MANIFEST… Because i am grey. The different parts of me crash into and complicate each other constantly. And i know i'm not the only one trying to figure it all out. Because we all have something to say. Because one important way to break down all that oppresses is to speak our truths without reservation or apology, and find solidarity and inspiration in each other’s honesty. Because sometimes i get angry. Because sometimes i get happy. And oftentimes i want to share. Because if you don’t feel like you have a place to go, you need a place to go. Because i am a Young-Girl. The jumble of fragments that follow in no way comprises an offering of any definitive theory on the Young-Girl. They are materials accumulated from encounters with, observations of, and most importantly, personal experiences of Young-Girls. Minds looking for moral comfort or for vice to condemn will find in these scattered pages but roads that will lead them nowhere. In fact we're not so much trying to convert Young-Girls as we are trying to trace out all the corners of a fractured battlefront of Young-Girlization. And to supply the weapons for a hand to hand, blow by blow fight, wherever you may find yourself. This text is a pact. This text is a labor of love. This text is a gift to you. -To all those who relate and create, connect yourself and keep creating. (inspired by TIQQUN)
GENESIS GREY & FEMMEDYMION
Among the things I miss are my mother’s red rice and my sister’s chicken, helping her cut bread, or slice onions; and my mother’s big laugh and baby’s little laugh, and the greetings we passed back and forth every day, in an unending game of smiles. I miss my neighbors’ easy handshakes. I miss the way the loud courtyard with tiles that fry your feet by midday would fold into its nighttime geometry, suddenly puddled with moonlight. I miss brushing my teeth on the roof, under the stars — I know I’ve told you all this before. You know I miss making tea and slow conversation behind the house, and the smell of burning sugar when the teapot overflowed. I miss too many bodies on the bus, the feeling of going the same direction other folks are going, and I miss the ocean, filling us with wildness and salt. You’ve heard me say plenty of times how much I miss the sound of the language of welcome, which I am still learning to speak, though nobody can give a name to everything. But I like to think my sister is with me every time I cut onions the way she taught me, in little slivers — and I don’t cry anymore. I count and recount these past-and-future things like prayer beads: thankful, thankful, thankful. -FDC
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excerpt from the Asheville pages, Dec. 21-22 genesis grey
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The house is small, reads more like an apartment, with a twin mattress on the floor in the front room, along with a small pile of wrapped Christmas presents. Sitting in the second room—the rooms are horizontally stacked, shot gun style—Grace and i talk to her neighbor, Lori, until one of the cats, Willow, walks into the room, greets Lori, mounts the cat lounging structure and settles down facing us. Willow is a substantial, part flame-point Siamese with large, pale green eyes and a mouth that seems perpetually and slightly agape, forever posed to say something. And as his gaze traces to Grace and me, the newcomers on the couch, his eyes rest on me, square on me, and stay there for some minutes, more like a baby in a restaurant staring curious and tactless than like a cat. I meet his gaze and he does not look away; i wonder if he is seeing good or bad things.
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Lori’s son, Phoenix, comes in, a plump, bright-eyed boy of nine, tells us of the solo he’d sung before a crowd of 500 in his school’s holiday pageant just the night before, how he hadn’t been nervous at all. His skin is a shade or two darker than mine; when he learns i am in college, he asks if i have a job, if i had a job in high school, where it was. He asks if i know how to sing “Jingle Bells” in French; i feel guilty that i don’t, that i don’t know any French songs with which to repay him for the ones he gives us, sitting on the floor with the script of the play his school will put on in the spring. He steams ahead, singing the tunes he likes and reading his lines, both for and not for us. If Lori and Grace begin to talk not over but beside him, he does not notice or at least does not demand that they stop and devote their full attention to him, but he will pop in, every so often, and explain the play (“The queen says that, not me”; “The nurse interrupts me there”). The play is called Princess Whatshername; he is playing a steward.
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Lori says that Willow stays close to her, won’t really go outside with the other cats even when the weather is nice and the door is open, like today. I read in his complacency, his piqued attention to but ultimate ignorance of the goings-on of the house around him, something familiar. The other cats trail in, bidden by a shaking of the dry food container: there is Jazzy, an orange, one-eyed tabby, and Wilma, a shy and lovely part ragdoll, and Hattie, the effective mother of the brood, a rotund and darling calico who, Lori explains, adopted and
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nursed the other cats when they were young and had been inexplicably shunned by their birth mother, except Willow, whose mother had died when he was a baby. It made more sense to me, suddenly, why Willow clung to Lori’s side, why his eyes, fixed on me for so long, seemed to see right in.
After we leave Lori and Phoenix’s house, Grace explains that Phoenix, too, is adopted, that Lori chose him only two years ago. I think i wouldn’t have guessed that and feel annoyed that i think that, wonder just what that’s supposed to mean, to what that’s supposed to testify. That evening, Grace asks me to explain Phoenix to Michael; i say the best way i can describe it is Phoenix seems “clear,” direct, i mean, but also something more. “He takes up his space,” i clarify a moment later, to which Grace adds, “Unapologetically,” a feat i still have failed to accomplish, wonder if i ever will, worry if Phoenix will ever lose it, how much time it took him to begin to call Lori mom as he does, as he did, the edges of it smooth as any of his other words. Back in their living room, the four of us sat discussing the cats. “You’re lucky,” i’d said to him, looking into his eyes, meaning he is lucky to grow up with four sweet cats, and he smiled a real smile, saying nothing. Now, i wonder if i was, in that moment, one of those adults i’d always hated, the ones who had told me how to feel, or what i was.
(from my grandparents' kitchen) My mother is at the sink with her back turned, her movements vigorous enough that I don’t know til I hear her voice whether or not she’s mad. Slick slices of earthy skin fall onto the wet stainless steel as she peels potatoes. She cuts out every spot that my grandfather might find unsightly when these have been mashed. “There are things that matter,” says my mother. “Like when you’re whipping cream, if you go too far it’ll turn into butter. But there are other things that don’t matter.” -FDC
“Sex is not a goddamn performance. Sex should feel as natural as drinking water. It should not require confidence. Sex should happen, because the moment is ripe. Ripening lips, ripening labia, ripening cock, ripening pupils, ripening state of being. Ripe and augmented and brimming. Your energy goes to your pumping heart, then to every external nerve, then to theirs, on fire. You bask, roll, play in it. You sigh, moan, laugh. It’s not about being “good in bed.” It’s about being happy. One should never worry if they’re doing it “correctly.” Sex is not factual. I don’t want your cookie-cutter sex, I don’t want your meticulously crafted, calculated, fool-proof fuck. I don’t want a show. I want you. Let your instincts, urges and whims define that. It’s enough. What do most girls like? Forget about it. Statistics are meaningless when there’s only one. Hello, here’s me. Here’s you. Don’t worry about taking it too slow. We got time. We got infinite rhythms, combinations, possibilities. Explore each fuck. Take our time. We can do a different one later.
Don’t worry about making me come. I’m here. Right where I want to be. I am overwhelmed by wanting; you don’t have to convince me. I want you because I like you. So don’t put on a front. Don’t taint this. I’m frustrated—it’s just authenticity I want. It’s originality. It’s passion. It’s joy. Don’t say that something I like is ugly. Don’t compare yourself to the rest. You will live and die with and within your experiences like everyone else. If someone thinks you are amazing, they are not wrong. Their universe is as real as any other; it is forged through perception. I don’t care if you accidentally slammed my head into the wall, if you slipped out, if my arm cracked, if the delightful pressure of your wet lips on my anything made a silly sound. There is no right way and no wrong way. “Good in bed,” what. You’re good in my bed. I’m pleased you’re there. I feel it suits you. Shove your technique. Let your memory swallow it. Fuck me like you’d fuck me, fuck me like you feel. This isn’t a test.”
Paradelle for autumn walking If anyone asks where I am, say I’m out walking. If anyone asks where I am, say I’m out walking. Can’t stand to miss the sun’s last honey. Can’t stand to miss the sun’s last honey. Can’t say I miss anyone. Out to honey; if, am. The sun’s last stand asks where I’m walking. I decide to turn at the next right. I decide to turn at the next right. And will you be waiting there with your hands? And will you be waiting there with your hands? At the next hands, I will decide to with. And there you be, your turn waiting right there. Let’s go to the orchard, though that’s crazy. Let’s go to the orchard, though that’s crazy. Lift me up to reach the highest branch. Lift me up to reach the highest branch. Lift the crazy highest reach: that’s up to me. Go to the branch, though — let’s orchard. To anyone asks, Miss-Can’t-Decide-Where-To-Turn — I’m walking. Go to the to, the at, the though. Let’s stand out, say that’s the sun’s reach, highest up. You lift me, hands and branch; next, last. I will be waiting right there with crazy honey if I am your orchard. -FDC
“This is Unsustainable”
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You. You, make my temperature rise past sustainable levels Forget butterflies in my stomach You are the cause of my rising seas
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Sandy? Katrina? They have nothing on the hurricane ricocheting through my skull Melting ice caps and global climate change Can’t compete with the ice floe cast adrift in the warming oceans of my ribcage
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I choke on poison and struggle to breathe As the air becomes thick and polluted with your scent And dry forests ignite and burn in the heat from your breath
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This. This, is the second coming, the apocalypse, the End, That scientists have warned us about for decades But I was too stupid to listen. Too intoxicated by the possibility of us To heed their warnings And now it’s too late.
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Because I’m spinning through space Silent and empty and endless As the world floods, melts, and combusts Around me
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-E.M.D.
a doll hanging up at my grandma’s “beauty parlor.” has things like “pot belly” and “flabby arms” written on it, with pins sticking into the sites of contention.! ! —genesis grey
ED. NOTES
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On the seventeenth page of the October issue, a photocopy of a found poem was published unattributed, but it should have been attributed to Fiona Depuis Carey. Sorry about that.
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The 3-part collage that appears in this issue from pages 15-17 is by genesis grey and reads: “Seems like the small things are the only things i’ll fight”; it is a lyric from the Liz Phair song “Gunshy.”
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rpd.grrrls.riot@gmail.com FEBRUARY theme: first times due FEB 7