Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Ordinary
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
A thread
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Clay Daughters
disseminated
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
And to this place we landed tossed aside
to till this hard soil into forest.
Monday, July 25, 2016
Microagression
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Wrong Way
Today I turned the wrong way and ended up in your neighborhood.
I felt the a cold, pointed apprehension prick under my scalp. Awoke from the shock when the driver beside me laid in to his horn. It took a bit to shake of this feeling, like physical pain.
And I wondered why it haunts me, still. We dated a few months my senior year, a fall romance turned damp and listless in the spring.
Now I haven't seen you in 4 months. We've been strangers almost as long as we were lovers.
Yet you haunt me, still. This pain like an ice pick behind my eye. Except lobotomies are for forgetting. This is the pain of the body remembering. I'm not sure how you ended up in my limbic system, coiled in my lizard brain.
I want to shout, see? If you'd only waited we could have had everything we planned. Now I stand here, the fool in the rain proving a point to no one as I live our life myself.
Monday, June 27, 2016
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Give Me that Old Time Dyke Spirituality: Why Womyn’s Communities Should Matter to Millennials
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Pride and Prejudice
This year is different. This year is the first time in awhile I've felt Pride really embodying it's original intention. Pride is a political act. Pride isn't safe. Pride is about being seen and taking back our space. We're here. We're queer. Get used to it. We aren't going anywhere. Pride is a spectacle with drag queens, drag kings, dykes on bikes, leather and nudity.
Pride isn't a little street festival, just something to do over the weekend. We go to Pride with intention. We go to Pride at great personal cost to ourselves. We go to Pride to be seen in our most queer identites. We do not soften them. We do not cover them.
Queer covering, described by Kenji Yoshino in his book Covering: the Hidden Assult on Our Civil Rights, describes a survival technique used by queer people to tone down a disfavorable identity. Maybe it's acting less "femme" if you are a man at work or dressing more feminine if you are a woman. It can be keeping your personal life to yourself. Not being in the closet exactly, just not being upfront that your new boyfriend is actually your new girlfriend. Maybe you deflect and ask the other women at work about the new men in their lives avoid talking about the woman in yours. We trade the motorcycles for the mom van, the crew cuts for curls and say "see? We're just like you. We live in the suburbs with our kids."
Pride is a point of contention when it comes to covering. Pride is the opposite of covering, or it was. Now, we want Neil Patrick Harris to move next door and Ellen DeGeneres on the PTA. We would rather not have the bear in leather next door. Marriage is something the mainstream understands, landdykes? Not so much. But, covering isn't working.
A gay night club in Orlando was the target of the recent shooting. Our bars, like Pride are places we don't cover. Last time I was at a gay bar I watched a burlesque dancer with tassels on her ass. There's smoke machines, flashing lights, and sometimes a guy in only a jockstrap handing out glow sticks. We grind with our partners on the dance floor. We make out. Maybe we have sex in the bathroom. Straight bars, or as we typically call them--bars, aren't like that. But that's because the gay bar is one place our sexuality is normalized.
And that's why some people are silent about the attack. Do you have to be that kind of gay? Do you have to be so wild? It's that kind of behavior that makes people uncomfortable. We get it from our own sometimes. Don't be so "faggy" don't be too "butch." it shows people are still uneasy, we have not yet reached the level of comfort with assless chaps as we have marriage.
But consider this, where do you see heterosexual behavior? On billboards, in commercials, in magazines, in movies. You don't have to go to a special section of the store to find straight porn and the actors in your porn will probably actually be heterosexuals having heterosexual sex. Gay porn is often made by straight actors for straight consumers. No one has lesbian sex with press-on nail-claws unless it's in a porno or a cautionary tale about the dangers of long nails. On TV we see straight actors on top of each other gyrating pretending to have sex. We don't see a whole lot of kissing, or even hand-holding with queer people. In fact many times we don't even get confirmation a character is queer. Yet, were pretty aware which characters on television are straight.
Society may be okay with gay people in theory. They are not okay with what we do. It's love the sinner hate the sin. That's not good enough. Yes, you love us as people, but are you okay with us expressing our love as you do yours? If you feel weird about the shooting the answer is no. You like gays but not "that kind" of gay. You like gays but not the "really faggy" ones or the "really butch" ones. You like gay people who could pass for heterosexuals but simply aren't. And you want these heterosexual-looking gays to act asexual in public.
That's why a night club was targeted. It targeted our uncovered selves, our sexual behavior, our audacity to do in public what we do in private. It was an attack on our refusal to cover.
Saturday, June 11, 2016
My Father, the Storm
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Wilderness
"Wilderness" was originally published in the Open Field. It is the winner of a 2015 Clyde D. Tull Prose Award, a 2015 Reader's Choice Award. It was a finalist for the Nick Adams Short Story Contest in 2016.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Today was a Good Day
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Excerpts from my Senior Chapbook "Gods of Shadow and Light": Lois Lane Loves Wonder Woman
This isn't a poem about my girlfriend.
Okay that's a lie.
This isn't directly a poem about my girlfriend. This is poem for all the partners of Superheros in the world; the teachers, paramedics, doctors, firefighters, nurses, social workers, and anyone who saves the world at work. It can be really hard to take more of a support role in a relationship; to make the dinners, change plans at the last minute, have nights in because your significant other is exhausted. This job is so so important if undervalued, even for Lois Lane who has a career in journalism.
Wonder Woman was recently set up as a paramour for Superman and there are online debates about "who is better for Superman." What about who's better for Lois Lane? Wonder Woman? This poem pays homage to the type of female-centric strength and identity based on relationships praised by radical cultural feminists. It isn't less than, it isn't working in the shadows of a partner's career.
Radical feminism came in two distinct philosophical camps: radical liberal feminists argued the nature of femininity combined with women’s biological reproductive role impaired their development as human beings. Biology and culture combined to keep women from development as individuals. Philosophers in this camp argued women must be liberated from reproduction. This philosophy urged the adoption of androgynous traits--that is traits either male or female, to create whole individuals. Radical cultural feminists argued the reverse, that women could be empowered through femininity and our reproductive roles. Our nurturance and interdependence shouldn't be replaced by individuation and achievement, but instead, a higher value could be attributed to interdependence on our community and the bonding of our identity to our personal relationships. This development is not inferior to male development and leads to personal growth, maturity (a stage of development psychology suggested women never reached because they didn't become individuated!) and the development of empathy. The latter would strongly influence the Women’s Music movement of the 1970’s which sought to change a society that rewarded separation and achievement by building attachment and community interdependence.
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A sign at Michfest on Lois Lane (if this is your pic I will credit, let me know.) |