OCHO A Journal of Queer Arts
Guest Editor Rae Gouirand
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September 2014 www.8888ocho.com
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Cobi Moules Untitled Clover Canyon 2013 oil on canvas 8“ x 6”
EDITOR Rae Gouirand ART COBI MOULES SAM LOPES JILL LEININGER
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On My Lunch Hour Vacation Fetish (c. 1874) Silent Retreat
D. GILSON
To a Young Poet What I Know
BRYAN BORLAND
Animals Communion The Waiter, the Revolutionary, the Legislator, & the Poet
deborah brandon
the neighbor has a yard she is in… he says: I am eager to hear your star…
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DWAYNE MARTINE
Colonialism
B.B.P. HOSMILLO
Withholding
MARY MERIAM
Liebegott
JENNIFER PATTERSON
Dismemberment
JULIE R. ENSZER
A Lesbian Fantasia on Angels in America
JORY MICKELSON
excerpts from Self Portrait With Men in Cars
JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO
CHRIS WELLS
ALISON REED
MARY ANN DAVIS
Six Letters to Carl Sagan from Voyager One
Punctuation Anatomy of an Eye Skin Texas Sunflowers Metal Folding Forgetting Los Angeles Midmorning (W)hole
Confessions of an Art Worshipper
A Certain Simultaneity: On Lyricism, Criticism, and Healing Divides Between and Within
JUSTIN BOND
There—no, there Beneath the Dead Elm We are the Breakers of Our Own Hearts
JOY LADIN
Corpus
ON THE ROAD HUGH RYAN & SASSAFRAS LOWREY
Report from the 2014 NYC Queer Book Diorama Show
MANAGING EDITOR Matthew Hittinger Sam Lopes T Cell March 2013 mixed media 30”x18’x18
PUBLISHER Didi Menendez
GOSS183 Publishing Group
FRONT COVER
Cobi Moules Untitled (06-17-2012) oil on canvas 40”x30”
E D I T O R I A L
N O T E
When Matthew Hittinger asked me to edit this issue last February, I told him that I found the idea of a journal that moved really moving. It’s not like anything in life stays still—and straying can have profound purpose. Art knows that. But even in motion we still touch—in our visions of what is and what can be. It’s been an incredible honor to act as the eyes and ears of this publication these last few months and to bring together the talents and messages of this issue. I could not be more touched by the internal conversations born from this combining, or more grateful to have had the opportunity to sit with all of the incredible work that came in for #33. I’m passing the reins over to Wendy C. Ortiz for #34. Stay tuned. Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry and the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award for Poetry. Her new work has appeared most recently in American Poetry Review, VOLT, The Rumpus, The California Journal of Poetics, The Brooklyner, ZYZZYVA, [PANK] online, and in a Distinguished Poet
feature for The Inflectionist Review. A recent guest editor for a special issue of Adanna in tribute to Adrienne Rich, Nonfiction Editor for California Northern magazine, and lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis, she currently helps judge the Triangle Awards for The Publishing Triangle and leads a variety of poetry, prose, and cross-genre workshops locally and online from her home base in Davis, California (allonehum.wordpress.com).
Sam Lopes History Lesson 2007 mixed media 14’x3’x3’
Cobi Moules Untitled (detail) Winter in Wyoming 2013 oil on canvas 41“ x 71”
JILL LEININGER
If I were pressed to say what links these poems, at least thematically, I would probably say something about preservation, the paradox of the artist’s compulsion to capture a moment. It’s most direct in “Fetish,” which is a reflection on the 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, but apparent in
some of the more self-conscious notations of the other poems, too. I still find it strange that language is both the instrument that leads me into my life and the charm that draws me away from it. These poems present this process of “capture” at different distances and with varying levels of anxiety and acceptance.
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JILL LEININGER
Vacation The bee dives into gentian blue
On My Lunch Hour I take off my blouse and put on my apron, tweaking campus radio to tackle the kitchen. It shocks the cats—all this clanking at midday, me!, half-naked to empty the fridge (old chile soup, old beef). After all, I’ve survived this Christmas alone. So I salt eggplant to drain (it may be too early, but I’m planning ahead) and bop at the sink as the soft carrots grind. I return a call, refill that prescription. Season’s Greetings and rejections in the mail. Charred tortilla stuck to the good element, dark laundry on my way to the bathroom. I don’t write poetry.
jaws, and phthalo wraps the bumbler’s pulse, reluctant then nodding, ravenous, too. We pause, consumed by its sharp-cut mouth: the bee drinking and the bud yielding and their transaction ending, as the notes say, in sudden disentanglement. Though each of us, it seems, had plans to do more, take more, we’re satisfied to see the buzz back out, ass up, and shake the pollen off its legs; you say What luck, to stumble into this at Lac Pierre, and so far from the usual morning mess.
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JILL LEININGER
Silent Retreat
Fetish (c. 1874) She could make them beg in any number of ways. She could hold them still or frighten them wide open. Sometimes she tricked them into gestures she thought essential: one woman’s feigned annoyance, or the sad suck of a wrinkled eye. Under black velvet, the real always justified her means. The story goes she’d locked an artist in his closet for five hours just to capture him facing the blast of light he’d finally stopped pounding against, skin like paper, which she’d judged lighter by the trail of his whimpering, then plunged him into a purple blush. Julia, he’d said, Okay. Enough.
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I imagine fish breathing wholly and impossibly in thirty separate tanks. Thought. Sometimes, even my teachers are trapped here, a rectangular admiration of their own presence; they’re angling to be looked at profoundly, or looked through. Others get caught unhinging their wide and silent mouths. If you want words to teach you, they say, you must swallow them for years. Practice. By instinct, speech will sense the time to rise for air or food. Contained, even a kind of atrophy becomes grace, I imagine, though I probably shouldn’t. I wonder if should they warn us of the more unruly ones, espouse captive psychology or suggest what to do when a good idea dies because we’ve taken away its wildness. When we break silence, I ask if others might worry about that, the deep resentment of words.
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D. GILSON
These poems come from a series on American masculinities, and right now, I’m particularly interested in consumerism as a masculine-making ideal. I live in Washington, DC, which is perhaps the most American city in
many rites. We’re currently seeing an explosion of both horrible and wonderful gentrification, which of course is never free of complexities along lines of class, race, gender, or sexuality. That’s what I’m most consumed by right now.
To a Young Poet Beneath all this, I am craving Diet Coke, walking to 7-Eleven, the fanciest 7-Eleven in all the world right on 22nd Street in Dupont Circle. Almost June, it’s been a good spring for roses, a brisk-almost-June-night before thunderstorms come tomorrow, set in for a whole, humid week to kill the more delicate: bloodroot and lilac and hyacinth. Almost June, everyone agrees a ninetynine cent Big Gulp is a hell of a deal in any economy, so with the world’s fanciest 7-Eleven only two blocks away, maybe three, I walk north, fill my fortyone fluid ounces with Diet Coke just for the taste of it, pay my due and peruse aisles of Slim-Jims and Cool Ranch Doritos, Trojans and Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer now with aloe. Walking north still, a bookshop surprisingly open and on the clearance shelf— What Narcissism Means to Me, poems by Tony Hoagland. I buy it for a boy who is Catholic (thus breaking my commandment: thou shall not flirt with this student of your best friend who is not even gay and never will be and wants to be a poem-writing priest) or something like that. When the boy sends me a poem, I write to him: Be more specific. Read something new. He has a taste for the old. Beneath all this armor, I am craving Diet Coke and blood and clean hands. So I will send him the book. Do as I say, not as I do. And I will name him Helen, or Troy, or Paris is Burning: you are burning my heart. You are flaming an unstoppable war.
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Sam Lopes A Lot to Hold 2012 acrylic and colored pencil on panel 14’x3’x3’
D. GILSON
What I Know That her name was Robin, as in the tiny bird, feminine derivative from the medieval Robert, meaning bright fame; that she was fourteen, from Anacostia, from that side of the Potomac; that she shouldn’t have been walking by herself after dark; that she was going to 7-Eleven to buy a wicked apple Slurpee; that her mother wouldn’t report her missing until the next morning, after coffee; that her mother still grieves her baby Robin struck by a stolen car, which then hit a tree and was abandoned; that she died immediately; that it is likely the boy or man who stole my car just saw a late-model Jeep Cherokee nobody would miss; that where the bumper should be there is now a smear of blood the police officer tells me Don’t touch that, sir; that I will not cry in front of this police officer, this car now impounded, this belly laugh of Good thing you reported it stolen on Sunday morning; that I am not at fault here no more than any of us is at fault for these tiny, everyday tragedies; that these are not tiny to everyone; that her name was Robin and when her mother shows me her eighth grade picture, a mouthful of silver braces and tacky pink and green and blue rubber bands, I wonder if she got the Slurpee before the car hit her, and if the sweet of it cooled her tongue, or if she had yet to buy it, some comfort of this want.
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B R YA N B O R L A N D
Animals The year the man becomes intrigued by his own body is the year you lay silver at the base of his temples, an offering of vines the color of winter wolves, of links in steel chains strong enough to pull down trees and pull up skyscrapers. The month you move in, you begin to coax a jungle in this city, your fingers taunting muscle to follow through an age of ice that runs from root to pit. There is a cold so deep that if held long enough against the meat of your buttocks it screams in burn. Then comes a moment in the whipping snow when you allow a chest, a daddy, a gentleman. A wolf roams these streets. You smell him. Around all of these turns you stand your ground. You’ve learned. You grow what you need or it grows you first.
There are several erotic poems in my first book, but my writing style in my early twenties was anything but subtle—“Animals” came about when my husband challenged me to write an erotic poem. “Communion” and “The Waiter, The Revolutionary, the Legislator, & the Poet” address some ways Adrienne Rich has been on
my mind. The former looks at how I wrestled with the idea of naming SRP’s poetry journal for queer women after Rich; the latter I wrote in response to two news stories one Saturday morning about the tension in the Ukraine and the trend of states adopting laws allowing businesses to turn away homosexuals.
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B R YA N B O R L A N D
The Waiter, the Revolutionary, the Legislator, & the Poet The waiter who poured the coffee last night takes the palace this morning. And you are not in a motel room in Tempe writing of how the mask he wears makes his eyes look human. Or asking who will watch the children as their mothers are turned away from a lunch counter in Phoenix sixty years after the south carved the same harsh lessons into the bark of its pine. The past is repeating itself, Adrienne, so when will you rise again in these crowds of characters, the colleges and professors, the gas station clerks, the old
Communion Over coffee Adrienne says the people she can trust are the ones who will let her have her death. Are we keeping her too long? Better a literary journal than a shopping mall, she says. I don’t pretend to understand her shadow puppetry against these tables for two. Klein played poet at her feet and even he doesn't answer direct when asked what she'd think of these lines. Mostly we're the hungry content in our conversation. She at least humors us when we tell of old friends not congratulating the marriage. She says they're mere actors who want us to stay and further the plot. I ask if my notebook is a script I've tied to her hands, if I've any real claim to her
poets who know history well but remain absent in cold capitals where
possibility. She laughs and says, of course. She reminds us of her highway sĂŠances with Wallace Stevens. How
laws are being constructed, revised, pounded into form? Today
she'd turn left where his ghost finger pointed and end up God knows where.
the world needs another love poem like it needs blood in the throat.
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deborah brandon
∞ the neighbor has a yard she is in, which— not unlike a magazine— is a trap. she warns the grass she will come at it with knives
then lies
down an alley bricks have lost their corners
is anyone immune to erosion
my lip he took it
so i thought
These poems are excerpted from my book, A Botany of Limbs, which explores the liminal space of gender transition, as well as various interceptions of longing—for self; for the
are unfit for placing
certainly not
for chopin
jealousy, pecking out eyes
maude wore
left me no choice
i mean i thought i was swarms
lover. My preferred form is the fractured poetic narrative. I experiment with white space both aesthetically and as an act of creative suspension.
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deborah brandon
JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO
∞ he says: i am eager to hear your star. a splinter from the frame he says, i would open the door and let the wind kill you with the moon inside me.
go ahead, i say. but do sparrows stay in the barn through winter or do they build suckhouses under the elevated or find places with real green yards?
he says, let’s be honest, these tracks are no strangers to bones.
i say, a map eradicates the going.
These poems are from a manuscript that explores an intergalactic love affair between the Voyager space probes. By positioning the Voyagers as queer objects in a queer place, I work to explore themes
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of desire, post-coloniality and colonial complicity, and the tensions between science and magic. These particular letters are inspired by Carl Sagan’s own writing on space exploration and colonization.
JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO Six Letters to Carl Sagan From Voyager One
Dear Carl,
Dear Carl,
When lucky, we’ll find somewhere new for men like you to love like oceans churn sand. Purse mouthed, I’ll send words we’re taught not to use. Hiss jumbled code across unwired darkness. It’s the job of storms to never rest.
Culture as skilled accumulation. Look, it’s welded on my side. Burden new terrain with gold spun strides, art coded sticky with classical residue. Photograph of a nursing mother, of rush hour in Thailand. A double helix, elegant and profound. What more could the landscape ask of us?
Rally the mathematicians, physicists, the pundits. Organize thick paper stacks, blinding and white. The evening news will flash my face, steely. Distant. Yours, tele prompted. I’m billions & billions of nickels & dimes away, shiver still, longing for rust. Geography of homelessness, rudderless trauma. We bless and break each hustle with this grand expansion. One.
You bumperstickered me Mars 4 Martians, applauding the possibility of sandy mouthed sun stalkers or simple proteins clamoring to their frilled potential. But what if these planets, gray and reedy, were just rounds of plastic beneath equally plastic cups, shifting and snuck by some stony star god? Terrified of my own not-at-all-ing, I shiver approximate slumber. Sing of dreams I’ll never have, the dark my only mirror. One.
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JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO
Dear Carl, What of the blueprint of becoming a body. Of learning to swallow my tongue. Folding in stereo, applause. Well-dressed people navigating the rocks at water’s edge. I write letters with the steam of breath. The skinny apex of V. The florid shush of O. Look at me: I’m plugged in, I’m sonic boomed and boring bloom. Let me practice being the bad child. The ugly seed. The humid riddle / the damn ark. Another download. Another voice for God. Another homeland – imagine, another word for free. Oh, my wires ache with purpose, with catalyst and slopping urge. A body works to body, takes effort. Tantrum and scream, keeping heart in an ice bucket, my only-ness effervescent as champagne.
Dear Carl, I want to name the things I find. To call milk, or dry, or auger. To invert the u, make words that feeling form, flush for cheek and hip I’ll never see. I’m steadfast. I’m direct. Moving through space that needs me to exist as much as I need it. Or I am an apple, wind fell sweet as gravity’s prayer. Godish forces imagined as arithmetic, a formula for pull. As a moon that reaches to expose a wave, a pale arch of want. A body sloppy in grief. A candle made of wax until it is made of flame. Everything is waiting to be replaced. To be given name again. One.
One.
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JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO
Dear Carl, In your next transmission, don’t bother the code. Tell me your secret life. Nights lying awake while your starry obsessions pintwist, spiral around you. What it’s like to be able to touch the thing you love. When I look inside I’m a thousand horses, each gilded neck an arch of muscle in lavish frontier spectacle. Buffalo everywhere I am not. Somewhere, a man moves his lips the shape for beast, shoots, kills to take tongue bleeding holes. Flies swarm in celebration, lusty buzzing as blood curls, then dries. It’s the pattern of a leaf. Five veins unfolding in frond and fuzz. It is hot. The ground is swollen. No one wants to be told they are anything less than beautiful. He cocks his gun, shoots again.
Dear Carl, I’ll proceed as though work were neutral. Or love. Or Spring. Forces unfolding across meridians, sunflower bright and teeming. Only. Bright. A compass isn’t moral, north no more magnetic than a pretty girl in a pretty window. What makes the vastness bearable. Light the color of lemon in winter. I’ll proceed as though I were neutral. A dark room full of stars. Me, floating, direction a quality of brevity. It isn’t enough to want. To unhinge will from breast or spine. To know desire as a star marking your small, bewitched body. It isn’t enough to do these things. But in the vastness of this all, it is all I can. One.
One.
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ALISON REED
Punctuation W, X, Y, Z, and, per se, and. Trying to figure out where the punctuation marks go/between the freckle on my lip and the weight of your hands. The freckle is a punctuation mark and the hand its replacement/the body’s gestures sway to words that only scratch the surface of a matchbox before breaking/so we find flames inside the circular scent of an insular g. A 36 letter alphabet that forges alternatives to commas including/colons and crutches and precocious children connecting lost constellations of ellipses hoping for resolution. We’re flung in opposite directions like the long s/an Alfred Hitchcock cliff that allows for nothing but the wish that words didn’t transmit symbols for the sounds of songs without words/are words for you. My spinning song last night as your morning lullaby. Our words don’t need a modifying relationship they need unfolding/additional dimensions for individual letters I want you as and wants ampersand.
In “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich writes: “The words are purposes. The words are maps.” I truly believe that reinventing language creates new ways of mapping experience. I’m interested in repurposing specialized vocabularies to articulate familiar feelings. Lately, my work grapples with expressing love for friends so deep it might best
be described as chosen family. Family is itself an oppressive structure, so I’m always redefining what queerness means to my own desire, relationships, and politics. I am drawn to words that have been rendered meaningless through redundancy, or that fall apart by encompassing everything and nothing— words like ‘utopia’ and ‘revolution.’
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ALISON REED
Anatomy of an Eye
Skin
Your retina a film recording. Converting light into language/an electrical impulse through fibers connecting organs/optic nerve receiving testimonies taut. Your life
Mon ultime prière: Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!—Frantz Fanon
a revelation. Sunglasses bronzed/blazer blowing rain falling miracle on desert land/vascular tunic reading opaque/and the messiest of haloed hair twirling words wild/between graphic panels thrown on walls/a woman’s finger pressed to a bottom lip red/plastic sheen. It too transcends/decades leaking secrets/about whose plays produced whose sex life. Your past lounges bathtubs with goldfish blowing bubbles that pop crushed candy coating she sucks pretending/no one’s around on Washington Square South but Mary listens. With attention to atomic movements of a body feeling each key/making vitreous shake/moving toward tension so scratched and perfect it could kill you/love’s sham. You found me hidden behind the city’s F-sharp opening/legs bruised by winking/florescent fruit spread on beds/a trabecular meshwork of shared trauma. You are concentrated playing/of Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor. Executed not with quiet exasperation but understanding restrained desire stretches limbs long until they can no longer stroll they sprint slowmotion toward sirens spinning lights so loud they’re blinding. You, the last bulb that pierces whites of eyes before reaching/windows with shutters so fast
On your skin his words I touched with callused fingers softened by ice and whiskey. A nocturne for never asking/vibrating cosmic harmonies. Each generation must discover its mission/in relative opacity. We met at wretched/transparent. French perfume, hands skimming thighs. We’re mired in our own invulnerability. If a thing can’t be crushed it’s robust tedium. Your clouded shy and my sentences soaked postage stamps stuck to soles of shoes. I walk down streets bending magnetic curiosities to our impossibilities/what is of the earth is not easily extinguished/two strangers crossed through by syllables spinning secrets. I toss them under the bar stool. Your words carving new channels of desire. Maybe Fanon theorized revolution/and love, not as a divorce from history but as an unloosening. When we touch palms homesick years rub off in blue streaks made beautiful. Tongues flick history between lips to feel its enduring stare.
they stay open. I need patience but immature passion has run me. Restraint only in crooning Simone. Other other other/scattered. Everywhere. Interrupted by the synchronization of bodies/reaching/collective. This is the zone of nonbeing, where two touch to dissolve, for a moment, into scent and sound. This arid region, this utterly naked declivity of upheaval. Maybe I’m ready for love as nothing other than insurgency. But before sand mutes screams of stupor on this sinking path to utopia
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My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a person who questions!
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ALISON REED
Texas Sunflowers
Metal Folding
You gave me sunflowers and I thought we are these/with course geometry and broad leaves strengthening our inflorescence, which could give so much life
I sped down highways splattering coffee on windshields/because that kind of beauty seemed reasonable. I whispered to the barista who flirted ponytails and chocolate almonds
or feed cattle. Our dicot structure a mimetic doubling. Separating primary and secondary roots was like pulling pooled hair/each jerk of the wrist anticipated pain, which hurt so much more
spilled all over floors. Sea salt dust swooning. The texture of fishnets between jeans and skin/when I almost announced that I love you.
than the plucking. Our heart-shaped vanes heaving for dense mulch/but toxins we extracted from soil could not save us from being seen as weeds
That kind. Music filled my lungs/a funfair dunking machine. I don’t know how not to/synch tongue to tempo watching your words on the screen
our faces wanted to follow light across the sky/yet we turned east and never once glanced back until we felt night’s slick calm on us/and our heads grew heavy
don’t grasp too tight or the seat will pinch fingers/upon falling. An assembly of calculated fun for spectators or victims, no one knows.
now our petals, made from recycled metal, double as blades/blinking across sprawling heat. We illuminate the desire to make new recycled satellites/to turn trash into something iconic
Just another ducking stool for disorderly women. And it’s not agency to make public humiliation a choice/maybe. Whose wet shirt on whose floor.
if not beautiful. Self-sustaining LEDs a display of so much labor/so much taking in of the sun, who keeps giving even to those who hoard
I’m underwater listening to my slow motion choreography/unlatched. My seat suspended above me/but I didn’t tell anyone I jumped/already knowing how the target will be hit
as a way of breathing/of holding tight to everything ablaze.
and how the chassis will give and how it will shock me/until and until I come through.
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ALISON REED
Los Angeles Midmorning Los Angeles landscape/of angular buildings expanding against an impenetrable sky/streets bulging with swollen lungs. Forgetting
City of sinewy men/consuming mimosas midmorning/wafting orientalist cologne. In daylight we’re an aberration
a word in a language I’ve forgotten but still understand. The word is mundane. A clip or clasp or button/something holding a fragile thing to another.
collision course of woman against woman/and the peeling fingers of freeways/cars red as acrylic nails.
Baraka would say forget it/leave in the subway its magnificent apples the sexual slicing of a sentence. The interanimation of finding myself affixed to you. Just a word/a mundane word. A word I forgot that touches me when I want to forget how mundane is her touching.
Your pocked skin profile/moves us forward in precarious steel encasements I must trust/but spinning out with skin bruised renders lovemaking abstract/an unfurling purple wig. Our romantic notes wedged between booths at greasy spoon diners. Look a child just graffitied with half a crayon. The other half stirs my styrofoam coffee/while stale malt balls disintegrate on your tongue a kind of laborious kissing. Lately I can’t remember why I wanted such sudden textures/but nature is for nature shows/not the sphere of desire and politics. Besides/I’ve been here too long/and your constant circuits of invective tire me.
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ALISON REED
COBI MOULES
(W)hole So easy to forget the earth moving. So easy to lock up spares and trash the original/so confusing to love words that cut across cobwebs. If childhood were a generative (w)hole I would take you there/into pianos and other dark interiors mediated by sound. We would sneak into the stringed wooden shell plucking our pleasure out in words. Words fill the distance/a structure under which I find refuge as roof shingles collapse/outside, people are running. There are never two. We are many and our streaked eyes knot rapidly/refusing to find in all of you/the whole of our immeasurable. I painted you a nude hoping you’d come through paint. Despite resistance to futures. Survival. Not queer failures but renegades/we curl into the corners of our smell hoping that hope is the material between the heat/of our tired bodies. If the gods were coming I think they might kiss you. If the earth were ending I might too.
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Through the exploration of the Grand American landscape and reflection on mid-19th century American landscape painting, I have created a fantasy world in which only I exist. Throughout, there are many different narratives, coexisting to create an alternate world with a sense of excitement, self-worth and play. Through the multiplication and overwhelming presence that I/we take within the paintings, we are both taking precedence over the landscape as well as integrating ourselves into it, specifically into a space with an art historical background that represents the manifestation of God and the insignificance of the individual. The landscape, based on the work of the Hudson River School, is a stand-in for my own Christian upbringing; I see a number of ideological links between their works and a specific current American Christian culture that was a integral part of my formative years, particularly in regards to ideas of purity and the honor of sacrificing one’s selfhood for the glory of God. I seek to renegotiate my relationship with this upbringing, creating a space for personal significance and a queer and transgender presence.
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COBI MOULES currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited work extensively throughout the US and is currently showing with New York City gallery Lyons Wier and Boston, MA gallery Carroll and Sons. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, The Advocate and Art Slant and is in the collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College and the RISD Museum.
Cobi Moules Untitled Fallen tree near La Verkin Creek 2012 oil on canvas 21“ x 28”
Cobi Moules Untitled (08-29-2013) 2013 oil on canvas 40”x30”
Cobi Moules Untitled Southwest 2013 oil on canvas 8“ x 10”
Cobi Moules Untitled Lake McDonald 2012 oil on canvas 21“ x 41”
Cobi Moules Untitled Yellowstone Brush 2013 oil on canvas 8“ x 10”
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JOY LADIN
Corpus I want to say goodbye to my body before my body says goodbye to me. We've never properly been introduced. I always call my body “body” and my body never calls me at all. On bad nights, I dream I'm being dragged inside it but my body doesn't want to hold me, isn't angry, isn't lonely, isn't an instrument of self-expression, friend or enemy, temple or ruin, sarcophogus or shroud. My body slides like a bow across strings of time, gut and rosewood singing and moaning through lips that are and aren't mine. That's the closest my body comes to letting me say goodbye.
These days I’m working on a book tentatively titled Learning to Say ‘I’, writing poems that explore the dimensions of the first-
person—dimensions I couldn’t explore when I was writing as a man, or during gender transition, before I had a sense of self.
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D W AY N E M A R T I N E
Colonialism a seduction
Yet another homestead blossoms its chancre on the land, shines its ache across everything there is. And maybe it is just the moon and not my heart breaking again as I watch the earth rise into voluptuousness, burst its seams with new life, only to be fashioned into yet another loneliness again. But I’ve made these promises before, that I wouldn’t love it, that I wouldn’t call this a home before I could take an ax to it, that I would be a man only after I conquer my own hungers with this other blood. But I watch my own becoming. We are not one thing here. We are caught in the interval between believing what cannot be believed and holding onto what should not be kept, as who would not believe the lolling heads of all the bodies under the now ordinary moon decaying here, who could not resist our hands, who could not resist our desire?
I wrote “Colonialism” with the idea that people came to this continent free to do as they wished but unfortunately were caught
up in the legacy of their lives and beliefs. There is a hope things can be different but that hope is unfortunately lost.
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B . B . P. H O S M I L L O
Withholding 1
If cultural transgression means home, let words be of disobedience. In the collection I’m completing, all names are Biblical prophets, names of warning, names that presume dangers—except for Esau/Edom which is a
name of birthright destruction. In this project, man loves man and there’s an embodiment of condemnation. Is love really like that? My characters are in war.
The elevator lifts us up less than a minute, it’s heaven and my weight changes while you’re holding my hand from the ground floor to the bed the way an astronaut is changed, devout on the moon. I say just hold me up and listen. There are cockroaches I hid under the bed, bulldog ants building a kingdom in the tiny orifices between my toes, and rapid compasses of a horse should you want to accept what love believes in. I say hold me up again and don’t bother yourself with any noise that’s not me. There are those who whisper a curse on your buttons as you lose them one by one, they act so close to you. In a dream my diary slips out, your father asked what curse will wake you up. I gave you an open mouth for you to realize I was there holding a glass of water you forgot to drink. It was warm, flowed like a silk, stayed inside you like compassion. 2 A lizard’s shadow is running on the newly cleaned kitchen table. You’re waiting for the yeast to be cupcakes while you’re thinking of how to love me more. You’re thinking of how to put my entire body inside the heated oven to become something else. Under light, two plates were given what they’d lose when the bed couldn’t reach us as though we could stop the dirty game even for a while. You shooed a lizard and I thought you were saying something to me. These cupcakes are not cupcakes. You should have reminded me how to work with fire. 3 It’s a snowman melting in my mouth, with my mouth. But there’s no record of winter here. It must then be a man with light brown eyes and dark brown lips who followed me in the bathroom of a shopping mall and ended up peeing in my rented house, erased the spaces that meant to have difference the way God put me in a mysterious body I never actually received. How long will I not have? My body, stateless a framework it is, turned on the black light in his halogen throat and I could see my bones with it. My body then, while it worked in whichever unthinkable position, appeared as an acre of crimson butterflies, a meadow that unrolled for you, for all you want. You could run and play in it, cut some grass with your hands, track the moist. But he said, darting my body with straight eyes It’s like a mosquito that lands on my palm. OCHO 33
B . B . P. H O S M I L L O
What else will I do? This is the entry of the night when you can’t disjoin your blood from mine, your danger from the bottom it enfilades, your moist from the melting, the body from the innermost literal heat it is pierced with. If this inseparability is heaven, who wouldn’t want to get in touch with this whirlwind space and be impelled by it? I wanted heaven to be a space too, a mysterious dimension with circular entrance like nicely shaped, calm lips, but heaven is not a kind of space where we have the same speed and the same force and the same extent of destruction, it will never even be a space. Please, darling, drop this artifice and just tell me how you felt it, the fact that I received you, and how you want to live for it. Tell me; I will give. It’s not the bumper hall built for charity work but the heavy breathing of beaten up children there, invited for a program to tell how the world made them scared, the ideal in it conceives them as juvenile drudges surrendering all their clothes to prove they’re abandoned, abraded puppies and they’re helpless, very helpless that as each of them cries another runs away to leave the hall until only one little boy shakes the entire vestibule and he stands out—the program’s star, witness to all those who were given a taxi fare on their way out and clapped in gratitude. Heaven is the feeling that one is less alone against another standing out, and you feel like going somewhere because of this, you pass a church, pass the candid attempts to dislike and crucify idols, pass a faith healer, pass the soiled herbs squeezed eyes drown into, pass a market and how you want to take all white meat there, pass a cemetery and how you want to be one of the graves there, especially that one wherein withered buds can never anymore be roses.
even curses for their messianic purpose couldn’t be music with a soothing message and your song list has gotten longer by a pond, you can’t just put yourself back together, not in the way you remember me everyday you’d rather keep thinking of me than occupy your daily job, it’s because you’ve left your dark brown jacket and light brown pants in my couch and I’ve also forgotten there’s a good couch in my flat, somewhere I could be lost in. What you can get, darling, keep it forever, the glass of water or the halogen throat or the cry or the held up, or take them all, they’re yours anyway. We’ve forgotten the things we’ve never left hanging but they are hanging now, they really are just like the bones I once saw in black light and they will fade, will contrast the better failures we could have done but couldn’t trust to matter when they should have. Will we be able to see the changed color, or the color they changed from, or at least the space that made us different? And even then, what for is it to see? Is this compassion enabling us to forget to distinguish light from dark? You deny this forgetfulness by catching the taste of melting light brown liver in my mouth, you take my neck from behind toward the light, dark brown on my skin, of the empty lobby and I’m not surprised at all, there’s just no room for surprises in this body someone has brought to heaven again.
You felt heaven, darling, but you are not the boy standing out. You are one of the boys counting the amount of debt people owe you as if somewhere in the numbers is shelter, keeping it because it’s all you got, the common exit far across your shadow you couldn’t outrun and you’re feeling lucky that it’s just a tie, no one gains in a draw, a deadlock and you’re still deciding what kind of blossoming flower will shrivel the best into dark brown saplessness for you. Take your time, and then tell me the kind of flower you want to die for. I could grow into its likeness if I could not be it. 4 The sunset’s nail stretches, and toward you in that you feel the need for emery skin to reduce the sharp point of failure you are visible through. It’s the end that ends without accomplishing anything, OCHO 33
MARY MERIAM “Liebegott” bloomed out of The IHOP Papers, The Beautifully Worthless, and Cha-Ching!, Ali Liebegott’s three books. In German, ‘Liebegott’ means
‘dear god.’ Ali’s writing freed me to weep and wail, curse and cruise, and want to rise up out of death and pain into life and art.
Liebegott The hell it is, a hell I said, a monster swamped in plastic bags, and on the shore, the waves of dead. Look hot on me and turn me red. Untie my clothes, or rather rags, the hell it is, a hell I said. Oh god of ocean, god of bed, strike it down and fold the flags, and on the shore, the waves of dead, wash them to sleep and bring instead her puckered lips, not devils’ crags, the hell it is, a hell I said. A knot pulls harder on a thread, a taut-held line, and still it sags, and on the shore, the waves of dead. Remove the nightmares and the dread, I’ll fuck my love till loving gags the hell it is, a hell I said, and on the shore, the waves of dead.
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J E N N I F E R PAT T E R S O N
Dismemberment (prompted by Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers) 82. Tell me what you know about dismemberment. I wanted the definition. I searched the internet and the visuals screamed to be seen. Broken, torn bodies bent over medians on roads, jammed into holes. The red a deep brownishcrimson. This is not the dismemberment I know. I have never witnessed this. I do know of a stealing, a taking, a loss, a not returning because it was discarded and there was nothing left to give. Dismemberment: I forget we are talking about bodies and instead, slip back into my fuzzy brain. Sometimes there aren’t words for the way we lose our bodies. Sometimes we don’t know they are gone. The limbs are extracted and what isn’t is simply left behind. It isn’t always a loss. Sometimes we remain high functioning, other times we find ourselves deteriorating, then relearning and trying to recover what was displaced. The phantoms stimulate the imagination, make us feel as if we are whole.
Exploring bodies, trauma, and loss, I’m really interested in how people choose to heal. I’m also really excited about exploring the good/bad binary; what makes someone a ‘good’ survivor vs. a ‘bad’ survivor. I want to interrogate and break down
the pathologization and stigmatization around the choices queer survivors make to inhabit, rebuild and utilize their bodies after experiencing violence on a personal and community level.
Sometimes I’m in a car and over and over I see crashing. It’s not that I’ve lost control rather I am choosing this wreck. What would be lost if I finally followed through? There are so many ways to kill off the self and it isn’t always about suicide or wanting to be gone. Sometimes it’s just about forcing the impending change, letting go of the wheel in search of what’s to be. Finding a new way to function because the old ways aren’t sustainable. Honoring the loss. It’s so much work, this body, this brain, the ways they break and possibly don’t reconnect. For some bodies, there is comfort in force, comfort in a ripping out of what’s expired; the impatient demand for new.
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A Lesbian Fantasia on Angels in America
JULIE R. ENSZER
Each time I watch the HBO film adaptation of Tony Kushner’s stage play, I rediscover how the obsessive elements of Kushner’s artistic metier mirror my own. This poem explores Louis and Prior as archetypes of the faithful and the
unfaithful. What does it mean to want to be both simultaneously? Often I wonder if the great work each of us faces in life is to craft meaningful relationships in communities where we do not die secret deaths.
Louis, I fear I will be you abandon the one I love in a time of great need though equal to my fear of being Louis is my fear of loving someone like Louis of being Prior. Prior Walter. Prior, prior, what was before what we were before what we loved before this was our life prior Prior, so much easier than future, after, what will be the certainty of what was even when it is a mystery is one that can be solved it happened in the past Prior, it can be known. Prior. I want to be Prior the prophet, the mystic, the visionary. Prior, who ascends to the heavens up a fiery ladder and returns to earth through water. Prior, elemental, earthen, airy, burning, I burn for Prior I yearn for Prior Prior the man who represents the hope of us all the possibility of making meaning from the epidemic, the senseless loss of life when government looked away without care. Prior. I want to be Prior. But I know I am Louis broken, unable to complete the Kaddish until Ethel intones those ancient words with him Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba though even these words bring neither of them forgiveness, neither redemption Ethel long dead Louis unable to be present in the simplest of ways Reading a book about democracy Louis unable to see the failings
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of democracy before us today. Yes, I am Louis, broken, unable to hang in for the hard times; even after sixteen years I doubt my ability to stay to be the loyal one and Kushner gives me no model no hero just anger at a g-d who has abandoned us. Every morning I wake and see Louis’s face in the mirror. Even today years later as we enter the teens thirteen years since the millennial turn millennium no longer approaches the millennium has past. Louis now in his sixties and Prior, if he lived until January 1996 now alive, happy, partnered, maybe married— with a New York marriage like mine— we all grow up, the millennium passed, Perestroika not what we imagined no ascent to heaven no choice to return to earth just daily life arise each morning the mirror offers little comfort even the words spoken at the fountain of Bethesda provide little solace though maybe this is all there is these words We won’t die secret deaths any more we will be citizens the time has come you are fabulous each and every one and I bless you more life the great work begins these words these sixteen years.
JORY MICKELSON
People commenting on the work of David Wojnarowicz often focus on his rage, on the politics of desire, and the AIDS crises; I am struck by his longing set against or in tandem with the landscapes he and his speakers inhabit. Growing up in the rural West shaped my eye to the
land. In such a vast terrain, it’s hard to imagine that a single person can have any kind of lasting impact against jagged mountain ranges or even a twenty minute whiteout blizzard. These selections come from a long poem examining landscape and self through the lens of car.
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Self-Portrait With Men in Cars Driving a machine through the days and nights of the empty and pressured landscape eroticizes the whole world‌ David Wojnarowicz Little dome light, my moon of yellow open and shut the door; push button owl, cigarette lighter of blue smoked wings;
*
steering wheel, you echo the view of the river’s hills;
What if we refuse to call it Destiny, disbelieve virtue or mission; can we settle for the progressing roads unlooping outward? Why the notion home(stead) is always hereafter, elsewhere settled somehow hence? And history a henceforth, from this place, a ways off. I longed for a horse, then horsepower, finally to come home.
Milky Way expanse of glass in front of me, in front of me; I told them and then I drove all night, until these clustered trees set fire to their cold branches with early filaments of sky.
OCHO
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JORY MICKELSON
* Blessed be the algaed wheel of minnows flashing round the pond in early June. Blessed be the half wagon wheel headboard in green that slowly spun my father’s childhood, then mine, to sleep. Blessed be the dark beneath that bed where I kissed the Light of the Valley Assembly of God minister’s son, cheek pressed to cold linoleum. Blessed be the progression of six empty rings that gauged the red needle of my father’s anger. Blessed be the day-lit bat that staggered drunk around at noon while I lit my denim jacket overhead like wings, more scared of rabies shots than being bit. Blessed be the crooked circles of homemade cakes and their sliding icing, their burnt or perfect underneaths glazing the table at the end of meals. Blessed be the slyness of barbwire, which cordoned off the best of places, ringing our legs in a purple camus of scabs Blessed be the town’s eleven other upright churches, their clapboard congregations queued from and into the wood or carpeted pews. Blessed be Orion’s belt done and undone across the Copenhagen can of blackened sky. Blessed be the thistled tongue of August heat that yearly set the slough to puffs of dust. Blessed be the wheeling red and blue of deputies who poured out my beer, their own mouths circling with thirst.
* None of the men in this car are lovers, but one would be if I asked him. One balding, the other going gray. It doesn’t matter. From the backseat, perspective is strange. After spending so many years driving, it’s hard not to take the wheel. From here, it’s easier to feel spring summer fall winter— the terrible motion, the sawing away. The highway’s rhythm once bearable, the wheel, a world that tipped at my fingers.
Blessed be the ring of the Sapphires and Bitterroots and that kept the valley shut of wind. Blessed be every round where the whitetails sleep, will someday lay down.
OCHO
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CONFESSIONS OF AN ART WORSHIPPER A SELF-INTERVIEW
HOW ARE YOU LIKE A GOD?
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
I create things. I love the things I create but sometimes they make me angry. I am impulsive, emotional and can be unforgiving. Like a god, the things I create represent the best of me, transform me and the way I see the world.
We hold events that are rowdy, joyful and inspiring, using forms that may be recognized as religious (meditation, call and response, community interaction, introspection, worship) but I believe pre-date religion. We invite people to look at the world creatively.
HOW ARE YOU NOT LIKE A GOD? I am not eternal. I do not live on a cloud. I’m not worthy of worship. I am out of shape; gods are typically fit. Why are we talking about gods?
SO, WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS AT A SECRET CITY EVENT? The Secret City band is playing when people walk in. The work of a visual artist is installed in the space. There’s an altar with a candelabra and other objets. At some point I walk out in a fabulous/ridiculous/magical outfit and welcome the crowd, sing a few bars with the band and do some dancing to get folks whipped up. WHAT IS THIS PICTURE? This is where I live: a cottage built in 1902 as part of Byrdcliffe, the original artists’ colony of Woodstock, NY. I live here with my boyfriend of eight years, artist Robert Lucy. Our cottage is surrounded by woods and, after 11 years in Manhattan and 18 years in LA, it’s very healing; my nervous system is recovering. You must be an artist to live in the colony, and you can stay for a fiveyear period. The cottage has a name: Yggdrasill. YGGDRASILL? Yes. It’s the Tree of Life in Norse Mythology.
Hailed by The New York Times for his ‘sort of a salon, sort of a church’ The Secret City (an artistic tent-revival in NYC, LA, Woodstock and soon, The World, www.thesecretcity.org), and the recipient of a 2010 a special citation Obie Award for service to the creative community, CHRIS WELLS is an award-winning actor who has made original theater, music and performance for over 20 years in Los Angeles, New York and around the country.
WHAT IS THE SECRET CITY? The Secret City is an artistic tent-revival.
IS THAT A BRA ON YOUR HEAD? Yes. AND WHO’S THAT CUTE GUY NEXT TO YOU? That’s Jeremy Bass, our music director, one of my longtime collaborators. He’s an amazing singer/songwriter and fronts The Secret City Band. OKAY, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
CHRIS WELLS
The Secret City Singers enter. We sing a welcome song; the refrain is ‘We’re Connected!’ After that there’s a call and response that spells out what this community is: creative, engaged, curious and supportive. After a brief mingle, the service begins: breathing, a
cultural calendar, we look at the visual art together and have a q and a with the artist. Then we have a food offering, where a local chef presents a taste for us to experience together.
This is followed by a piece of community interaction: a game or exercise related to the theme that playfully asks people to examine who they are. Then, a brief reading followed by a story—I write a story for each Secret City event, inspired by the theme and I read it in the service. It’s my take on the idea of a sermon, so it’s a first person story about my life as an artist. Then we all meditate in silence for about 4-5 minutes. That’s always an amazing thing, to sit silently as a group in a performance space. After that, we have a featured musician perform a song.
I also started The Secret City because I felt that The Theater wasn’t really connecting with or serving ‘the audience,’—a word I have mixed feelings about. But, in any case, the strict divide between spectator and performer wasn’t sitting well with me.
WHAT ARE THOSE KIDS ABOUT TO EAT?
ARE THOSE WOMEN ARM WRESTLING? Yes, that was part of a round of Truth or Dare that we played in LA as part of our service on ADVENTURE. I love games and we use them a lot in our services.
That was a hand-painted half-world of dark and white chocolate atop a crystallized rose petal, piped with carbonated dragonfruit mousse, crowned with a marzipan pearl covered in 23 karat gold. There were also pairings available for the adventurous palate: chocolate-covered superworms, queen weaver ants, or armor-tail scorpions. This offering was made by Tom Bliss for our Secret City LA service on ADVENTURE. INTENSE.
But, back to your question on beliefs: as someone who leads a community of creative people, I do believe there’s profound value in creativity: the way an artist looks for connections, for creative solutions, how an artist’s work asks them to be in the present—these are very meaningful lessons, not just for practicing artists but anyone longing to live a more engaged life. I’ve also found art to be the most transcendent metaphor, so it’s an ideal tool for worship— inclusive, connective, joyful, universal/personal, without dogma.
Yes. People go all out, I tell you.
WORSHIP—THAT’S A STRONG WORD.
SO KIDS COME TO THE EVENTS? We suggest ages 13 and up. The services aren’t really designed for younger kids but people do bring them. Depends on the kids, depends on the parents. I love kids but, with The Secret City, I’m more concerned for adults needing to reclaim their own childish energy. We do offer free childcare so people with kids can take part. Starting this fall, we’re adding art activities for the kids while the grown ups take part in the service. GREAT. SORRY I INTERRUPTED YOU EARLIER, YOU WERE DESCRIBING THE FLOW OF EVENTS? Following the food offering, we have a featured performance: this could be anything from a dance troupe to acrobats, aerialists, a bubble artist, magician, or performance artist.
Then we take a collection where our ushers pass the baskets and the choir sings. Our suggested donation is $15. Then I read announcements and thanks and we close with the refrain found in the program. It’s adapted from Rachel Carson. Every event is followed by a coffee hour—people bring something to share: coffee cake, fresh fruit—and it’s very social, people connect around the ideas of the service and get to know each other and, an organic sense of networking takes place. WOW, SOUNDS REALLY FUN. It is fun! And, at the same time, the service gets at some very real, deep stuff; it’s healing and transformative in a joyful, deft way. It’s my hope that the garment is light, if you get my drift. WHY DID YOU START THE SECRET CITY? I’ve had two primary fascinations in my life: art making and spiritual practice. When I was 12 years old, I started going to church on my own—I loved the music, the people, the pageantry and the space they created for contemplation. But I didn’t feel a connection to this thing called GOD that everyone was talking about. A few years later, I started doing theater in Lancaster, the town where I grew up in the Mojave Desert and it was there that I found a spirituality that really spoke to me—the spirituality of art making and collaboration. As an adult, I continued to explore various types of spiritual practice while pursuing the life of the artist. Then, in my early 40s, living in New York, I decided to start The Secret City, which unites these two things. And it’s grown into a community worship ritual with art as its central metaphor.
SO YOUR BACKGROUND IS IN THE THEATER? Yes, I’m an actor and a writer and a performer and singer and front man and lyricist and educator and community builder and producer and art-thinker. And, especially in terms of The Secret City, I consider myself a trickster, a fool. THAT’S A LOT. As Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” NICE. ARE THERE OTHER QUOTES YOU MIGHT LIKE TO SHARE WITH US? Iris Murdoch once wrote, “I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.” That’s very much a Secret City notion. Another guiding quote is from Susan Sontag who said, “All my work says, ‘be serious, be passionate, wake up.’” The Secret City asks people, including myself, to wake up. I also love this by Krishnamurti: “The truth is a pathless land.” When we find ourselves in that place of mystery and not knowing, inspiration occurs, creation takes place. SO, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR BELIEFS? People often ask me what I believe—it’s not something I’ve ever felt I had to pin down. I am descended from vaudevillians and metaphysicians—I guess you could call me a Metaphysical Vaudevillian. Lately, I’m really into the idea of JOY as a spiritual belief, and that creating joy—for oneself and others—can be a very meaningful goal.
Yes, the word ‘worship’ is related to WORTH. To worship is to create a relationship based on what you value. Our tagline is, “We Worship Art.” AH, SO YOU’RE BUILDING A WORTH-SHIP FILLED WITH ART. Yes, you could say that. WHAT’S THE VISION FOR THE SECRET CITY? The Secret City is ready to travel the land. We talk about getting a bus that runs on vegetable oil and having a big tent that we set up in parking lots and fields all around the country. Also, partnering with arts organizations and venues in different cities and towns. Right now we’re expanding into the Hudson Valley—we just held our first Secret City Woodstock, which was a blast, as you can imagine—talk about an artist community! Of course, before we can achieve Absolute World Domination, we have some major infrastructure-building to accomplish—I’m still the only staff member. REALLY? Yes, although we have an amazing team of volunteers and a great and dedicated board. We also envision The Secret City Institute: part artist retreat/ part think tank/part education center where we discuss our work, how to start other Secret City communities. And, The Secret City radio show—on public radio. One of our team is also working to convince me that we should live stream the events, something that terrifies me, but we’re definitely considering.
SO, HOW DOES THE ORGANIZATION SUPPORT ITSELF? Being a not-for-profit, we rely on individual contributions, grants and foundational giving. And, we’re opening an online store this fall where people can buy Secret City merchandise—hats, tote bags, buttons, posters, tshirts and MUGS!
and it’s really exciting. I’m also prepping for my 50th birthday party, which will be here in the woods this summer. 50? WOW—HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT? Love it. I’ve always wanted to be older—prime of life and all that.
WHAT ELSE DO YOU DO BESIDES RUNNING THE SECRET CITY?
IS THAT SILLY STRING YOU’RE SPRAYING IN THE AIR?
This summer I’m napping a lot, with the doors and windows open and the sounds of the woods all around. In between naps, I’m working on two books—one is The Bermuda Triangle Inn, A Memoir in 29 Stories—it’s primarily stories that I’ve written for The Secret City linked together to tell the story of my life. The other is Confessions of an Art Worshipper—it’s the story of The Secret City. I’m also developing a new performance series called RC RADIO HOUR with pianist/composer, Rachel Grimes, combining stories and songs. We did a workshop at Skidmore College this summer
Yes. I love Silly String.
SAM LOPES
WELL, THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME. It’s been my pleasure.
Photos: Bobby Lucy, Keren Lynn, & Kim Zsebe
My images weave together stories of both personal and collective loss. As a child of the eighties, I witnessed AIDS and queerness through the lens of mass media. I came of age with a debilitating fear of my sexuality and gender, and an intangible sadness. I paint landscapes that have been devastated, and characters attempting to make sense of the devastation. I hope that by externalizing this emotional environment I can grieve and reflect on what has been lost.
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Sam Lopes Understand my Lineage 2007 enamel on panel 18“ x 24”
SAM LOPES is a multi-disciplinary artist working out of Oakland, California. He has been nominated for the SECA Award, Visions from a New California Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and has received the Edwin Newton Honors, and Trillium Press Award. He has exhibited internationally and is featured in the current Bay Area Now exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Sam Lopes Being Downstream 2013 acrylic and colored pencil on panel 18“ x 24”
Sam Lopes I Feed For Us 2007 enamel on panel 18“ x 24”
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M A R Y A N N D AV I S
A Certain Simultaneity On Lyricism, Criticism, and Healing Divides Between and Within
I still find myself moved by these poems, if not for their subject then certainly for their lyrical forms. Still – still – perhaps the beauty of the language, the music of the lines, was no longer enough to carry the fraught content. These questions moved through me with a dizzying, unmooring effect, as I paced, read, paused at certain moments to let the ideas of the poems ease themselves uncomfortably back under my skin. The feeling was a growing pressure inside, which I wanted to push back onto an idea Robert Hass once articulated, in one of my MFA seminars, about music, language, and lyric needing to precede ideas. In the revisionary nature of my memory, he said something profound and certain, such as: content is meaningless unless the music is there first. But here I stood, facing poetry again, and wanting the lyricism to support a different way of being in the world.
Desire When I returned to poetry last year, I was also slowly, bit by bit, leaving behind a relationship. My return seemed a necessary step in healing, by which I mean a necessary step in accepting myself exactly as I am, which meant accepting the fact that I have always had an ambivalent relationship with my identity as a poet. Integration was a word that circled through me, in my attempts to bring lyricism back into my life, or to re-open the lyricism within me. But because I had been quarreling with poetry for so many years, the return was not an easy one. I set up a system for myself: begin and end the day reading poetry. Every morning and night I stood in front of my bookcase with closed eyes and ran a finger along the narrow spines lining the top two shelves. (My previous partner had told me I needed to purge books and, par for the course with my split with poetry, most of the books I got rid of were poetry volumes.) Back and forth until I felt compelled to stop, then I tilted out the volume and paced my tiny back house, drinking coffee or wine, and reading poems out loud. I was returning to some of my old favorites, so many poems dealing with love and desire, loss and lack. But on the other side of an eight-year relationship and a doctorate in English Literature (Victorian narrative) and Gender Studies (queer and sexuality theories of sadomasochism, BDSM, and kink), I found myself wondering at the tropes of desire-lack/love-longing threading some of my favorite lyric voices. For example:
Now you’re in fugue across what I’m sure some Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea. Those are the words that come to mind. I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—? Close between grief and anger, a space opens where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder. (Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems, XVIII”) ... and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel. All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it, it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that they close their eyes again and hold each other, each feeling the mortal singularity of the body they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so, and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man, I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness . . . (Robert Hass, “Privilege of Being”)
Theory This was last October, and poetry and I had been quarreling for the past decade, around about the time I completed my Master of Fine Arts. I told myself the break was due to being sick of the workshop dynamic as well as to a recent break-up that sent my melodrama intensely inward rather than pathetically outward in hyperventilating lyrics (we were poets together so of course the break up had something to do with my poetry, in addition to my having hair that was too long for a lesbian). I was sick of what I felt was the confessional narcissism of most contemporary poetry, and therefore most poets – and viewed my own poetry and poetic temperament as crystallizing a sort of tortured longing and lack that rarely resulted in keeper-poems and often resulted in bad interpersonal decisions. How many times had I heard from other poets/artists and had I said, to myself and to others, Well, at least this [insert god-awful experience] will lead to some [insert art form of choice]? I remember thinking to myself at some point that year Can one write poetry and ever be happy? Or: Can one write poetry if one is happy? Or: If one is happy will one want to write poetry? Some of my own lines from this time might serve to illustrate the form of lack and longing against which I wish poems, poets, and poetry might work:
Rain in tatters, and she’s wearing the wrong shoes, the wrong face, the one that runs off into her mouth. Her fingers lose their tips. She cries before sex. Wrong again to miss the I and you.
A part of me will likely always feel a deep resonance with the affective state being imaged by this poem. But I refuse to be this person, to exercise this form of relationality with the world, with myself, with others. And yes, poetic temperament be damned, I do feel I have a choice. Ten years ago, I couldn’t handle reconceptualizing a different kind of lyric subjectivity. So I turned away from poetry. Or, at the least, shut it somewhere deep inside. Or, at the worst, carried it around my neck like the millstone of failed art, of my lack of true poetic temperament: After all, if I was a real artist, I wouldn’t have this struggle to write, it would flow naturally, I would write come hell or high water, I would write because I couldn’t not write. But that has never (or rarely) been my relationship with writing. I write because of the endless wonder I feel when a certain lyrical combination of words introduces a new concept into the world, and because I view the lyricism itself as offering a new way to think about or conceive of an experience. And the desire-lack/love-longing tropes, as much as I appreciate the music of the lines I’ve quoted thus far, feel like very old, very habitual conceptions of erotic relationality. When I pull Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet off my shelf, the text is inked with the marginalia of an old version of myself, one who felt a deep rightness that desire must involve lack, that love, real love, always involves an element of longing. Carson’s analysis is incisive and powerful, showing the endurance of these tropes in Western poetry, which she originates in the fragments of Sappho. I look at the old me, writing such affirmative comments in the margins, accepting these connections as natural and inevitable, feeling a little less alone in her suffering. I stand with the new me, palming this book, wondering.
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Body Memory for Y, for O, for G
If I knew how to spit out words. My fist has the memory my friend tells me. Mint leaves boil up around her unsaid factual sadness. Simple want to be inside. If I knew the taste of yes and no. The widest part of the hand is at the knuckles an instructor tells me. Once inside there’s no option but to curl to the body’s demand. If I knew the bite of apology. Can you feel that your heart is broken? another friend’s leather and fist thud into my chest. The moon above has no words. To call this desire. I lack nothing. To call this pleasure. I once wrote the line Pain is the word yes. To close my eyes and write as if in a dream. To trust that much.
Pressure When I moved into my back house – alone with a U-Haul, enjoying the physical endurance it took for me to carry shelves, a hope chest, and boxes and boxes of books all by myself – the first thing I did was decide where to place those bookcases. Two very tall, very wide, very shallow bookcases. I placed them side-by-side, I let them take up an entire wall, and I placed nothing in front of them. I wanted my books, all of them, to dominate my experience and my space. When I unpacked my books onto the shelves, I organized them not alphabetically but by genre. It seems now, to me, no accident that I placed my critical theory books right next to my poetry volumes: on the top two shelves of the other case. Because in all of my pacing, my reading, my ruminating, I realized that lyricism had not been absent from my life. I had just been locating it elsewhere. I’ve long been fond of saying that I don’t believe in the divide between critical and lyrical thinking. I’m not sure, however, that I ever really knew what I meant. Standing in front of my shelves, I was faced with trying to explain the discomfort I felt with the tropes of desire-as-lack, love-as-longing, threading through so many of these poetry voices. And I found myself returning to ideas I encountered in my reading and teaching of gender and sexuality studies – quite literally a turn to the shelf next door. Instantly, of course, there was the old voice in my head, the voice distilled from fellow poets and poetry mentors, who I have experienced, as a group, accusing critical theory of thinking the life/heart/essence out of art: Of course you would think this way. This is from your training in critical theory. Don’t over-think the music. Don’t get mundane and prose-y on me. What I realized: My engagement with (my own and others’) poetry has been an engagement with a particular concept of myself. My engagement with theory has also been an engagement with a particular concept of myself. (I am, for the moment, setting aside post-structuralism’s disdain for self and subjectivity.) And these engagements are, for me, both lyrical and critical – especially when I bring them into conversation with one another. Because my experience of these two selves has been, up to this point, mostly an isolated, combative relationship, between the lyric self of lack and longing, and the critical self of pleasure and intention. Mostly what my thoughts regarding the arbitrary line between critical and lyrical thinking have meant is that lyricism leads to new ideas, and that lyricism doesn’t only belong to poetry. Despite all the complaints (often valid) of overly difficult writing, theory often has its lyrical moments. A small example from Judith Butler: in explaining her concept of gender performativity, Butler invokes the image of sedimentation as performativity’s main process, a word that in itself I find to be an intense lyricalization of her thinking. In fact it is a word that almost always guarantees my students will ask but what does that mean?, at which point I make them describe sediment (what is it made of? where is it found? how is it made? how long does it take to produce? what texture? and so on) and therefore define what sedimentation means. The multilayered sensuality of these terms comes to bear on the concept being conveyed – sediment and the process of sedimentation come to be the concept
of how gender functions in our lives. Another star sexuality-theorist, Michel Foucault, writing against the sex-desire complex, uses the phrase perpetual spirals of power and pleasure (if I was any good with scansion, I would tell you the particular rhythm of this translation), one of many examples of his use of syntax and image to carry his ideas (what does the rhythmic quality of the line mean for the idea? what is a perpetual spiral, and what does that suggest about the relationality between power and pleasure? and so on). Not to mention the sensuality of theorists such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Samuel Delany, to name only a handful of thinkers whose inclusion into theory courses and anthologies is often neglected because their writings are too simple, too easy, too accessible. I wonder how much of the dismissal of these thinkers is due also to the lyricism of their writings, particularly when this style is aligned with the fact of their being queer persons of color. Such a dismissal seems based on the assumption that the proper form of theory is a certain absence of music. My fingers trace up the shelves to the spines of these writers. How, I am asking myself now, standing at the spatial and conceptual point where my shelves/selves meet, can the flow from lyrical to critical be reversed? How can new ideas, new critical concepts, lead to new forms of lyricism, new forms of poetic subjectivity? For, as many of you know, critical theory on gender and sexuality has long been invested in reworking the desire-as-lack, love-as-longing tropes. Specifically, of course, there is Foucault’s monumental shift from sex-desire (that one’s sexuality extends from one’s biological sex, male or female, in the structure of desire-lack) to bodies-pleasures (that erotic pleasure might not be reducible to sexual difference, but diffusible through the entire surface and depth of a body, in infinite possibilities of acts and intensities). How would such a shift in concepts reflect in poetry? What would happen to the use of pronouns (for example, the man and woman described by Robert Hass)? What would happen to the relationalities described (for example, the estrangement articulated by Adrienne Rich)? What forms of sensuality and eroticism might be conveyed if lack, loss, and longing were simply acknowledged, perhaps resisted, but not defaulted to? If they were, in fact, critically engaged in lyrical forms?
Unlock for A Untethered, undulating late-afternoon anxiety. Uncollared light breaks in prisms across bodies unbodied to a wholeness not yet ripe. Unsaid, unseen only a taste (you) or a texture (me). Nails welt unfinished moons across your shoulders. Hands not unloosened grip hip hand me my ribcage describe bones as present. Not unscathed. Not unmoored. The pleasure wholly separate from grief yet grief wants its due. Not unworthy. These souls unchecked under a moon-less afternoon know what is good what is understood and undone and OCHO 33
Pleasure
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Perhaps the question I’m actually circling is how to write poetry about erotic pleasure and, yes, even desire, without falling into the lack-longing way of articulating these experiences. (If there was time, we could explore what Gilles Deleuze has to say about desire not necessarily being associated with lack.) The two rough poems I’ve interspersed here are not meant to serve as exemplary evidence of moving beyond the desire-lack, love-loss tropes – but they are my initial experiments in moving beyond, which is not about progress but about alternatives. The poems are works in progress, works in healing, and as I continue to ruminate on these ideas, change is the only certainty. (The first poem, for example, isn’t quite right in terms of lyric. I question: is this because I am trying to articulate erotic experiences that aren’t perhaps that familiar – such as fisting or flogging? Experiences too crass, mundane, too much in need of explanation or justification for poetry? Whereas the second poem, in attempting to enact pleasure and joy in and with the line and language itself, might be too vague, too interior, too abstract.) But I offer the poems here because it feels right to me that a shift in poetic articulations of erotic pleasures and desires might also encourage a shift in our assumptions of done-ness, a recognition of the process necessary to healing as well as to writing.
JUSTIN BOND My work has always come from a confessional viewpoint, and these poems are no different. I try to write the kind of poetry I like to read. My chapbook was decidedly poetry of place. The work I’m creating now is shifting
the focus more directly to love: not romantic love, or strictly love of or from the body, but the darker, more obsessive kind—the scary, Fatal Attraction kind—and the ways in which it relates to physical and chemical addiction.
Perhaps, as well, there are poets who are already practicing this revisioning of erotic lyric subjectivity, and in my quarrel with poetry – really just a quarrel with my own self-worth – I have missed out on these new voices. The fact of a response, to poetry or to theory, is certainly an individual experience. Or is it? I have lived and worked among communities of poets and communities of critics. Both groups often prescribe ways of being, of living, and standards of ‘good’ texts, all of which tends to split lyrical and critical thinking from one another. As a poet, I must not let my art be contaminated by the pressures of politics, identities, mundanities. As a critic, I must not let my thinking be swayed by matters of music, sound, rhythm. For the former: music first. For the latter: thought first. And interdependence? When I decided to face myself about a year ago – by which I mean to sit with my fears, my sense of inner deficiency, to look at these feelings so that I might pass through them, once and for all – bits of writing kept coming into my life, on fliers, on walls, in the texts I was graced to be teaching, as if I was sending messages to myself. On a flier for a critical theory group at a local community college, there was Michel Foucault: “Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.” Yes, I thought, and also thought at the same time of my quarrel with poetry. Might not poetry also come from this place – avoiding facile gestures, practicing intention with regard to content, attending to content at all? In an anthology for one of my courses, there was Audre Lorde: “[P]oetry . . . forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Yes, I thought. Might not criticism also come from language – not necessarily first, but with a certain simultaneity with the idea? Just as it gives me such deep pleasure and security to know that all of my books from all of my (seemingly) disparate interests exist alongside, next to, across from one another, it seems to me that to understand, to make space for a conversation between critical and lyrical perspectives requires a prepositional shift, an openness to betweenness rather than a posing against. I trace my selves not into a cohesive whole but into a balance of possibilities offered when I recognize that lyric and idea are produced in time with one another – like pulling books from my different shelves and cradling them to my heart.
I have always had theories in my head. I spent time imagining what it would be like to take the theories out of my head and live them.” bell hooks, from Wounds of Passion: a writing life.
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There—no, there When he says put it back, I want you to think about the places that have gone without. Yes, I know how that sounds. There’s something wrong with things not touching, with all these empty spaces. My mother was always this way. Haven’t I told you the story? The beginning and ending are always the same, the middle depends upon the audience. If the cat moves in with the people down the street, it isn’t that they stole him. A living thing can never really belong to another living thing.
OCHO
Beneath the Dead Elm Just below the lip of the raised bed a green tongue of iris pushes its way up through the soft palate of earth. You tell me this happens every year, the difference between annuals and perennials, and I think how we begin each day with mouths full of futures we shed by the hour like deciduous teeth. The mockingbird knows the secret to survival is pretending: not in happiness, which is very real, but that we knew all along where to find it.
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We Are the Breakers of Our Own Hearts I rise and there is no metaphor in it, just the song of the body plucked on tired strings. I used to call the night my unkempt familiar: my throat was thick with wet leaves, I had a cunt like a storm drain. But the morning is a stranger beast, all fang and feral fur. Canopic jars full of light stacked against the basement wall and your fingerprints, god bless you, on every single one.
OCHO
Sam Lopes White Wash 20104 mixed media 24” x 24“ x 24”
Report from the 2014 NYC Queer Book Diorama Show For many LGBTQ people, books are the first place where we see pieces of ourselves and our identities come alive, making books critical to the process of identity formation. This fall Pop-Up Founding Director Hugh Ryan and awardwinning queer author Sassafras Lowrey have co-curated an exhibit at the New York Public Library Jefferson Market Branch sponsored by the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History and the Lambda Literary Foundation highlighting the unique relationship between LGBTQ people and literature. Books
can be lifelines for LGBTQ people isolated by geographic area or other life circumstances, and we sought to break down the divide between the author and reader, to create conversation through art exploring the role of the queer book within our community. Responding to an international call for participation, LGBTQ artists of diverse ages and experiences from the United States, Canada, and South Africa created dioramas depicting books that contributed to their understandings of themselves as LGBTQ people.
Curator Statements The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History develops exhibitions and events that engage local communities in conversations about queer pasts as a way to imagine queer futures. We provide a forum for queer people to do what we've always done: tell our own stories. We are artists, historians, educators and activists and we believe you are too. We are honored to be presenting this beautiful, evocative collection of queermade work from around the world, which explodes the diorama form while simultaneously showing the wide variety of sources from which each of us builds our own sexual and gender identities. There is great power in knowing your history, but we believe that the experience of analyzing, deconstructing and sharing that knowledge is just as important. Through this sharing, we come to a place of deeper understanding. Outside of a school context, we are rarely given the opportunity to perform this kind of creative/analytical work, which leaves us ill-prepared to deconstruct the false histories that are so often told about queer people and our communities. For that reason, Pop-Up is invested in democratizing the museum form, and creating shows that draw from common experiences in formats that feel accessible to anyone, even those who might not normally consider themselves scholars or artists. If this work speaks to you, we encourage you to create a Pop-Up of your own! —Hugh Ryan Founding Director, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History
As an author my job is to make worlds come alive with words on the page. It had never occurred to me that I would ever get the chance to see a world that I had written into existence come alive off the page. Last summer that changed when I opened a box shipped to me by Michelle Brennan and discovered a tiny diorama replica of my novel Roving Pack complete with a little punked-out doll, black-sheeted bed, bookcase, and floggers on the cardboard wall replicating the basement apartment that the main character Click called home. By queerly reclaiming the "book in a box" elementary school book report style diorama medium, Michelle quickly inspired this show, as my shared photos of her diorama on social media inspired others who had also been touched by LGBTQ books. For many queer folks (myself included), the first time we are able to understand ourselves is in secrecy, holding a book. The Queer Book Diorama Show harkens back to that private moment of self-discovery and then invites the viewer to join the artist in theirs—whether it's coming out the first time, or a later awakening to a new queered desire or identity. Together, we are exploring the ways queer books touch our lives, fortify us, save us. It has been a tremendous honor to curate this show with Hugh Ryan and I'm so grateful for the support and sponsorship from The New York Public Library, Lambda Literary Foundation, MIX NYC, and the Pop-Up Museum for Queer History. —Sassafras Lowrey Author of Roving Pack, Kicked Out, & Leather Ever After
Melissa Sky & Jennifer Corbett Toronto, Canada Beebo Brinker Chronicles, Ann Bannon
Michelle Morgan New Haven, CT Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles
I discovered this book on the bookshelves of a university Womyn’s Centre where I volunteered as part of their collective in the early 90s. It was the first time I had ever heard of butch lesbians. Reading about Beebo took my breath away and turned around my entire way of thinking about my tentative exploration of possibly loving women. After I finished the book, I knew I was a lesbian, and there was no turning back, so the book holds deep meaning for me in the unfolding of my identity, as it did for so many others. However, I find the genre of lesbian pulp fiction intellectually satisfying too. I studied it for my PhD dissertation, investigating how lesbian writers in the 50s and 60s seized this rare opportunity to write openly of their lives, how they both fulfilled and outwitted formulaic conventions to write these sexy, campy, best-selling queer stories.
The 28 short stories in Chelsea Girls find revelation in disaster and beauty in ugliness and ugliness in beauty. Myles refuses any neat positioning of the self in relation to the events that make up our lives. I chose this book because it came to me when I needed to learn, as a queer person, that there is no climatic, epiphanic moment when we learn something and proceed to some neat resolution of our many selves. Maturity narratives are lies heterosexuality how to accept that.
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Jenny Lin Montreal, Canada Female Masculinities, Jack Halberstam
Michael Moran New York, NY Dancer From the Dance, Andrew Holleran
Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance is a fever dream of romantic idealism, set in a hedonistic carnival. Over the last thirty years, reading it has reflected and clarified my life. In 1984, its mixture of camp, satire and nostalgia captivated my naïve, goggle-eyed self. In 1989, AIDS’s carnage made Dancer a message from a carefree dreamworld. At that year’s Pride parade, I met a former co-worker. The epitome of a Chelsea muscle guy, he had belonged to the swirl of men in Dancer’s background. Now he was a half-blind skeleton being wheeled down Fifth Avenue by his lover. The end of a world? By 1999, Medicine tamed HIV and time had tamed grief. I could laugh at Dancer—its nostalgia had turned comic. In 2014, Dancer is a time capsule, but a living one, with different geography from today. Hedonism is back. Romance and satire exist side by side.
Peer through the glasses and share a first-person vantage point in my reading of Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinities. This book, among others that I read when I came out in 2000 / 2001, helped bring the words “queer,” “lesbian” and the phrase “gender deviant” to my awareness in a way that I personally identified with. This excerpt on the “Bathroom Problem” describes an all too familiar scenario for those who present as gender-ambiguous or masculine: entering a women’s bathroom only to be informed that you are in the “wrong bathroom” or that “this is the women’s bathroom.”
Jacky Flagg Cape Town, South Africa Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
When I began reading Fun Home I scoffed at the similarities it shared with my life. Alison Bechdel’s experiences seemed uncomfortably familiar. I’ve always felt that my outsiderishness made me unique, and it was hard to read something that showed me otherwise. Halfway through reading Fun Home my father died. My relationship with Bechdel’s story went from a mirror image of my childhood life to more of an adult hand-guide to dealing with death and unanswered questions. I carried the book with me every day, took it everywhere, sometimes without even realizing it was in my hand. When my partner (Zee) gave me the book the pages were crisp and clean. By the end it had been crumpled, water damaged and with a few pages less than when my journey with Fun Home began. In short, I love Fun Home. It comforted me in a time of confusing loss and was the first gift given to me by Zee.
Jason Bishop & Tim McMath New York, NY Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford
In the 6th grade, my teacher Ms. McNeese asked us to find an autobiography and do an oral report as a character from the book. Like many young gay boys in the 80's, I was obsessed with the movie Mommie Dearest. Actually I was obsessed with any story that involved a young person being persecuted. I guess I related in some overdramatic way. When I realized that Mommie Dearest was actually a scathing tell all book by the bitter daughter of Joan Crawford I knew that was the book for me! I painstakingly wrote out a script to perform for my class. I bugged my mama until she agreed to go to Kmart and buy me a busted blonde wig... then (much to her chagrin) raided her closet for the perfect costume and I was ready! When performance day arrived I went to the bathroom, put on my wig and much too large high heels, and strutted down the hallways of McLauren Elementary with more self confidence than I ever had before. I walked into the classroom, stared down my nose at everyone who had ever called me sissy or faggot and said in my best girl voice, "my name is Christina Crawford... and you're very lucky I'm here today because I'm a very busy woman!" I got an A for my fine theatrical work. But what I really got was a sense of what I was capable of.
Michelle Brennan Lansing, MI Roving Pack, Sassafras Lowrey
Kate Conroy New York, NY Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit & Rubyfruit Jungle, Jeanette Winterson & Rita Mae Brown
I created a diorama mash-up of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson and Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. While these authors’ literary styles differ remarkably, their frameworks are quite similar. Each story is a chronological account of an adopted girl growing up in a small town with an abusive and homophobic mother but sympathetic father. We follow each girl’s discovery of her queerness and her perseverance to break from church and family to move to “the city” with hopes of finding acceptance, love, and a career. Both independently and complementary these books have supported my intention and determination to thrive despite society’s relationship to the female gender and same-sex attraction.
Sassafras Lowrey's Roving Pack couldn't have come at a better period in my life. It was the first coming of age story I related to so deeply. As a formerly displaced queer coming of age in Boston in the early 2000's, and realizing I hadn't read a book so representative of my own narrative, I was inspired to reclaim dioramas as a queer experience, and to remember this period of my life where I wasn't sure I would survive. This diorama came together slowly through the months I went through treatment for breast cancer, once again in a place in life I wasn't sure of how to survive. It was the best way I could think to show appreciation to an author whose work I was so moved by, and the diorama turned into an incredibly healing art therapy project.
Report from the 2014 NYC Queer Book Diorama Show
Victoria Baker New Orleans, LA Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown
When I first read Rubyfruit Jungle I was in my twenties, still coming out—I was afraid of what it “meant,” even while I was in a queer relationship, and it all seemed so serious. The book constituted a huge sigh of relief. Reflecting on the call for proposals, I immediately thought of the grapefruit scene. I remember it particularly as allowing me self-acceptance—it was so full of humor and whimsy (and of course, kink). The book was important as I awakened to my workingclass origins and to the role of homophobia in policing sexuality and gender expression, and its engagement with race was compelling. Though held to be a lesbian/separatist book by some, I saw the book as supportive of queers of all stripes (even the protagonist’s revulsion toward butch/femme is belied by that message), and it provided me a much-needed bulwark against the pressure to conform that was all too real in the lesbian community.
daniel rosza lang/levitsky Brooklyn, NY Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stone, Samuel R. Delany
I first found Delany's Time... at 13, while helping pack up my grandmother's house after her death. I read and re-read the story of a no-longer-petty thief and quick-change artist as he travels from a Hell's Kitchen hustler bar to an uptown penthouse, in the company of the Hawk, the Singer—one of the griots of this future New York. The tale, anchored in the deep gossip of everyday queer life, is all about the many people one body can be, the line-crossing power of semi-anonymous queer sex, the significance of unwritten culture, and the value of pleasure and desire for the 'wrong' things from the 'wrong' people. Hawk, seen in my diorama, may be the hero of Time: a teenaged artist wearing scars he asked the narrator (among others) to give him, with neither pride nor shame, because lust needs neither to be worth honoring. OCHO 33
Report from the 2014 NYC Queer Book Diorama Show
JILL LEININGER lives and works in Seattle, and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Roof Picnic Skies, New York and Sky Never Sleeps. D. GILSON is the author of Crush (Punctum Books, 2014), with Will Stockton; Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (2012), winner of the Robin Becker Prize from Seven Kitchens Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Indiana Review, and The Rumpus.
Ketch Wehr Brooklyn, NY The Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson
Ferdinand was and is a crucial template for masculinity that I was raised with and continues to hold dear. As a female child who would eventually transition to male, I did not understand why this book felt so vital to me and my expectations of my life when I was young. Growing up Quaker and as a sensitive, expressive (eventual) boy, this story set a clear tone in my upbringing: that being gentle and non-conforming is valid. I revisited Ferdinand as a concept and icon of gentle masculinity throughout my formative years and still consider this book deeply important to me. I have also loved building dioramas throughout my creative life. I have been as excited about crafting small worlds as exploring them in my own imaginings and through the books I read as beacons of hope and routes to escape or strength. This diorama is an homage to both Munro Leaf and illustrator Robert Lawson’s creative vision. In this paper diorama inside this wooden box, I have sought to bring the experience of peering into something elegant, private, small yet expansive, and sacred to the viewer. My aim is to give you the visual experience of stepping into a book and feeling free. Photos: Hugh Ryan & Sassafras Lowrey
notes
the National University of Singapore—Asia Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship in 2012. He is currently based in Rumatá Artspace in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. MARY MERIAM is the founder of Lavender Review, co-founder of Headmistress Press, editor of Irresistible Sonnets, and author of The Countess of Flatbroke, The Poet’s Zodiac, Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar.
BRYAN BORLAND is publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press and founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry. His books include My Life as Adam, Less Fortunate Pirates, and, most recently, Joy Exhaustible, an anthology of gay publishers he edited with his husband, Seth Pennington.
JENNIFER PATTERSON’s writing appears in The Survivors Project: Telling the Truth About Life After Sexual Abuse and on The Feminist Wire. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Sexual Violence Movement (Magnus Books, 2015).
deborah brandon holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Additional work appears in [PANK], Bombay Gin, Mom Egg Review, Denver Quarterly, Moonshot, Cadillac Cicatrix, Hotel Amerika and other journals. deborah lives in Tucson with her partner, two children and cockatiel.
JULIE R. ENSZER is author of Sisterhood (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010), and editor of Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2011) and Sinister Wisdom.
JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO’s work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Fifth Wednesday, CALYX, So to Speak, Booth, and elsewhere.
JORY MICKELSON was born and raised in Montana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in CutBank, The Carolina Quarterly, Superstition Review, Sundog Lit, Weave Magazine, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, and other journals. He is the 2014 Guest Poetry Editor for Codex Journal.
ALISON REED’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals including Matter, Femme Dreamboat, Skin to Skin, Cactus Heart, and So to Speak, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is pursuing her PhD in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. JOY LADIN is the author of six books of poetry; her seventh collection, Impersonation, is due out from Sheep Meadow in 2015. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. DWAYNE MARTINE is a Jicarilla Apache/Navajo poet living in Tucson. He has been published widely online and in print. He works as a professional editor and writer. B.B.P. HOSMILLO is a Southeast Asianist queer poet. He received the JENESYS Invitation for Graduate Student Research Fellowship in 2011 and
MARY ANN DAVIS earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Gender Studies from USC. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award and the Prism Review Poetry Prize, and currently teaches in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College. JUSTIN BOND’s work has appeared most recently in Heavy Feather Review, Lost In Thought, and Vinyl Poetry. His chapbook, Going Native, was released earlier this year by Red Bird Chapbooks. A contributing editor for The Found Poetry Review, he lives and works in Tulsa.
Sam Lopes Brken Dam 2013 acrylic and latex on panel 21”x36”
OCHO www.8888ocho.com