round-up: 6/18
Happy Saturday!
I hope y’all are well, and staying healthy, and taking good care of yourselves & each other.
I’m on vacation so I don’t have much for you today, but here it is:
Housekeeping
Resources
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I’m in Italy right now and it’s beautiful! Look at it!
What else?
Pride month continues so here’s my lil shopping guide:
Resources:
Also:
I’ve talked a lot about being a good community-member, about tracking your influences, and about showing your work.
Sharing all the recent quotations & poems etc. I’ve encountered lately feels like part of that. So here are some passages that I loved & I hope you’ll check out these writers’ oeuvres.
Quotations:
An ancient city of light is buried
in my chest.
Forgive me.
I can’t pray tonight.
Today, I am stealing
another boy’s teeth.
We never refer to sadness
as something that looks
like secrecy
but it does
-Chase Berggrun
I imagine my insides sometimes—
part female, part male, part terrible dragon.
-Ada Limon
Joy is one way to claim personhood, to resist being flattened out. Still, I’m skeptical about the poetics of joy, its resistant capacities, at least on its own.
Recently, there was a Law and Order SVU episode in which a confrontation between a group of black cis boys and a white trans girl resulted in the trans girl’s death and a black boy’s imprisonment. The episode seemed, on the face of it, to have an anti–racist and anti–transphobic message; it made both protagonists fully human, divided our sympathy. In this rendering, both the black cis boy and the white trans girl are essentially good kids thrown into a world where their trajectories have been unjustly predetermined. The trans girl will inevitably die young, the black boy will inevitably go to jail. We are supposed to notice that this is not the fault of either individual, or any individual; rather, it is the fault of “the system.” Law and Order pretends to want us to rage against the machine. But, it’s funny, how even this good liberal story can’t imagine blackness and transness as anything but antagonists, that the place where they meet can be marked by anything but violence.
It’s possible that I simply find joy exhausting work.
Poetry moves us and reconfigures us; poetry allows us to find pattern and sense in a chaotic world; poetry gives voice, song, and spark to a fundamental creative force that can resist, or tango with, forces of destruction.
Poetry is always somewhere. If it leaves the realm of the arts, it is all the easier to see that it belongs first and foremost in action, in a way of living and in the search for a way of living. Everywhere repressed, this poetry springs up everywhere. Brutally put down, it is reborn in violence.
-Raoul Vaneigem
It’s great that there’s no money in poetry because we can make the art we want and feel free of market pressures, but this is the dark side of that freedom: because there’s no real capital in poetry, ego and reputation become the currency that poets stake so much on. If there’s no money in poetry, and slim chance for wider cultural recognition, then poets’ best chance of attaining power is by having a good reputation among their peers. Losing that reputation by being publicly critiqued or exposed online feels, and often is, dire.
How can we harness the powers of new media not to “encourag[e] horizontal hostility,” as Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider, but to “question the vertical lines of power or authority”?
We dressed in whatever
held us together & starved for love.
I was told god would be here would come
to lick the sin from the earth & replace
my body with something else.
-Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Knowing I could never be
the girl of anything’s dreams I stayed inside
& spoke only in platitudes.
-Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
how when the older man face sunken as damp earth
invites me over feeds me drinks + the promise of moneyi stigma my lips into entrance to receive him
-torrin a. greathouse
this story is about sex; but
it’s not; but maybe, it’d be easier
that way; his hand clenching; like
teeth; on the back of your neck;
-torrin a. greathouse
the porch undressed of wasps & us / our old names—
-Bradley Trumpfheller
Your hand finally on the small of my back, without any kind of fear.
-Bradley Trumpfheller
This time, I’ll be a girl & you can be anything / alive.
-Bradley Trumpfheller
A thousand miles
from here there is a forty-three
hundred foot drop to the forgotten
syllable of her name that sometimes
surfaces at night like a buoy in my mouth
& bobs through the jetsam
of homesickness that pollutes
even my dreams.
-Meg Day
Sorrow,
I will follow your hoofprints anywhere
but to the shoreline that made me
a tidepool instead of solid stone.
-Meg Day
I met her at my house. Down
in the basement I put a record on.
I lay beside her on the floor.
I touched her hair.
There in the contours
and shadow we recognized each other.
-Alison Prine
Everything worth doing
is worth being terrified by.
-Alison Prine
what good does a memory
of the garden here
(half dead) (half place)
(half thinking
the place) do to remain
aware of me
the obscurest moon
-C Dylan Bassett
On nights when I am
your husband—& the elderly woman at the symphony
pats my hand & calls me son—I wish I knew how to be
that man, if just for an instant. I wish I knew how to turn to you
with the veneration of a spouse, to feel the law make firm
the ground beneath my knees as your brilliance pulls me
to them.
-Meg Day
I’m still trying to figure out what it means to stay.
-Hieu Minh Nguyen
The strip of skin on your stomach is paled moon, marbled.
-Jackie Delaney
I want to be held back: by tide. I want to run two fingers over the moon.
-Jackie Delaney
It only takes three seconds for it al to swell, and end. Weeks later, I am still brushing my hair like it matters. Who is to say what is beautiful: the fog like a wall on the water, the dead frog I almost step on in the road, this morning light. Or the hiss of the shower, the open lungs, the thrill to spend a day alone. The freckle I find.
-Jackie Delaney
So often this body becomes a distraction—
delicate husk, inconvenient hair,
the bizarre need to recharge.
-Kaveh Akbar
My whole form is mostly
skeleton and loose meat: that I’ve managed
anything at all seems cause for praise.
-Kaveh Akbar
Now I listen for the sighs
of people who love me, each agitation I create
a reminder that I am less than constant
in my grace.
-Kaveh Akbar
See how
I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how
my throat is filling with salt? Boil me.
-Kaveh Akbar
When I say I get wet for her, I mean holistically.
The palms, the under-arms.
Of course, the mouth.
-Erin M. Bertram
You know that moment, in a glass elevator, when you watch, dumbfounded—as if in slow-motion, & yet with a logic clean as math—the ceiling of one floor become the floor of the next?
-Erin M. Bertram
Say Lake of Fire, sprinkle Sissy somewhere
in his sermon & I am draped in a gown
of kerosene again, an inventory
of lit matches spilling from the split
maw of heaven again.
-Jabari Jawan Allen
I walk down the aisle when the preacher spit
Damnation, the stupid crucible
of my heart leading me
to my own perdition.
-Jabari Jawan Allen
As you began to undress,
you looked at me, without averting your eyes—
and with great carefulness, began to unbutton your shirt.
It was almost painful to see the nakedness of your face
made even more naked by the act of undressing. As if
I were witnessing something not meant for my eyes—
-Danusha Laméris
We crossed over
into a wilderness. Or maybe you were the wilderness
I crossed into—through a thicket, under a stone arch.
And I just stood there in my gangly, animal body.
-Danusha Laméris
What happened when he touched you?
The world spilled out.
-Eduardo C. Corral
Once I read a book about infinity. I didn't understand it, but accepted the premise: that things tend toward chaos, centripetal motion, spinning outward from the source. This was when I was entropic, made of electrical storms. In advance, I should tell you that soon I will break into your chest and rewire your heart, and it will probably blow. I've never been good at the heart part.
-Marya Hornbacher
I love my fingers; they are the only parts of my body that are genderless.
-Hussain Ahmed
Here / what I cannot name / I call holy to avoid questioning.
-Hussain Ahmed
The love for those parts of my body that are least sexualized are a form of worship / like hurricanes / praise / because their destructions earn them names that help track our griefs.
-Hussain Ahmed
Everything holy has a cost.
-Hussain Ahmed
That’s all I have for you today.
Thanks for being here.
-Despy Boutris