Higher Power Mavis Moon

Higher Power

Mavis Moon

Callie Wohlgemuth

Structural

Clara Callahan

inside outside early summer

Lila Goldstein

AIR AND SPACE

Edited by Callie Wohlgemuth Photos by Zoe Fieldman

song for homecoming

After spending a long time looking for a home outside my body, here are a few options I have found:

1. An interest in bird watching that compels me to stand quietly whenever I hear the punctuated calls that birds cry out in motion.

At home in Delaware this early in the spring, these calls are made mostly by robins, cardinals, and small finches and sparrows (house and song, respectively). My mother taught me a ritual for the first time I see a robin every year, one that she learned from her mother who probably learned it from her mother, too. A ritual passed from mother to daughter who became mother and passed it to daughter who became mother and passed it to me (non-daughter / child / (???), still in the process of becoming). A ritual that involves licking the tip of your thumb, pressing it firmly and gently into the center of your palm, and then making a fist and using its outer edge to stamp the place where you pressed your thumb down.

This spring, when I saw my first robin in Massachusetts, I did it wrong. I remembered the lick and the thumbprint but not the stamp. I harbor a secret fear that this small mistake of letting the spit linger in my palm, un-stamped triggered the outbreak of a global pandemic that forced my friends and me off campus for the best season of the year, when everything blooms

bright after a long winter of graybrown and coldblue. The robins see the coming of this season before any of us, I think— they recognize its imminence as the ground begins to thaw enough for them to dig into it with their beaks and pull out limp, pink-bellied worms. This is a sign that’s easy to miss through layers of socks and boots and dry grass. Maybe spring would seem to come sooner if we spent more time digging. This way our luck wouldn’t hinge on a small ritual based on the coming of a small bird. Although, isn’t it nice that it does?

It is a small delight to be attentive to little flighty things who know better than us that spring is coming. It is a kindness to listen well. It is magical to build a ritual from the non-human.

2. More than one shelter of unknown origin made of branches and fallen logs, happened upon in pursuit of an unexpectedly bold pileated woodpecker.

I put the cheap binoculars I bought as a gift to myself back into the pocket of my denim jacket and step inside the lean-to I’ve found. From far off it looked like a group of young trees, fallen together into an auspicious structure, by chance — as I come closer I realize that someone has made it, dragged branches to this place and nestled them into the notch of a standing tree, their bases splayed out to cover more ground. I imagine that when it was first built, a roof of leaves covered the gaps between the branches to make a tidy little fort. I start to think about the implications of the military word fort and their effects on how children play, but decide instead to step inside the shelter and let myself be delighted by it. Inside, it feels like a memory.

My childhood best friend and her family lived in a house that backed up into dense woods.

The house was pink, the woods brown. My friend and I were both tomboys— we don’t keep in touch but I wonder if she is gay now, too. Much of our play consisted of climbing the trees in front of her family home, and exploring the woods behind it. Sometimes we joined with her other friends from the neighborhood, but mostly we were alone. The woods behind her house opened up onto a creek, which in childhood seemed impossibly wide as we hopped from rock to rock to reach an island in the center, from which we would throw goldfish crackers to the fish below (a harmless cannibalism). We played house, we played adventurers, we played archeologists, we tried to start fires, we caught fish in the mouths of gatorade bottles, and we built forts. I went to sleepaway camp as a kid, and I fancied myself a survivalist. I knew the difference between a lean-to and a wickiup and a spider shelter and I was happy to offer directions on how to construct each. We shimmied into small openings, huddled together on top of damp leaves with muddy knees and gritty fingernails, alone together inside our small makeshift house for some time, before by some magic we found ourselves crossing back over the creek and traversing the woods back to her house, just in time for her mother’s rice cooker to click off, and her younger sister to have finished setting the table. My friend never fell into the creek, but on more than one occasion I slipped into the shallow water, and had to walk in through the back door of her family home, sopping wet, to borrow her older brother’s clothes for dinner while mine dried over the railing of the back deck. I doubt any of the forts we built have held up well enough to be encountered by birdwatchers, but I hold out some kind of romantic hope that a squirrel or a bird or a fairy found shelter in one of them, or that another pair of young tomboys cozied up inside.

3. A stand of scrub pines huddled together on a cliff face, hardened by the wind but forever opening themselves to the sea.

My partner is from Rhode Island, the smallest state in the U.S. (a fact I mercilessly tease her about since Delaware is only the second smallest state). Rhode

Island’s nickname is “the Ocean State.” I visited her in her parents’ house over winter break. I rode on a train for five hours from Wilmington to Providence, and she picked me up in her mother’s car, wearing a white sweater. I only stayed there for a few days before we rode back to campus together, but while I was there we drove to Newport, RI to walk along the cliffs there. It was January, and the colors of the ocean were muted; they faded into the sand and the sky, blue and gray and brown and green all at once, broken up by the gulls dotting the beach and the sky, crying out relentlessly. We kissed next to a stand of scrub pines, whose hard beauty we share a love for. It was cold and windy in a way that only got more biting as we ventured further from the shore along the cliff walk. We held hands the whole way anyway and by the end my knuckles were white and raw, opened by being in love in the face of the biting ocean gale. We stopped holding hands for a moment because we found a folded slip of unlined stark white paper on the ground as we walked and I insisted on picking it up. It wasn’t creased, or well-worn, or secreted away — it looked as if someone must have just gently laid it on the ground with the intention of us finding it. It had a string of numbers written on it in blue ink. I thought it might be a code, a first clue of some kind of mission or mystery we were meant to embark on right away. I envisioned us in a crime procedural show, hunkered in front of an array of bright screens, typing the numbers into some database to trace them; maybe it was an IP address, a password to some secret site for spies, the phone number of a mafia boss who wanted us to a run a heist. I wondered why it had been left just for us. I imagined it being dropped by some carrier pigeon or, more likely in the seaside town, a carrier gull. She thought it was just a slip of paper that had drifted out of someone’s pocket. The cliff ran right into a college campus, maybe it was a library call number, drawn out of someone’s pocket by the wind or dropped like litter. She is sensible that way. I thought this was much less exciting, but folded up the piece of paper anyway and secreted it away in my pocket to be happened upon on some later date — a reminder of this hour we spent together, narrowly avoiding certain death or imprisonment during a heist gone awry because of her sensibility, watching the waves crash onto the rocks, eroding them right in front of our eyes at an imperceptible pace, wondering about whether or not anyone did or had ever lived in the lighthouse barely visible on the horizon, watching the scrub pines open themselves to the seas, opening ourselves in the same way.

I texted Kate to ask what she remembers of that day, the scrub pines and the slip of paper stand out in my mind, mundane objects as representations of a tender love beside the ocean.

She told me about memory— “how strange and nice it is to take someone new and loved to somewhere you have memories of people who you’ve known for a long time and loved.” She told me about a bridge on that walk, one where she has taken a lot of photos of friends and family, one where she now has a memory of me.

I texted her because I read somewhere that a good way to practice writing an essay like this is to think of three words or objects and write from them. I asked her for three words about the cliff walk to write a poem from, but she said that was too hard. I planned to restate what she said in my own words but she is a writer and she said it better than I could have and now I am writing this on my back porch, 308 miles away from Rhode Island, and thinking about how hard and how nice it is to be in love right now. I wonder if the scrub pines feel that way about standing forever against the sea.

3. A fantasy of myself embodied in older butches.

My aunt is the first butch I ever met. She is the one who texted me first when I came out as queer, a quiet offering of support that felt like a welcome. She is the one who googled “gender neutral term for niece” when I told my family that I’m nonbinary and has called me her nibling ever since. She is the one who offers me the tee shirts she has outgrown— the latest offering is a bright red, well worn tee shirt with “This shirt is written in Braille. Please read carefully!” emblazoned above a series of raised dots across the chest, an invitation for someone to run their hand across it. I recognize that it is in poor taste to mobilize casual ableism as a pickup line, but I still ask for it when my aunt texts me “Looking at my T-Shirts. Thinking i gots too many. Got yer eyeballs on any that you’re hoping I Outgrow?” because it feels like an offering. We repeat this ritual every few months— the stack of thin t-shirts in her closet seemingly inexhaustible, constantly diminishing while my stack grows taller. When I wear one of them, I feel strong and well rooted, like I have been projected into my very near dyke future somehow when I shrug it on over my binder. I hear my aunt in the jokes I tell, in the way I talk to my dogs, in how I show affection for my partner. I see her in how I imagine my life at age 37. Except I don’t like football.

has since transitioned. He was one of the first lesbians I ever knew and now he is the closest to being a trans family member that I have— in classic queer fashion he and my aunt have remained close friends since their breakup. I texted him when I was first thinking about top surgery, he texted me to ask what kind of tattoo he should get to cover his scars (I said he should get a tree). When I get top surgery I will want a chest tattoo, too, but I don’t want mine to be a cover up. I want it to draw people’s eyes to the scars emblazoned across my chest in angry red, then smooth pink, then white. I know what my scars will look like because I already have three scars on my chest from heart surgery as an infant. When I think about my eventual voluntary double mastectomy I think about the place where all of my scars will meet. I hope whoever I love then will kiss that spot: the point where the past and future of my body meet.

4. The belief that revolution is an act of love. Good friends and a lover with a dimpled smile who share the same conviction.

in love with the downy woodpecker clinging to a branch of the newly budding tree in my backyard. I am in love with each and every one of my friends. This love powers infinite dance parties and leads me to ask very big questions. I am in love with my partner and the ways she talks about the future. I am in love with the infinite and infinitesimal delights that draw my eye within any given day (a house with a yellow door, a flower bush with enormous flowers that I cannot name, the smell of rain, the buds of honeysuckles that are waiting to open and be eaten, etc.). I am in love with a world that doesn’t exist because we haven’t built it yet. I am in love with these words from my favorite book, Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg: “There is no utopia of the Damned save the one we will make ourselves, and we will make it.” I am in love with an uncountable number of other words. And all of this, taken in its component parts or as a collection, is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because of the ways capitalism has taught us to restrict our love to our (white) parents, our (white) spouses, and our two (white) children. Being in love in an infinity of ways makes me want to be a better person working to build a better world; a world beyond the walls of prisons and detention centers, beyond borders, beyond policing, and beyond capitalism. All of this love is what teaches me that revolution is necessary, and that this revolution must be built by and for our collective liberation — a liberation through love and struggle. We have to be in love with the world because we have been taught to do the opposite. Doing the opposite is revolutionary. There is something to be said, I think, about using plural pronouns and being a radical; my faith in and love for the collective must necessarily extend to myself. “They are striving for liberation” means me as much as it means all of my friends and comrades. I wonder what it would be like to think in terms of “we”— not in Genesis P-Orridge’s pandrogyne sense of two becoming one, but in the revolutionary sense of all of us as entangled, bound up in each other’s liberation and joy.

We will dig down into the soil and feel its coolness and warmth, alternately. We will hold seeds in the palms of our hands, letting them drop in divots We have dug into the dark earth. We will reluctantly go to our jobs but when our paychecks come We will use them to buy more seeds and to donate to our bail funds. We will work, but not tirelessly. We will feed ourselves from the garden around the back of the house.

We will go to bed whenever We want, with whoever we want. If We decide to, We will have a dance party. We will listen to shitty pop or bright folk. If We don’t want to dance We will listen to tracy chapman or We will listen to gil scott heron. We will spend a lot of time imagining our utopia and thinking about how it is already entangled with our reality. When We awake in the morning We will rise and make us breakfast. If there are leftovers, We will write a note to us that says “please eat me!” and when We come home we will see a note next to the empty skillet that says “We did! it was delicious! were these potatoes from the garden?” We will smile. We will go to the garden and dig up some more potatoes to make dinner for us. We will admire the dirt under our fingernails. We care about us. We care about everyone else just as much. Come take from the garden! Come dream with us! Come build something new!

5. My own body

In all of its faults and discontinuities it makes for a lovely house

with a warm kitchen in which the ones I love can gather and an open window through which the setting sun shines and we hear the dusksong of birds; sparrows, finches, jays and others alighting from feeder to sky to fencepost to windowsill to sky. All this while soup simmers on the stove and our winebright laughter mingles in the air with cuminthymerosemary and lemon zest and the tang of yeast from bread rising in the oven. All of this announcing our arrival on the threshold of a meal eaten together— bread broken stories sung hands held love lipped into being by all of us together. My body as home. My body as (y)ours. My body as belonging to all of us.

Lucy James-Olson