In Defense of Queer Villains

                Queer coding is the time honored process of implying a villain is LGBTQ without saying it. From the effeminate princes prancing across Mel Gibson films (yes, both Braveheart and weirdly The Passion. No, neither was historically accurate) to lackluster “gender reveal” finales (Crying Game, Ace Ventura) it’s a cringe worthy way to enforce gender stereotypes.  However, sometimes these villains are deliciously despicable: The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the drag queen Divine and she has the best song of the film with “Poor Unfortunate Souls." She also has a healthy dose of personality opposite a, let’s face it, flat heroine (although Ariel herself shares an unexpected following among trans children who long to feel “part of this world”).  Likewise, although overtly femme, Scar in The Lion King is a love-to-hate villain with an impeccable mane. The problem then isn’t when villains are queer but rather when queer characteristics are villainized. When the motive for stalking is spurned advances the lusty lesbian villain it falls flat, but if perhaps she is power hungry and fierce we can forgive a less-then-ethical power grab.

Aliens

This world is so hot, sticky, and alien. The air breaths on my neck causing my hair damp and limp  to form a small knot resting on my nape. It’s never quiet, something howls or sings in the night. Last night I caught a tiny lizard in the house with a cup and paper, the same motion of arachnid catching as the Midwest but for a completely different creature. There is no equivalent to a lizard in the Midwest, they inhabit more space here than mice, but mice might be the closest example. They are reptilian mice. Every time I go outside they skitter from the porch by the handful. I am fascinated by these alien creatures, these little dinosaurs. Keeping lizards is exotic where I’m from, requiring special heat lamps and a mister to simulate humidity. I’ve never owned one but it seemed complex visiting the lizard keepers of the Midwest. It’s weird to think of them outside. Breathing this air. Thriving.

                My cat shares this sentiment. The other night he let out a cross between a moan and a howl. Awwwwoooo. Awwwooooo. This was similar enough to his car song for us to look at each other, concerned. It is his call to the unfamiliar. We found the cat in the hall with something rubbery and limp dangling from his mouth. Awwoooo. Awwooo. Look at what I’ve hunted, my strange alien prize. Before we could grab it he swallowed the lizard in his mouth.

Prelude: The Barbie Art Project that Made its Point Before I Could Start it (and How it Almost Didn’t Get Off the Ground)

Representation Matters Barbie

Simple Premise: Every kid should have a doll family that looks like their family or the family they want one day. How hard could this be to DIY a less pink, more inclusive Barbie set? It should be a simple case of a few repaints and mixing a few doll set. I’m from a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, blended family, and I’m gay I wanted to use some of these elements to create a representative American Barbie family. I dabble in doll making and collecting from time to time but have really basic skills. This is a simple project anyone could do with supplies they already have at home (probably).

Ordinary

“One minute you’re waiting for the sky to fall

The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all.”

“Lovers in a Dangerous Time” Bruce Cockburn, 1984

The moment the star swells before bursting

is the most beautiful

worth the Technicolor aftermath

as light splinters,

shatters

and begins the long fall to Earth

I’m working on grad school apps but it’s taken a backseat to perhaps considering schools in blue states or out of the country. It’s not lost on me that as I am defining my poetry in my personal statements as “lesbian domestic, lesbian confessional” this country is showing it’s backlash to my “ordinary”. My idea is that the lesbian confessional has not been fully explored, how could it? We’ve had marriage a year.  The ordinary domestic--the sour milk breath of an infant pressed to your chest, or the weight of afternoon sunlight across the living room as you read in silence—these ordinary moments, the non-events of life haven’t been fully written because we are not ordinary. We are denied a place in the ordinary. So much the act of raising a child is political for a queer woman in the way it isn’t for a straight one. The slant of light a search light looking for fault or a sign that we are the beginning of the end times, the breakdown of morality.

I don’t want to write political poems.

I am at my core a poet of love.

But the second I use the pronoun “she” it becomes a political act.

When I wrote my undergrad thesis I was not allowed to defend for honors over inappropriate line edits my teacher suggested. I wrote about the meaning of names and how chosen names in our [gay] culture relieve the weight of given ones. My professor crossed out “our” as if all US culture did the same.

She was wrong.

She was wrong and I didn’t get to defend for honors.

Maybe we aren’t ready for the lesbian confessional, my senior workshop wasn’t. It was that small red pencil line that crossed out my subculture. My otherness.

But it’s not the heterosexual domestic we’re afraid of losing. The heterosexual family unit is in danger of nothing more that perhaps being seen as uninteresting. As confessional. Women’s poetry. My ordinary will never be uninteresting, it will always be other, poltical. It will also be political protest poetry.

The fight over an “our” ordinary. Perhaps a different sort of ordinary. A queer ordinary.

I’ll build you a house by the sea

Without closets

And bedrooms upon bedrooms

To unpack all of our baggage

And let it the afternoon sunlight. 

A thread

I’m having a hard time with the reality of my dog’s surgery next Thursday. He’s 14 but healthy enough to go under anesthesia. The surgery is small, the surgeon’s hands skillful, but I waver on verge of nervous and pleading tears all day. Please. Please, don’t take my dog. 

I never thought my 14 year old rescue dog would outlive my dad, but he did.

And this dog, this rescue mutt from Texas, shepherded me through the sickness, and the long shadow of grief as my constant companion.

I see my dog and I think of my father, frail but skin yellowed and stretched too far over the center until he looked a bit like the moon. Think of that last hug at the hospital, the goodbye that wasn’t supposed to be forever. Crying and trying not to cry. 

Holding my father in a hug like maybe I could hold him to Earth.

And failing.

I think, I’m not ready for my shepherd to go out like that. Not ready to drop him off for that final goodbye that isn’t supposed to be a final goodbye. The threads of this grief are tangled, coiled so tight into a dark tapestry, that little as I am I cannot reach my arms around. It blankets everything in the shadow of loss.

I cannot lose my dog because my father died. Because there should be a limit on how much the universe can take before it owes restitution.  

Clay Daughters

We

   women

   educated

&
disseminated

on the wind like seeds
to land alone and
like Hera make our daughters
out of clay.

Daughters to grow
down
beneath the soil.
Roots beginning as small clay-brown hands
grasping a finger tying us to

Gaia

to earth

to our ancestral mothers.

And to this place we landed      tossed aside
to till this hard soil into forest.

Microagression

I froze when the waitress asked “together or separate.”

Because here we were not just with your coworkers

but your employees.

And it took me back to Northern Michigan.

To a blue collar bar with wood paneling,

ancient crackling neon sign for Pabst Blue Ribbon

before the hipsters claimed it.

The bar was

haunted by spirits