Coraline Ismael Karim

Water

Monday, September 7, 2026

I won't make this long. I went hiking near the Appalachian Mountains with my roommate today. We foraged for mushrooms, found Lion's Mane, the one mushroom that's named after chicken, and she gifted me a woodear mushroom. As we were walking back to the car, I asked if there was a creek I could sit at just to listen to the water move. The wind was so silent that every slice of water moving through the rocks was music. Growing up near the beach in Florida was a wild privilege. I spent much of my perceived childhood there with my best friends. My roommate told me the forest reminded her of those happiest of memories, many filled with the wild love she had for her best friend. I told her the water reminded me of mine. Every beach memory of him reflected in the moving water of that creek. I miss him. I miss him, and I hope one day I can move on and simply love the memory of my best friend, the one whose memories live in the water beneath me.

I Wish I Could Be (Happily) Cisgender

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

In a more humane America, I'd be happy just the way I am. But this country actively propogates massive hatred towards any oppressed minority who is poor, brown, black, trans, queer, or identified under the umbrella of "other" to distract us from the actual perpetrators of violence and inequity which are the rich. Sometimes, I wish my brain, my soul, whichever designation that found the causation to define my person to become transgender rather than cisgender because the latter meant suicide and the former, within safety, is genuinely so much better for my mental health, could just hate others the way America hates others. Being othered is so... exhausting.

So, why don't I just de-transition? Well, I actually want to keep living. And I know if I de-transitioned, I'd just inevitably kill myself. And while transitioning has been an ultimate saving grace, America's constant hatred and vitriol against anyone transgender makes being alive so much worse. Any space that requires me to reveal my gender identity is met with so much hatred. This is most apparent in potential workplaces that are able to undergo background checks. If they look past my Muslim name and brown skin, I still have the worry of a final test of discrimination that is my gender. I can be the most qualified candidate with the perfect amount of experience, but I'm also what I like to call "too diverse" within spaces that I dream of working in.

A white or white-passing cis man with a high school degree can be considered somewhat of an equal candidate to a brown-skinned, Muslim transgender woman with a Master's degree, years of relevant experience, and a genuine love for the work she does. I say this mostly because this is exactly what happened to the job I had before being laid off. I had finished the same program my supervisor (the one with the high school degree as well as being two years younger than me) had completed the year prior that allowed us to spend a year at an organization with the possibility of being hired afterwards. He was hired afterwards. I was the hire following his fellowship. Well, I was not hired afterwards. And before folks jump to conclusion, and as much as I'd like to dive into the context of this work program, I'll just paraphrase the experience by saying both of our roles were what I'd describe as an experimental infancy role that each worker--being myself and my supervisor--would "nurture" with the assistance of our peers and boss.

This is a local non-profit in Baltimore that pivoted towards a dependence on federal, state, and private grants rather than prioritize small-based local donations. My supervisor's work program year was met with, in majority, a lot of assistance from our mutual boss. Our boss, or his at the time, technically, worked with him to establish partnerships with private entities that ultimately settled a role for him to continue to work there. In other words, the responsibility of the team was met with success because they assisted his infancy year with direct contribution. Now, this non-profit is also extremely small. At the time, my supervisor's supervisor was another peer with a director role and massive amounts of expected responsbility, but I'll just say now that his supervisor did not assist him at all and was shortly put on work probation for being a lacking employee. His supervisor had also been working there for several years. So, our boss becomes his symbolic supervisor while the actual supervisor maintains his own statute of failures. Our boss assists my supervisor with legal documentation, involves the board to provide increased assistance, and eventually lands a partnership with a private entity that provides grants to MY supervisor to maintain his career status at this non-profit.

Cut to my year. As further context, MY supervisor's role was designed by our boss. MY role was designed by my supervisor's supervisor...the one who was on work probation and designated a hinderance. Yeah. What I'm trying to say is, my role's description had very little to work with. I didn't know which direction I was meant to go with, and every time I asked my supervisor's supervisor (and this is getting confusing so let's just call my supervisor's supervisor Caleb, as Caleb was my initial supervisor before getting fired and eventually my new supervisor, who is the white-passing cis man with a high school degree, that we'll call Jacob, replaced Caleb). Sorry for the confusion. I don't really have the money to get sued for defamation now that I'm unemployed and trying to scrounge for pennies.

Okay. So our boss designed Jacob's role with great detail, assisted him in every way, and eventually led him to success. Great. Caleb was Jacob's supervisor his entire year, did practically nothing for him, everyone knew, and still maintained his supervisory role for my year. And the cherry on top was he also had the new responsibility to design MY ROLE. Which was a jack-shit description that I had to discover what the hell I was going to do with. I start my role in mid-August of 2025. I'm asking questions, directions, what the organization's goals are for my role, and I'm met with shoulder shrugs and your typical "you'll figure it out" responses. I'm immediately neglected. I ask Jacob if this is how his year started. He says, "Yeah". Okay. So this is just a normalized start that should've been repaired after the first year. Cool. I ask Caleb, "How can we make my role successful?" Well, Caleb didn't seem to know what the hell was going on half the time. He said we'll have to try involving ourselves into public entities to spread the goal of my role. I asked him how should we start doing that... do we have connections, people to speak with in local government, friends, families, anyone? He gave me the verbal shoulder shrug of "I don't know" and told me to speak to our symbolic supervisor, the boss. Why are you still here Caleb? Why did they let you be a supervisor again? Why did this job set me up for failure? Was it intentional? Was it by accident? Was it because there is no accountability in Baltimore and therefore within non-profits? Are non-profits genuinely a saving grace, or are they a symptom of capitalistic governing that abuses the people's taxes and forces us to rely on private, "non-profit" entities whose success is granted by tax-payer funded grant money by public government and private corpo checks that allow the latter to continue to exist in their socialized privilege while the people suffer? So many questions!

Anyways, I go to the boss, and he seems very disinterested in helping me. He tells me to speak with one man, just gives me his name, not a number or email, and I eventually find his information on my own since the man in question was fortunately a public servant whose professional information was pubicly accessible. I conversed with the man, met with him online, and he gave far more information in a span of thirty minutes than Caleb did in a month. The fact that this entire ladder of connecting with the public servant through the hoops of Caleb's incapability to my boss' vagueness took an entire month was a designated failure in and of itself.

Time passes. I'm trying to use the advice the public servant gave me. I'm desperately asking for assistance from my boss and Caleb. Our cumulative team of five people, myself included, were told to move our focus to event planning for something that had, in theory, to do a lot with my role but lacked the execution because my role was not integrated into said event. I was an afterthought, merely third-party paid assistance. My boss asked me just a week before this event that took place in late November how Caleb was as a supervisor. I was brutally honest and responded to his scale question between 1-10 and said, "Zero". He nodded and said, "That's what I expected." Well, boss, I'm glad that's what you expected and knew. Thanks for setting me up for failure in these last three months.

Time passes. Caleb is fired. Jacob, our previous fellowship member from last year, is now my supervisor. It is now mid-January. Our work program expects us to complete a capstone project. I decide to do a literary magazine. I design a website from scratch using HTML, Java, and CSS on Microsoft Visual Studio for the magazine. I speak with local communities to host the reading event, introduced myself to a local press, and collaborated with a local artist and bike messenger to design the fliers and covers of the magazine. I did these steps of communal connection entirely myself. All I asked from my team was to assist me in hanging up my fliers. Their local cafes, bars, restaurants, anywhere that had a bulletin board. Please, hang it up for me. That's all I'm asking. I never even saw those fliers leave their desks, save the grant writer whom I actually liked but couldn't do much for me because Caleb, the previous supervisor, grew agitated from anyone attempting to assist me. I think she just got scarred from that and avoided offering direct assistance. At least she hung up fliers. Thank you, grant writer. I want to say your name, but I don't want to get sued.

Anyways, my boss and Jacob couldn't even hang up fliers for me. Awesome. It's now May of 2025, I've managed to connect with local communities to spread the word of my role, and I'm successful in providing material for our local school system on my work that I don't know if they've actually shared amongst the public school system. Regardless, I'm getting stuff done, no matter how small or slow. My boss finally decides it's time for him to be involved. You may think he's going to set up meetings with the school system and find an in for me to create a genuine relationship with them or possibly find a private organization to fund my next year like they did with Jacob. No, no, no. He's now going to meet with me weekly over Zoom to discuss progress. I think between May to July, under the expectation of weekly meetings, we only managed to successfully meet once and the weeks from that single meeting were each met with him not showing or having to cancel because he always prioritized new meetings with councilmembers or pocketing professionals over his own employee's success. Oh, I didn't even mention that the day of the magazine reading, neither Jacob nor my boss showed. The grant writer and a member from a sister organization did. Thank you to you both. It meant a lot to me. Jacob was too busy with the world cup, according to him. And our boss had already planned a trip. Great. It's not like my reading was planned months in advance.

It's now August, the day before my final day. He messages me over our Google Chat and says, "I'm sorry we weren't able to find the funds to keep you on. I think the work you did will really leave a continuous impact for Baltimore," or some shit like that. I can't even reference the actual quote because the quickest thing he did for me was delete my entire email the day after my last day. So. Yeah. He's efficient on what he prioritizes. Priority. Priority... that's the whole point of this... rant? Who gets prioritized? The white-passing man with the high school degree or the brown-skinned, Muslim-named transgender girl with the Master's degree? Jacob's still there. He's been prioritized with most of the responsibility to deter him from becoming as useless as I was artificially made to be. Good for him. Every opportunity I volunteered for, he also did and, like everything in the world, the white man is given dibs no matter the circumstance.

I hate being trans. I do. I've lost every friend I was raised to love, through my own debilitating mental health and the constant disconnection of having cishet male friends who knew me as their own and then were led to perceive me as an entirely different entity because of my new identity. Their predisposed mysoginy caused me to not only hate myself even more, but any attempt at begging for a semblance of empathy or love was met with the all too familiar, "Well, you chose this life!" as if I'd ever choose to become an even more oppressed gender minority underneath the vastly visible brown skin and Muslim heritage while also living in America, a violently racist, classist, and genocidal apartheid that HATES EVERY PART OF ME! No, no, no. If I had the choice to be a cisgender brown man or a transgender brown woman, I'd pick man on every single box because I am told to hate myself so much that even the love I've learned to have for my body and soul is starting to become tainted by the amount of hatred I experience. And after all of that, I still miss those friends. But like my old boss at this job, I think they're overjoyed that I'm no longer in their lives. The stress of priority. I think once upon a time they cared about me, but I can't even love myself half the time because of all the hate that is spewed for the poor, the queer, and the coloured. But never the white man. No, no, no. It's either you attain to be the white man or you are the white man. Those are the two expectations in this classist and racist society. And I hate myself because of it.

"Well, what were ya wearin'?"

Saturday, June 20, 2026

I'm staring at the sky on this small hill in Patterson Park. It smells of nothing. Cleanliness. Air. Absent of coal and tar filling my lungs. My lungs still refrain from a full breath given the years of damage they've taken. My asthma still remains, my respiration a fraction of the childhood full of forced inhalation of nicotine smoke and burning tea bags.

I digress. There is never such a thing as a deserved peace, it seems. Creator works in ways beyond my imagining and tests us when we believe we are safe, even in the quiet of daylight grass. On a bench of many. Aside a cement walkway shaded by the climbing tree I jumped from just minutes before. Refrain. Quiet. Cleanliness. All at a cost.

Men are aberrations from the construct of chaos. They sow machinations upon us that destroy, the patriarchal divinity of malice and undoing. I am sitting on this bench watching the sky meld with its clouds. I am sitting beneath the leafshade of the tree canopy, somber and absent, yet present and aware. All good things behave in balance. Bad, or perceived evil, that is, must also makes it appearance.

A man approaches in my peripheral. He looks like the street sleepers who deserve housing and mental health access. And food. And education. His skin is melanin-rich, a shade of soil like mine, before dirt is watered yet dewy, full of discoloration beneath clothing. I believe it's called a "farmer's tan". But he is like me. Latin, Spanish-speaking, yet a man. A man who perceives certain aspects of people as fruit to eat for his own accord. Misdirected, misrepresented, misallocated rage. He wears a sweaty navy t-shirt and long pants. He hunches as he walks, his backpack slipping into his thin frame and outward from his stressed back. Even as I stare into the sky, I can feel the familiar grin of a hungering wraith. A blackguard approaches, I hear the creator whisper into my ear.

"Hello," he says in that accented English, like my mother's brothers in Ecuador. Pervasive, though. Expecting.

I stare in the sky, nodding. I do not respond. I am somber right now. I want to be alone. In my own space. Away from everybody.

"Hello," he says again, and his neck is bending in a stare, his elbows against his knees, his legs spread eagle.

"I know you can hear me."

I nod, my body's subconscious mannerisms reacting as they've been propagandized to. Mannerly. Civilized. Womanly........

But I am not afraid. My somber is transmutating. It is appearing at the edifice of a hilltop, nay, mountaintop, where blood fuses into facial apparations and boils into that ever-equalizing rage. Why must he bother me? Why must he expect reverence? I stare into the sky, moreso, and the clouds are disappearing. I do not hear anyone around us, the teenagers sitting meters from us on their own bench, the butch black lady with headphones on is walking farther away, and I realize I was more absent than I wanted to be. I am alone right now. Alone with a god apparent.

"What's your name?" he asks, and he's thirsting, this man, this abomination of the creator, that demanding undertone, the offspring of domination. Blackguard. Bastard.

I start to undo. There are keys between my fingers that were there to unlock my bike beside me. A fickle finger play begins, and I twist them between the gloves I wear. Metal against metal, the ring of artifical urgency, yet I sit. This is but another game that I must win.

"I know you can hear me. What's your name?" he says, fickle, annoyed, still sitting on his own bench beside my own.

My skin is warm, my visage turning. I chuckle by the nonsense that is occuring, but it melds into a waiting smear. I am ready. Whatever is to happen, will happen by the supposed consequence of the creator. I am merely a facsimile of resistance, a stardust comet of rebellion, the spawn of my mother and our mothers before her. Fear is a tool of control, yes. But it is also a weapon to react. I am reacting. I am waiting. I am the godkiller.

There are keys between my fingers, and I tighten my grip. My subconscious knows to smile, but it also knows to scream. It knows to bleed. It knows how to kill.

"I am George. What is your name?" he asks again. He waits. I shake my head slowly, and the smile returns, my smile, yet it is twisted, a mimicry of his own, reactive, countering, a mirror of insanity.

He stands. "Can I sit next you?" he asks, pointing to the empty space beside me. Closer he comes. Sterile. Scentless. Empty.

There is a moment when every transgender woman must come to her own conclusion of reality that we live in a country that wants us to die in whichever way we can. It is a convenience to the government and the authority as our very existence is resistance and our freedoms are an evolution for all others. Suicide, murder, disappearances. These are all preferred conclusions to our ends. Yet there is a moment when a transgender woman must also realize that no one will come to save her, no matter the circumstance, no matter the creator's whims. We are the godkillers in our reality. We must slay the slayer. And here, I tell her, a god approaches.

He walks forward, closer, and I turn my head from the sky for the very first time and stare at him through my black sunglasses and say, "No, por favor. Sale de aqui, por favor." How mannerly, everpresent.

She is human, he thinks. An echo of revelation occurs to him. Dark skin is seen as a fetish to the white man. And the white man teaches our fathers what is considered appropriate, no matter how damning. We are seen as a consumption of sorts, with how our bodies have been related to delicacies for the tasting. But when a Spanish man who speaks like my uncles and talks like my cousins assumes a doll is simply a doll to play with with no ability or capacity of self-thought, he is, in and of itself, vulnerable.

She speaks. Yes, I do. And I speak your language. My language. Our language. A connection is made with this god and godkiller, and he leaves. He nods and is in fear. It is likely he thought I was a sex worker waiting for a client, or, maybe he wanted to steal my bike with threats. I didn't include that bit of dialogue for the narrative, but he did complement my bike several times. No, no, no. Truthfully, though, I wanted him to attack. I wanted to retaliate to the highest of my power, no matter how relatively small my physical prowess was to his. I wanted to beat the man. I wanted to watch him bleed or die trying. I wanted to release my anger on such a foul copy of a man. Bitter thing that walked away.

I pity the fool for missing the discovery of my fire. I would've burned every bit of his flesh just to enact whatever justice I saw fit. And there I was again. Missing the movement of the sky. Wind bleeding through branches and tree leaves. The great giant covering me in its shade. The creator reminded me that my voice has power. My silence was my weakness. My shout, a weapon to fell a god.

Yet, still, I remain unsatisfied.

Baltimore City Government Leadership is Disgraceful

Saturday, May 16, 2026

I was going to write a whole rant at seven in the morning, but I just can't. Our leadership pretends to care about us, but they instead take donor money from corporations and the wealthy to fill their pockets at the expense of the people. They act as though because they are Democrats and that they are "not Republicans", we must automatically be grateful they are, in fact, in leadership and should shut the fuck up. It's disgraceful. Brandon Scott, Zeke Cohen, Ryan Dorsey, Odette Ramos. They don't care about bettering our lives, just providing flowery words to shut us up for a few more days until we discover another lie they've been trying so hard to cover up like signing on for data centers by John Hopkins, a data center that costs more than $150 million and that the state government has provided to them $9 million for the creation in marginalized parts of Baltimore City. They don't care that our water is going to be polluted, our climate destroyed, our homes unlivable, all so that they can make millions in the process at the expense of our lives. I am seriously so fucking over this apathetic, Democratic leadership that becomes aggressive the moment we criticize them for their inaction.

Baltimore City has the highest budget for their police department, per capita, in the entire nation. Nearly $653 million to the Baltimore Police Department while healthcare and education barely meet a third of the former's budget. And you know who pretended to not know? Zeke Cohen. Probably the rest of them, too, if they responded. It's so fucking abhorrent and pathetic that these suits pretend to care about us, but they rely wholly on our arrogance, our illusionment. But we are being disillusioned. We are realizing how much of a lie the capitalist American construct is. This entire settler-colonial, apartheid creation is a fucking disgraceful lie. The "I want to recognize the land we are on" lazy fucks, the "vote blue no matter who" weasel bottoms, and so and so forth. "Vote Blue No Matter Who...unless they actually have policies like universal healthcare and anti-war sentiment and transportation alternatives that aren't just a fucking car" bull fuckers.

"AI is inevitable" they say, as they actively allow AI to enter our world from tech billionaires that artificially bring the artifical into existence and somehow equate it to a natural phenomenon. It is not inevitable, you loose rodent. You're the run bringing into our fucking society, Odette, Brandon, Zeke. You are all going to destroy our homes because you'd rather be a fucking lazy politician that refuses to encounter their own constituent outrage so that you can pretend to be a living deity and angel in society because suddenly being a "Democratic" saves you from doing absolutely anything. And these same people hate Zohran Mamdani not because of who he is but for what he presents. He's doing the thing that Democrats have always claimed they are doing: ACTION. Mayor Scott thinks doing a "90-day Spring Cleanup" is this amazing, newfound miracle, when having Baltimore City Government actively clean up the city and provide benefits for their constituents should be A FUCKING EVERYDAY JOB. HOLY SHIT. THE BARE FUCKING MINIMUM, AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO CHEER HIM ON FOR IT? I'm so over the do-nothing-democrats! We need a socialist overtake, but this god-damn country has propagandized its entire population for so long because education isn't free for a reason that folks are more happy with a fascist dictator or a sterile, vegetative inactive corporate democrat than a socialist who literally just wants the people to live better lives.

Property over people, right? Save the rich, fuck the poor. Our police isn't ours, it is the wealthy's. The police protects their property, the police protects their assets, their lives, their existences. They don't care about us. Our leadership doesn't care about us. It's time we remind these suits, these slim, scarce majority of people, that we have power in numbers. All they have is their words and wallets. We have the mallots and fists and blades to cut down their ropes. Fuck them. Fuck the rich. Tax them, Brandon Scott. I know you won't. Because you are them.

I Got Hit By A Car

Friday, May 8, 2026

A lot of American exceptionalism and classist theology teaches us to side with the oppressor and always question the victim or the oppressed. With that being said, no, I was not at fault. I was riding my bike in New York City, around the lower part of Manhattan with my partner and friend, and we had not only the right of way, but were as visible as we could be with the amount of lights we had. The driver not only was blocking both the crosswalk and side street, but he also broke several traffic laws by being a hazard for folks not in cars. He initially backed his car up, and I interpreted that as him not only seeing us but giving us space to go in front of him, and our friend Ibrahim did actually ride in front of him. Alas, when it was my turn to ride in front of his car, he immediately accelerated into me, and I was launched off my bike, into the New York City streets where my forehead and asphalt made contact with each other, causing me to be severely concussed, and the driver eventually drove away. Ergo, a hit and run. He initially got out of his car to make sure I wasn't dead and that he didn't commit murder, and when he noticed I was breathing, and my partner told him to pull aside so we could get his information, he instead drove off, because, well, god forbid you hold yourself accountable for nearly killing someone.

If you ask me, he committed attempted murder. There were no cameras at this intersection, it was busy as fuck, car drivers in every corner caught in evening congestion, blasting their horns, and even the guy whose car who I was launched into, my frame hitting his rear light, made time to get out not to check on me but to CHECK HIS CAR, also dipped because, well, god forbid we care more about people than property.

No, we didn't take any pictures of the assailant. We had some hope for humanity that he'd pull over and provide his information. No, the police have yet to find him. No, I don't think he'll ever be found. My glasses were broken on the fall, and I have a concussion. My entire body is in pain, I have bruises everywhere, and I'm honestly fortunate enough to not be dead or have broken bones. Even if I did die, American society has developed such a violent malice towards the impoverished and those who are unable to drive or afford to drive that the likely response from car drivers would be, "Well, it's your fault for being on the road on a bike". Never does the status quo question itself. Never does society reflect onto itself and the standards that we have been given. I am genuinely grateful I am not dead. If I was, that'd make the authority's response to my death far easier because I am ultimately silenced and can be spoken for not by myself but another who can easily twist the entire situation against my favor.

The bike is fine. My front wheel is destroyed, but it's fine. It was a new wheel---pink Velocity rim---and so were my glasses, of which I had just received just two weeks prior to the crash (I initially typed accident because we are propagandized to call these crashes 'accidents', and that language therefore takes away ANY accountability from the assailant/murderer). My mind is all over the place. It's hard for me to keep a single thought. I've been increasingly more forgetful. It's hard to maintain conversation. I honestly am afraid I've developed a traumatic brain injury of some sort. I hate being vulnerable and weakened outside of my own accord. But I'm alive. Gods, I'm alive. And it's angering. It's angering that a hit-and-run can just occur with little impunity, and I am forced to continue my life as if nothing had happened. America is such a reactive society. If I died, then there'd be some sort of response that night to hold the man accountable. But since I survived, nothing occurred. "Oh, she's breathing". I'm still injured, though. I'm still bleeding. I'm still in pain. I'm still broken, mentally, emotionally. How many more times does the system think we'll allow injustice to pursue? There is a breaking point amongst these things where even the individual reaches their limit and demands accountability. When all is lost, there is nothing to lose.

Even after all of this, I still loved New York City. It's such a beautiful place. I don't care how stimulating it is for others. I felt so invisible, in the best way. There's a human saturation amongst every street that I just blend in. Save the street. In the streets I am the most visible. I am seen yet feel the most empowered. I am god on the streets, on my bike. It's so liberating. I think the reason why car drivers hate us so much is because they hate the system that has put them there, but they don't realize it. They want something visible to hate, and it's impossible to hate someone inside of a car because you can't even see them. But you can see the cyclist. You see how happy they are, how visible their emotions become, how exciting it is to see them be excited. And envy develops, and so on, and so on.

I hope they find the man. I do. And, yes, I will be suing. The guy did a hit-and-run. The guy almost killed me. And, if I have the choice, I want to see him behind bars for a long time. We need to stop letting attempted homicides like this slide just because America has taught us to blame the victim amongst every circumstance. No longer.

Free Palestine. Liberation for the working class. Tax the rich. Fuck the oppressors.