, and a culturally manufactured fear of vulnerability and shared connection. This Isn’t a Funeral lyrically argues that the site of the elegy simultaneously enacts the rebirth of its subject, that death is meaning-making rather than destruction, that both to love and to pray as Black nonbinary trans man is to engage in transformation that is then politicized and condemned.