“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.
