Issue II SPRING 2015
Founding-Editor Jos Charles
Editor SA Smythe Editor Emerson Whitney
Cover design by Jos Charles. Issue layout by Jos Charles. Text set in Goudy Old Style, Times, and IM Fell Great Primer.
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All Copyrights are retained by the original authors and artists with the exception of archival rights. ISBN: 978 – 0 – 578 – 16048 – 1 ISSN: 2332 – 0354 ©2015
THEM IS A BODY.
THEM is a body of writers, of writing that does not conform. Whether we lie outside, between, reject, or move freely between gender identities, our bodies are a site of disruption, confusion, and instability for those around us.
THEM IS DISASSEMBLY.
Like gender, writing has failed us. Gender has never been simple because our bodies have never been simple. Caught in an assembling of violences distributed by race, ability, capital, our genders bare mistrust unequally. THEM is unashamed to speak “I” or to address “you” in all its multiplicity; THEM is unashamed to bear an “us” in all its difference. We accept we have been constructed as many, so we reject the fiction we share a common identity to call home; we come from below. We admit we were never singular.
!
!
WE ARE THEM.
CONTENTS
Jos C h a rles A lo k V a id -M en o n
C o d y V a n d er C lu te D a n e S lu tzk y
W H E N A B IR T H C E R T IF IC A T E H IJA C K S A B O D Y A N D T E L L S IT T O SPEAK OR FOREVER H O L D IT S P E A C E
1 1 T A K E T H IS M Y B O D Y 1 9 P A R T IC U L A T E 21 REFRIDGERATOR CHILDREN
Ja m ie B erro u t
2 8 fro m POSTCARDS / PORTLAND, ORE.
Josh u a Jen n ifer E sp in oza L ily C liffo rd INTRO DUCT ORY
7
E rik a D . P rice
Jea n P a o li
iv
vi o n S U B M IS S IO N S
3 2 WE’RE ALL PISSED OFF BECAUSE OUR PARENTS DIDN’T READ JUDITH BUTLER: YOU ARE NOT ALONE 3 4 TWO POEMS 3 7 V IV A N O V A , MAMAN!
M a n u el A rtu ro A b reu
S a ra Ju n e W o o d s
S eeley Q u est S o n ya E llis
S tep h en B o yer T yler C o n a ty
3 9 T H E E V IT A B L E S 4 0 L IL C U B E 4 1 E V E R Y T H IN G S T A R T E D H A P P IN G AFTER REHAB 42 HUMANS HAUNT GHOSTS
4 3 W H E N T H E R A IN COMES 49 A CROOKED TALE 5 0 S E L F -P O R T R A IT W IT H G E N IT A L D Y S P H O R IA 5 2 #Uploadingnature Poem 5 5 11 (an autoethnography of performance) 6 5 C O N T R IB U T O R S
INTRO DUCT ORY v
ON ISSUE II
Before there is a “trans literature,” there is a “trans body.” As I write this I have open in a tab an article on trans representation, written by a white trans woman, critiquing a magazine article featuring trans women of color, positing it lacks “real” trans icons like [insert white trans women here]. As if being a trans body of color wasn’t enough. As if the trans body were given, individual, transcendent. As if bodies weren’t performing labor—affective, oppressive, material labor—for other bodies. Anti-black violence perpetuated by the state, the police, US borders, and the prison industrial complex frames our narratives. To that end, the rising popularity of figures like Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and Carmen Carrera means something. It also means something that names like these can sit comfortably in the US social imagination alongside names like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the oppression directed at black bodies, and increased violence towards and homelessness of trans women of color. In the midst of this, THEM issue II presents writing authored from bodies that bear violence asymmetrically. The experience of the white settler trans man, the trans woman of color, the non-binary colonized person, are far from equal or a coherent community. Our bodies take up space differently, some more than others. Any collection of “trans writing” wakes up here, among the messy shit that constitutes not theories of performativity or disruption, but our day-to-day lives. I don’t know what this collection is doing, cause it’s as distinct as our bodies. But I do know it’s unified possibility: the possibility for trans people to feel their words in their own mouths. To sketch an architecture of our existences.
V i INTRO DUCT ORY
First, I sketch a house; then, I sketch a field. But who is in the house? And who is in the field?
Jos Charles THEM fouding-editor
WHEN A BIRTH CERTIFICATE HIJACKS A BODY AND TELLS IT TO SPEAK OR FOREVER HOLDS ITS PEACE A lo k V a id -M en o n
we must ask:
what would it mean to say that i was assigned brown at birth? (& then came ‘man’ as the punctuation mark after)
what would it mean to say that after 9/11 my ? became !
what would it mean to say that the war on terror made me genderqueer?
that i woke up afraid of myself?
AL OK VAID-MENO N
would you believe me if i told you
7
would you believe me if i told you that i have spent the past decade flying away from man because he brown he !
would you accept me if i told you that my identity is the inhale yanked exhale the trauma yanked body the violence yanked gender ?
would you accept me if I told you my gender came from violence?
because sometimes i wonder if there would be gender if there were no violence. sometimes i
8
AL OK V AID -MENO N
wonder if there would be body if there were no trauma. sometimes i wonder if there would be brown if there were no plane.
last weekend i smiled when the security guard patted me down
i wonder if he was searching for my gender
i wanted to shout “wait – you are right -- i am concealing a weapon down there ”
how we no longer attempt to translate violence into language
how we have found ways to make their ! question itself
how good it feels to have them fumbling AL OK VAID-MENO N
in the darkness
9
10 REDACTIO N
Bea Noël’s piece, ‘THANKSGIVING ADDRESS’ has been redacted. A statement from THEM is forthcoming.
TAKE THIS MY BODY C o d y V a n d er C lu te
At the age of forty you will be on your knees. To keep the white collar around your neck you must swear Christian obedience, promise to carry out the responsibilities by which you are to be bound. The floor will be hard and the hands on your head warm the way they were during the summer of 1974, five years ago.
/
In West Virginia, the last day of July brings a wet river heat that sticks to the skin. Through the doorway you can see Harley: a young landscape of knobbed spine, bowed, and scraped knees pressed red against wood. Brother Joseph's got him folded up, squeezing his bent leg white, fingers tight, heavy tenderizer hands holding him to the cutting-board desk. This might be a holy place, sunlight going kaleidoscope through the windows and staining their flesh, but Joseph's not that kind of brother, no, all they've got is blood.
nothing but two duffel bags of clothes and bullet casings. Their parents took the rest, driving out of Ronceverte into brush country, ready to
CODY VAN DER CLUTE 11
Early May they came, dropping down from a high-wheeled Ford carrying
shoot coyotes for the sin of walking on four legs. Because you were not a Father, not yet, the parish priest sent them to stay in your bachelor house.
Now it's past the longest day of the year and the boys are still here, Joseph still denim-shredding seventeen and Harley with his fifteenth birthday a week fresh.
"Hey girl, just think, now you can drive," Joseph said, slapping Harley up the back when you put the cake down, candles smoking. "Go anywhere." Harley laughed, high and chopped off, guttering all the small fires before he meant to, but when his brother pulled out a lighter he pushed it away, took your knife instead. Seven days later you see the problem, why when Harley says thanks it's to your tie and not your face, why Joseph talks about brothers but says girl, girl, girl.
They had the same brown hand-me-down crew cut, the same too-big eyes, the same West Coast twang, and in the beginning it was easy to flip their names. As the weeks rolled out you learned to read their faces, a cartographer tracing unknown shores: the broad slopes of Harley's nose, scalene; Joseph's summer freckles, gravelled across his cheeks; the gold
12 CODY VANDER CLUTE
spots in Harley's green irises and the peeling red burn on Joseph's ears.
It takes you a moment to place the sound—one of the sounds, because you recognize that of heavy breathing, close to dry drowning. You recognize the stuttering drone of low voices, first one then another. The quiet suction of flesh against flesh. The creaking of wood under a weight it was not built to bear. You remember the wetness too, but it has been a
long time and you were not expecting to find it here. Joseph takes that bent leg and pulls it, spreads it wide until Harley's face is hidden and you are looking at the sound.
Harley's chest is wrapped tight, in an assemblage of defiance, because he has the body of Eve. This is the problem. On its own, it is a fine body. It is smooth, banded with tan, and for another person, in another place, the sight would be a prize. Think of the catalog you keep, of all the men you have seen in this world, indexed by the shape of their elbows or the down on their thighs. Young as he is, Joseph fits into here quick; there will always be a place for his kind, bold and handsome.
There is not a place for Harley, not quite, but you've seen him walk as though there is, without doubt, a walk you never learned.
Earlier, one mid-June day, Harley came to you in the tower. You'd just finished ringing the bells, rope rough even with gloves, and under the fading strike and hum his steps were silent on the stairs. Joseph was on the shores of the Greenbrier, fishing for sport as he did every weekend, pulling out mouth hooks to catch the same scarred creatures Saturday next; Harley usually wandered around town or nested in the library of this our St. Catherine, depending on the weather. The day was bright
night," he told you. "Less people."
CODY VANDER CLUTE 13
and hot, the lawns dusty by noon, a good day for swimming. "It's better at
The way Joseph bends over, holds onto him, has the look of deliberation, every move calculated and planned together. After this many months they've memorized your circuits, the hours of parish life, and know on Tuesday afternoons the church library is given over to your long-distance holy studies. The door latches on the inside, iron and hard to miss; you showed Harley how to lock himself in one loud bingo night. Even so it was open when you came—not as an invitation, surely, but out of insouciance.
He'd sought you out in the hopes of a normal book, as he called them— "Bradbury, Dick, Heinlein, all those great whites"—but all you had he'd read and this church did not carry such things. You offered him the Stapledon under your bed. "Odd John, I think it's called." You remembered the name clearly. About a superhuman freak's life, you said, and his loves. Quite good for 1936. "No thanks," Harley said. "I know how that story ends." When he looked down his hair was in his eyes, Rumplestilzchen sun turning it gold, so you suggested a haircut instead; no harm in it. You knew how to cut.
Hand to hip, brow to nape, mouth to shoulder: the two of them slot
14 CODY VANDER CLUTE
together, easy, with the rough grace of experience.
The evening before Harley's birthday, as the sky went all bruised, Joseph came to you in the kitchen. He already knew how to make a cake without butter, without eggs, so as you poured vinegar into the bowl, your hands flour-white against the glass, you asked him about the fish. "If Harl asks me to stop, I will."
You can walk away. Remember that. You leave the door open, so they don't know, and walk away. This is new, Harley's belief in his own skin. Growing up west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in these lowlands of wheat, you wrestled with yourself, growing wrong. But God was sacrifice, God needed willing bodies, so you offered yours back to the Lord. With those holy hands, you've found, it has been easy to tamp down the unwanted—yet the ease with which Harley moves his hips is undeniable, shattering.
Harley paid for his haircut with his history. Out of California years ago, the both of them, when their parents decided to follow the game and purify the land. Joseph took care of him in the backseat, mother and father trading off between the map and the wheel. Moving east as they did, a new state every summer, there was no time for school or outside loves. Only Joseph and Harley, brothers.
They find you in the basement. The small church kitchen's crowded enough with one at the low-slung Formica table; with three the windowless room becomes a den of intimacy and the glass of water goes slippery in your hands. Harley slides on out, peanut butter sandwich in hand, careless. Joseph reaches across you to take the pitcher, short sleeves riding up, shirt tag a flag of white against his farmer's tan.
divine than others. That's a fact, you know. But you're content with your lot, you are, because God has granted you this life. It is what you deserve. The boys, rebellious, are stepping off the path set down for them, and yet
CODY VANDER CLUTE 15
The Lord created man in his image, yes, but some come closer to the
they move through the town with their heads high—challenge us, those thin arms say, and be surprised. It is hard to face down such faith.
Go for a walk along the bounds of the old St. Lawrence sawmill, rusted over since before you were born, and take the long way back past the coaling tower. They emptied it out the day of your first beer, when the trains slowed down. Passenger rail is over, bought out by the government, and the coal jobs are moving beyond state borders. These children from the pacific West don't worry about such things. Their world ends where skin starts, all they need to know tied up in sinew and red muscle.
Twenty years ago, when you were Harley's age but locked down, stationary, Stephen from catechism school asked for a haircut. He had no money and you had the tools, fine scissors and gentle hands. Then, as now, your bedroom was lit up by the afternoon. But Harley would not be known; he wriggled out from under the weight of your hands gone still on his shoulders, leaving it to you to clean up the clippings as Stephen left it to you to wash the sheets.
After that, Joseph and Harley called you John. Your name is not John.
16 CODY VANDER CLUTE
Stephen gave you a name that he took with him to the mines of Wyoming. Harley has named his own parts, given his body new meanings, in a way which you were taught belonged only to God. Now, perhaps you could believe that the Lord is speaking through him, marking this child a prophet of the kingdom, or you could believe in the proven ways and
their blessed simplicity. There is no question of His guiding hand vanishing from this world.
That dying July evening, waiting for Joseph, you listen for his makeshift fishing rod. When you hear the branch and hook rolling across your porch you know he's home. He comes in bootless, walking red clay over the threshold, and you turn on the light. You don't say hello, no: "I've heard the way you talk to him," you say, "about fucking his cunt," and it's less the words than the lack of emotion that hits Joseph hard, openhanded across the face.
He doesn't move, his eyes sharp enough for the rest of him. They're too young for this, surely: the denial of God's will, the unnatural love—don't call it love. Don't get bogged down in specifics. Nonetheless he stands there silent with the fierce isolation of pride, independent.
"Cursed be he that lieth with his sister," you say, the last resort, and now he moves, hands swinging unpracticed but not unprepared. The sound of it is different from the library, nearer to bone against bone, loud enough to cover Harley banging up the steps. Joseph explains, saves you the trouble of spitting out all that blood.
You're not friend enough for his anger. They're still gonna fuck each other, he tells you, teeth clicking. It's his decision to make, the same way it's his body to make. "I'm responsible for myself," he says. "Are you?"
CODY VANDER CLUTE 17
Harley doesn't get up close, aggressive, stands instead at the door, cold.
/
The deep chill of the confessional grille is kind against every bruise. With this ritual your hands are cleansed; it is not your place to judge but the Lord's, and there is comfort in the knowledge that there is a world yet to come. How that world will look, and who will be in it, you cannot say. The months since have been a ballet of silence, eyes always averted; outside, a truck engine sparks alive, piston rattle muted, and you let it go.
In seminary, in your cell, you will have on the wall a photograph of the brick church of Ronceverte. People will ask about home, and you will talk about the town square, the green river, the stained glass in the
18 CODY VANDER CLUTE
ringing chamber. You will not talk about the boys.
PARTICULATE D a n e S lu tzk y
I kept the memories close to my chest a poker hand. I looked at them and patted them and got dirt all over them & creases & folds Spills— (hyperbole, moments missing.) You see I wanted them for when I’m 90. Perhaps I could box them up and contain them. Even now, what you said is no longer the same as the actual utterance. And your physical body is not the same. I’m left with aftershocks on my retina (or whatever blobs of color you see after a camera flash) There have been cameras flashing
(caught up in performing, I lost my clear vision.) I know that you were in a tent and there was a particular smell
DANE SLUTZKY 19
before me recently
humus duff rotting on the forest floor. You came with me we met with force
I told you who I might be now and in the future. You seem like several people too they are similar you don’t mind being one at a time. Well, I’m not sure what you said at any point but I of course know what you didn’t say which sat molasses in my head for so long.
20 DANE SLUTZKY
I’ve smoked so much since the particulates have hardened that substance even more.
REFRIDGERATOR CHILDREN E rik a D . P rice
Before they had a child, they spent eighteen months hashing out several of the endless dilemmas of parenting. They wanted to have an exhaustive discussion.
"What if it wants to shave its head?" the man said. “Or get a tattoo?"
The woman said, “A child should be allowed to do what it wants with its body."
"At age six? Seventeen? When?"
"Whenever."
"Will we tell it about Santa?" he asked, as they strode through the mall one rainy afternoon.
"Adults shouldn’t hold secret knowledge over children. The child should learn how to think for itself." E RIK A D. PRIC E 21
"But lying to it will teach it doubt."
The woman appreciated this thought.
"Will we give it a gender?" the woman asked, on the phone with the man. She was walking past an army recruiter’s station.
"No," the man said. Then, “Wait. We’ll give it a very slight, very tenuous framework. We’ll let it know it has a choice."
A month later, when they were in a gas station, they saw a twentysomething boy buying two boxes of Lunchables and a carton of Marlboros.
"Is that some diet I haven’t heard of?" the woman asked the air.
The man nudged her and said, “Will we let our kid eat like that?"
She sneered. “We will strongly discourage it."
"A child should have control over its own body," the man retorted.
They crossed the parking lot. They wondered. What if the child hurt
22 E RIK A D. PRIC E
itself? What if it made unquestionably bad decisions?
"What if someone abuses it?" the man said. “What then?"
"Depends on the age of the child," the woman said, lifting an eyebrow. “At some point you have to let them go."
"What if it wants us to let go too early?"
"Love is not insistent," the woman said. She said it like a chime, an incantation. Like it was the answer to everything.
"Love, love is a verb," the man sang, but she didn’t seem to recognize the song, and his heart sank.
They were friends with a couple that had just gotten pregnant. A daughter. The husband was tall and pale-haired.
“When I found out it was a girl, I’ll tell ya," the husband said conspiratorially to the man, “I started cleaning my guns."
The man’s stomach churned. “You’re worrying about boys already?"
The husband squinted at a dusty television. “I’m having nightmares already, man. You know how we are. Shit, I remember what I was like at seventeen. Don’t you? But nobody’s laying a hand on my sweet girl."
His wife walked through the room with folded laundry balanced on her spreading belly. The husband gave her ass a playful slap.
sex?”
"All the answers to everything it asks," the woman said. “Right away."
E RIK A D. PRIC E 23
Later, back home, the man asked , “How will we teach our kid about
The woman sipped from a glass of water and mused, what if the child didn’t want to go to college?
"We’ll set up a trust fund and hold firm," the man answered.
“Speaking of which, how long will we financially support it?"
"Long enough, but not too long," said the woman.
The man had hoped her answer would be “forever".
One evening, a year into the discussion, they were sitting on a hill eating ice cream.
“If our child killed a person," the woman said, “would you still love it?"
The man’s tongue had gone numb, but he said, “Of course. I’d be in that prison every day, visiting; I’d keep the kid’s dispensary account full to the brim. I’d be the biggest, loudest, brashest prison reformer there ever was," and he nibbled on the woman’s ear.
She laughed and said he should not assume the child would end up in
24 E RIK A D. PRIC E
prison. “I’d spring our kid out. Or put them in hiding. Fly them to Gabon. Argentina. Antarctica."
In bed, the woman’s feet were freezing and the man couldn’t sleep. He wanted to ask: what if the child ever wanted to kill itself? Or run away?
To donate all its possessions and live in the woods communing with possums? What if it starved itself to itty bitty bones, and called that beauty? What if it never thanked them? What if it never loved them back? What if they looked into their child’s face and saw a runny-nosed, slack-jawed nothing, and the child looked at them and saw nothing back?
Instead, he asked, “What’s the worst thing our child could be?"
"Stupid," she said. “No. Unfree."
"Well which is it?"
"Unfree. Uninteresting."
The man pulled the comforter to his chin. It was now his turn to recite an incantation. “It is better to be happy than to be interesting."
He’d read it on a poster somewhere, maybe in a therapist’s office. Maybe it had been a joke. But the saying had stayed with him, slunk into the portents of his mind and calcified.
The woman said stuffily, “I think we’ll leave it for the child to decide that." E RIK A D. PRIC E 25
They went to sleep.
Eighteen months in, they had a fight at a friend’s wedding shower. A day later, neither of them could remember what it had been about. But it was the end. The adoption papers were thrown in the fireplace, the birth control prescription renewed. The woman moved in with her sister and the man put all his possessions in a small apartment with a view of the train yard. They felt drained in a way that flouted expression.
Some time later, the sister asked the woman why it hadn’t worked out. She’d been privy to the endless, looping hypothetical discussions. It seemed to her the couple had everything figured out, or at least gamed out.
"It was too perfect," the woman said. “We had all the answers. No real child could live up to it.”
She smoothed her hair and looked at her reflection in the window.
“The philosophical problems were all that ever interested me about it, really."
Years after that, the man married a mechanic. He and the mechanic welcomed children into their home. They began with many ideals. No
26 E RIK A D. PRIC E
punishment. No criticism, no judgment. Never let the children see them fight. Give them snacks of whole wheat and fresh fruit; use natural shampoos and teach them all to sew, speak Spanish, wrestle, and play fair.
In time all the ideals were harshly violated. The children grew, and were corrupted, and were lost to them in various small ways. Some flourished in manners the man and the mechanic found contemptible. Some amounted to very little at all. Any flaws they saw in the children they blamed on themselves. That was what happened when you realized a dream. They cherished the fuck-ups like bubbles in hand-blown glass.
E RIK A D, PRIC E 27
from POSTCARDS / PORTLAND, ORE. Ja m ie B erro u t
28 JA MIE BERROUT
12. The advocate sleeps less each day. More and more cases have been piling up on her desk. What can she do, as committed (as removed from her inner life and body) as she is? She works more and more hours. The advocate decides to stop sleeping. It is difficult at first, but the headaches, the faintings, and inertia soon pass. Then crossing the street one ordinary day, the unexpected happens: she is about to be struck by a car, she turns and sees the car just before the moment of impact, but the car passes through her body: she is unharmed. Concerned, she goes to her doctor. “Doctor,” she says, “Something is happening to me.” Her doctor says, “Yes.” Her doctor says, “I’ve seen this before - we must start the treatments at once.” But then the floor opens up. The advocate falls through the floor. She falls to the basement and falls through the basement floor. She falls through the foundation, she falls through the different layers of earth. She falls more quickly now and cannot stop.
14. Traditions of the city. A person whose life is rapidly changing or collapsing, for whom everything is uncertain, may move house and live atop their favorite bridge. One of the dozens of bridges spanning the river that divides the city. Life on a bridge is not without difficulties: car exhaust lingers, the noise of the day lingers, the wind blows colder than anywhere else. Still, for us it is worthwhile. On the bridge, in the morning or the day or the evening, one by one you will find the people who have mattered to you, who have loved you. It doesn’t matter if they live across the city or across the globe. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t spoken in years, if they have passed on years ago. You will see your loved ones make their way across to you on the bridge. They will stop and embrace you, talk and listen to you. They will make promises to visit again, a day or a week later; and they will visit again, a day or a week later. A person is given this for as long as they need. So are we all healed.
JA MIE BERROUT 29
30 JA MIE BERROUT
16. You live in a room. The room is part of a house and the house has hundreds of other rooms. More perhaps. Through the walls of the room you hear the voices of people talking in the hundreds of other rooms. You cannot exactly hear what they are saying. You spend your life imagining the conversations they must be having, what new adventures each week they embark upon, the romances for and between each of them endlessly building and spilling over. You imagine everything during your lifetime, save that others may be living the same way. Trying desperately, without ability, to reach beyond the walls, succeeding only in part and not often enough.
17. Without warning the city levitates. You are left on a different, lower surface than everyone else. You try, but there is no way to make a sound that can be heard. You look up and there are cars on the roads and the people walk among the melting snow. You think, “How does no one notice?” You think, “Is this where my faults have led me?” You think of the other country, the other life you moved away from, a difference never resolved. Piensas, “Pero aquí no hace frío ni hace calor: no será infierno, no será el cielo.” Piensas, “Dios mío: lo que haría para regresar, lo que haría para ver a mi familia.” ¿Qué no he dicho, qué haré?
JA MIE BERROUT 31
WE’RE ALL PISSED OFF BECAUSE OUR PARENTS DIDN’T READ JUDITH BUTLER: YOU ARE NOT ALONE Jea n P a o li
Part I: Cultural Dissections Once upon a time; She first realized the Abject when, aged 18, naked and with her legs spread-opened in front of the mirror, she became conscious of her loss of mutability: her body was done. If during the day she longed to discover the algorithm behind the icy eyes of professional actors, at night she had vivid dreams of big-boned women, with hips as strong as a herd of bulls, solid, their red-brown cunt lips furiously hanging between their legs, pointing to the truth (she wanted to suck those jangling lips). All bodies and no apologies.
32 JEA N PAOL I
Striving to find meaning in the swaying of her hips; To all others: I know I only exist in their eyes as a suffering animal. I have no claims on my personal origin myth: suffering is universal. The infinitely shifting shade of this perennial Solar Nausea, the hyper awareness, the lingo (the brute force of the technical lingo!), memories of myself: AAA looking for a nice otaku penpal who can spell gynecomastia. Masturbating in the Library+Poetry; Laughing at their understanding of detachable body parts. I'm torn between the soothing beauty of smooth white plastic surfaces and giggling idiots who: R2D2 and C-3PO are so gay. Constantly missing the fucking point. I suppose it's a matter of geography. Some places are just more violent than others (technology: meet the bony, angular shape of my body). But if you could see the indefatigable persistence of male balding patterns, like tidal waves continuously submerging our understanding of
myself, of yourselves, of ourselves, THEN you'd understand beauty, you miserable twats. The Beginning; The straight line of X-becoming cuts through the air with the violence and velocity of a small calibre bullet. It explodes & it disperses between the signs when I fuck with them & I have to shout it out loud: FUCK! (It's lewd, this english language: my accent makes me feel dirty). We've been left at a strange interjunction; How much does the notion of Coolness inform your personal relationships? I'd join the ranks of the hipsters to feel good about myself but the exuberance of the sebaceous glands under my skin have turned my face into lunar soil: I belong with the lame kids. It's fine, really.
Part 2: Cultural Instabilities (comes with experimental writing and a side of raging psychoanalytical fuckfaces); 1. I need new paradigms of misery. I want my unhappiness to make sense to me: enough with the women trapped in men's bodies, shy appeals to cissexual considerations. Is it utopic that I long for new words that will describe my isolation, loneliness, incommunicability, inhabitability, oppression, frustration? I used to love The Smiths: now it's slipping away from me. 2. Escaping privileged education. Can I make sense of myself without recurring to categories and identity politics found in Butler, Sedgwick, Foucault, Rubin, Bornstein, Federici, Rubin etc? Do I allow others to make sense of themselves outside these categories?
JEA N PAOL I 33
3. Down with Western/Anglocentrism! What happens to “us” beyond the term transgender? What happens to “us” in academic/political/sociological discourses who do not revolve around Western sensibilities, religions and academic knowledges? What happens to “us”, how are “we” transformed, created, thought in languages that don't have a word for “us” yet?
TWO POEMS Jo sh u a Jen n ifer E sp in o za
a person is someone whose body pulls the air around it with it and no one says anything about it you and i create fire with every step the smoke can be seen for miles and miles my body shines with your body every other eye is a cloud the gaze comes down to fuck us up or fuck us or remind us of its lightness
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i feel the ground sinking all the time around my feet i like it it feels nice i have no desire to pass clean through spaces and put out fires i'm happy to be almost anything else
/
i leave class and move my feet in ways they remember they remember the cement they remember the grass they remember the warmth surrounded by the cold that is wrapped around everything the moon shines in a language of silence there is music in my ears i've left it there for protection as i come to the crosswalk i instinctively evaluate the faces of the group of bros waiting at the corner and in an instant i think 'harmless' (a thought is nothing more than a hope) i stay a good distance behind them as we cross underneath the freeway i watch a silent high five echo through the space
i am forced to reconcile my desire to be seen as a women with a fear of what it means to be seen as a woman at night, underneath freeways i evaluate his face and in an instant i hope 'harmless' as i enter the parking lot i see a spider web resting upon a bush
JO SHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZ A 35
one turns and glances at me as he enters the openness of being beneath the sky
the spider is full, large, satiated its legs cut sharply through its space i see an empty tree and its branches do the same thing they also form their own web driving home, i keep the window down and hold my hand out against the air i feel it push back gently into my flat palm i move my fingers, bring my arm up and down, feel all that resistance slide past i pull into my parking space and shut off the lights, sit still for five minutes wonder what it is that i am inhabiting 'am i a body' 'do i want to be' 'am i safe'
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'do i want to be' 'can i refuse to be just one single thing' 'am i already not' as i walk to the apartment and come through the door i let myself forget something important i think this is the only way to survive
VITA NOVA, MAMAN! L ily C liffo rd “I have never known a Woman’s body! I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying!” -Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Estradiol is converted from testosterone through a process called aromatase.
lift your shirt and show me your bruises, maman, show me the way my blood moves, too. mother tells herself secrets i can never know, secrets like: sepia as a noun, a history of mastectomies, her grandfather asleep at the wheel,
A key-chained photograph of a boy standing next to a seven-foot lego knight.
she refuses the MRI, she refuses the acronym, what failures of language. as in: a word that carries gender as she might. it will LILY CLIFFORD 37
happen again because adrenaline must find its exit.
Estradiol is the most potent estrogen found in the human body. To live without concern for posterity, steroidogenesis is the process by which cholesterol is transformed into a monument, “fresh as on the first day of mourning.”
oh mommy, the prosopagnosiac. such missing footnotes, it seems –
the creaking various sounds, all kinds: in cars folding into one another, tween shoulder blades, in the development of breast tissue, in the falling
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together and apart –
THE EVITABLES m a n u el a rtu ro ab reu
they painted that building the same color as the sky the painted clouds say ‘maybe we never wanted to be stonecutters’ they say ‘all waiting stones express the nameless’ the town crier is given a nightstick but it is a glowstick the clouds say ‘somewhere between a rock garden and a garden garden, repeat ‘brown’ until it loses meaning.’
MANUEL ARTURO ABREU 39
LIL CUBE i am looking for the Quieter for the loud parts of me to live in i want to believe in reptilians because imagine reptilian sex i have been wearing an eye mask to bed i hate that i can’t fall asleep sober it started with violence because we named it violence the loud volume of clouds is mind-altering, you say all cloud everything the world walks beside you, & is silent i am in lurch & thrall to the feeling of the ineluctable wantedness you give me
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in the rain it smells like burning licorice the seed in your curry makes your mouth taste like perfume can we both say a thing before we sleep? promises are dumb
EVERYTHING STARTED HAPPENING AFTER REHAB as a fat child i couldn't do handstands and feared being ransacked by swans
the tiny chamber ms. trunchbull from matilda locked kids in turns someone i know on i thought about that and i liked it
my body has always been a heavy system but my god is too small, like an army of cucks
i love bouquets of consonants almost as much as bouquets of empty rooms my body is a dead battery of forgetting
do you remember the band cute is what we aim for they had that one song newport cigarettes or something MANUEL ARTURO ABREU 41
HUMANS HAUNT GHOSTS yung metaphor of a circuit that pimps like kirby yung search for the eternal matriarch of conceptualism there is specific search domain drone pilot remains agonized at her screen yung 4th-person pronoun it's amazing my responses are so lifelike the yeerk in me is just me, and historicity 'just me' might include everything that ever happened & you need to tell me whether intention is irrelevant
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yung drone pilot of my own body engaging the hyperskin these toys do whatever you want as long as you don't acknowledge they're toys When will that which has been destined for me be wiped out?
WHEN THE RAIN COMES A Play in One Act Sara June Woods
Cast of Characters Juniper: (femaleish) is sitting on the floor. Avalanche: (femaleish) is sitting on the floor. Sara: (any gender) is dressed like a depressed person. Not like goth depressed. Like actual depressed. She is sitting on the floor.
SCENE The play is set sometime in the future or past, or in a place that isn’t quite either. Stage should be set to look like someone tried to kind of make it look like a forest, but didn’t try very hard. Tall standing lamps or broomsticks might have “branches” taped to them. Branches might be not taped on very well and be kind of falling off. A couple leaves might be on the ground. They might be real leaves, they might not. There is a rug on the floor. There is a minifridge. A record player sits to one side playing slow, cheesy organ music a la Jesse Crawford, Poet of the Organ.
AVALANCHE: What about the shower? Didn't she take showers? JUNIPER: It's not like a shower. Have you ever been in rain? SARA: She didn't take showers.
SARA J UNE WOO DS 43
SARA: Sara had a lot of thoughts about what rain felt like, but they never seemed to stay in her head. Every day it rained she had such a sensitivity to the sensations of her body, but when, say, winter came and it was all snow, she couldn't remember the feeling for the life of her.
(Pause.) SARA: She thought a lot about rain. She remembered the smell of her father's fur when he would come in from a day out killing things and not tell Sara about it. Her father is a wolf for some reason, but you already knew that. JUNIPER: (quietly) ...I didn't know that. SARA: Sara's father died when she was young of fire and a hunter. It was a fire hunter. A fiery hunter. A hunter that was on fire. He screamed so loud. AVALANCHE: The hunter? Or her father? SARA: Sara remembered the smell and the scream all the time. She called it the (slight hesitation) smream. She carried it with her all the time. It was huge in her mind and squeezed out the other thoughts. JUNIPER: The sensation of rain. AVALANCHE: Right on out the ol’ ears. SARA: Sara's dog thought Sara smelled great. To him her smell was a room with a grand hall, with every surface covered in long hair you could really dig your nose down in. That room was his home. He sometimes would find different smelling things to rub on her. It was his way of rearranging furniture in his smell-home. JUNIPER: (to herself) She didn't shower.
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(The record ends. Avalanche gets up and looks through the stack of records.) SARA: Sara would wake up in the mornings and her legs would feel like they were on wrong. Her feet would feel like they weren't claws but they should be. Her ceiling would be missing. Hammers would be everywhere. A foot deep. On the floor. Her dog would be hundreds. Her bed would be screaming.
(Avalanche puts the same side of the same record on again.) JUNIPER: ...smreaming. AVALANCHE: Right out the ole ears. (Avalanche pulls a projector out of the minifridge. He sets it up. It projects repetitive footage of Sara walking on a beach onto the wall and Sara is caught in the beam.)
SARA: Sara wrote a letter to someone. It was a letter shaped like the time she lost consciousness in the middle of the street and woke up to the smell of stale snow and an old man telling her about a bear he once saw. He said the bear was crying while it mauled a horse on a beach. He said the horse was comforting the bear between screams. Making little pathetic whinnies while its legs were broken and chewed on. Then whole beach turned white, water and everything. JUNIPER: What about the letter? What was in it? SARA: The letter said DEAR SOMEONE (Letter appears projected on the wall on top of Sara) SARA: I haven't talked to you in awhile & that is my fault & I'm sorry for it. I am a ghost town where the ghosts all left but their pets stayed & kept the factories all running without knowing why they did it. They didn't get any money for it. They just liked the sounds made by working. One time a man came and tried to give them money. He was a businessman. He had a briefcase. He gave them money and they tried to eat it but it slipped through their ghost mouths and ghost beaks.
AVALANCHE: I saw a movie the other day. It was a movie about a cool new drug that got really popular. Everyone was talking about this
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(Long pause. Projector shows footage taken from a moving train window with the word GHOSTTHINGS written over it in red all caps Futura or Helvetica.)
drug. The drug was a drug that people would take and immediately think about everything they had been trying not to think about. It was a drug that made you remember the last argument you had with your parents. It was a drug that made you flash back to the last time you killed something that used to be alive. It was a drug that made you feel like you were a mother bear without legs anymore, watching her cubs trying to bring her food instead of the other way around. (Avalanche starts new footage, this time it is of Avalanche, talking to the camera. Lights dim. Juniper turns off the lamp. All characters turn to watch.)
PROJECTED AVALANCHE: It was a drug that made you think you had written letters to your boss about how you knew what she had been doing at night. You knew how she would come home and take her coat off and lay it out on her kitchen floor. How she would pull a thermos and tea cups from her bag and pour herself a glass of thick, sour tea to sit with on the coat on the floor. How she let her hair down and thought about beaches & photo booths & newborns & slept on her coat and didn't leave the little world of her coat-on-the-floor until it was time to get back to work. Until it was time to shower, time to put on new clothes, time to make more gross tea, time to go back to work. How she assumed everyone lived like this, because this was how she was raised. SARA: When did she eat?
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AVALANCHE: Shhhh. PROJECTED AVALANCHE: It was a drug that made you lose track of your body movements. A drug that made your hands feel wrong. A drug that told you things that it promised were deep, true things but when you heard them they didn’t resonate at all, just this endless series of setups and deep disappointments that shook your faith that there truly is some sort of weird mystery in the world. A faith you’ve held since you were small. A faith that always made life worth living. And for the rest of your life you just float through, always half-there.
(Footage ends.) SARA: Jesus. JUNIPER: I used to work for a florist where I had to take care of all of the flowers. This was before I was here. I’m not sure where I was but I know it wasn’t here. It was beautiful. I used to name all of the flowers and put them in different vases like they were clothes they were wearing. They were my friends. The florist was never there. I think he was an alcoholic. I don’t think I ever met him. I’m not sure who hired me. I’m not sure when I stopped working there. (After a short pause Avalanche starts up new footage on the projector. It is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPMBbPycaCU. Everyone turns to watch. Footage ends.) JUNIPER: The florist was in my dreams though. Every night I would go home and dream about him coming into the shop and telling me what a great job I was doing. Sara used to come in sometimes and buy orchids. SARA: It’s true. JUNIPER: She would come in with her dog and we would tell stories to each other about fishing and basketball. I don’t know if we ever knew what fishing or basketball were… SARA: (interrupting) We still don’t.
(Sara crawls over to the rug and pulls it over herself up to her chin while Juniper continues the story.)
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JUNIPER: But we would talk about other things and just use the words “fishing” and “basketball” a lot. I used to say “Let me fishing you some orchids” and she would say “Okay, but don’t basketball this time. Maybe I’ll get some speckled fishing. Basketball basketball fishing.”
JUNIPER: And I would say “Fishing basketball fishing fishing fishing fishing fishing fishing fishing fishing fishing… (Juniper repeats the word fishing for a long time.) SARA: I was thinking about orchids just today, actually. When I was a little girl I used to love orchids. I still love orchids. (Avalanche opens up a powerpoint and the first slide says “SARA RELATES TO ORCHIDS BECAUSE THEY ARE HARD TO KEEP ALIVE” in red all-caps Helvetica or Futura) SARA: I wrote a love poem once that had orchids in it. It was about a mother who had a hundred children and gave them each an orchid plant. She told them she would love them whether or not the orchids died, but that if the orchids died she would shorten their names to something easier to remember. Before that the children were all named Asphodel but within a week all the children were named Rick. (Avalanche goes to the next slide, which says “SARA NEVER WROTE THAT POEM”. Pause. Then he goes to the one after, which says “(WHY WOULD SHE LIE ABOUT THAT?)”. Pause. Then he goes to the next slide, which is a photo of a majestic horse. Maybe on a beach.)
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JUNIPER: I haven’t seen a flower shop in a long time. (Avalanche presses the button again and text appears over the horse that says WILL YOU MARRY ME? The text disappears and new text comes up that says NO, IT’S FINE, WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT MORE, TOTALLY. WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT IT MORE. That text disappears and more text appears that says YEAH, NO. TOTALLY. That text disappears and more text appears that says OF COURSE I LOVE YOU. Avalanche turns off the projector and gets under the rug next to Sara. They go to sleep. Juniper gets up and looks around. She sits down on the minifridge. She looks around more. She picks at her fingernails. She stands up again. She moves the lamp off the bedside table and sits on the table. This goes on for a while. Moving/fidgeting. Lights dim)
A CROOKED TALE Seeley Quest
Once upon a time there was a fair child named Crooked, who one day went into the deepest thrusting forest. The marrow there was dimpled and shifting. But torso was brave and lippy and would never absent hir in a rut. Sie went through no straight tunnels to see a nest of mean twists awaiting. They asked: what was finer than knotting nooks to moldy plots? Correctly, sie pushed on through until sie was interrupted by hir only true. This queer undertaker gave a map. Hir sense of chasm gapped hir frame until sie worked to cross. And at the end found a wild crook where sie cunningly ate entrails, and lived happily ever after.
SEELEY QUEST 49
SELF-PORTAIT WITH GENITAL DYSPHORIA (December, Padre Island) Sonya Ellis
We drive down the isle in the jeep until we can't see anyone
and then we keep driving. I have to imagine the girls.
A fourth beer, then a fifth –
when my father asks what I'm thinking, I sigh with depth, say nothing and wait. He calls this look my poetry face.
But I'm daydreaming of easy, seasonal beauties,
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out for Spring Break. I want to be
as drunk as them, drunk enough to take my shirt off
and wave it in the air at the old, grizzled fishermen.
My mother takes photos. I am so drunk. Where are my loose, lost women? We reach the end of the beach –
a pile of rocks, grinning grills of minivans, their families smiling wider –
I don't know what we hoped to see or how those strangers found it.
SONYA ELLIS 51
#Uploadingnature Poem Stephen Boyer
Sometimes when I'm writing poetry I feel like an Orangutan scratching at bark Sometimes when I'm reading poetry to an audience I feel like a court jester performing to the new uneducated anarcho-fascist regime
I could suck on an infinite number of bodies but it's only a spirit which I could love: a spirit, a spirit: without a body just a dumb and useless mind.
I speak English and know a few phrases in other languages Not very communicative if compared to "other people" Can you squeel like a child?
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Or hum a Lady BlaBla Song while doing the dishes?
Beatriz Preciado enjoy's what they have. The unique pleasure of writing in English, French, Spanish, of wandering from one language to another like being in transit between masculinity, femininity, and transsexuality. The pleasure of multiplicity. Three artificial languages, expanding as they become entangled, fight to become or not become a single language. Blend. Find their meaning only in this blending. Production among species. Beatriz writes about what matters most to them, in a language that doesn't belong to them. This is what Derrida called the monolingualism of the other, none of the languages that they speak belong to them, and yet there is no other way to speak, no other way to
love. None of the sexes they embody possess any ontological density, and yet there is no other way of being a body. Dispossessed from the start.
As we sleep I grab your cock and dream our skeletons are intertwined in a coffin for all eternity... long after the world's forgotten, my bones remember the imprint of your fingers on my skin and imagine your cock in my ass which is now such a large empty cavernous void unable to grip and give any of the libertine pleasures we shared, our past-life crumbling into a decaying wooden container failing to keep our remains intact, I don't see myself becoming anything else too soon, more dirt? maybe a root? maybe if I'm really nurturing the dirt will form a root which forms a plant that will be eaten by a gestating animal? Maybe then, enough of "me" will be there to nurture this "new spirit," just as your pelvis, no longer capable of entering me.
Denial forces us to remain enchanted by the fact we are unnecessary.
You make me wanna sign onto Scruff You make me want to smoke cigarettes outside a taxidermist storefront
But once you've read enormous amounts of poetry you realize it becomes impossible to distinguish from the poetic... Its not as some say as they search for "what is poetry"... Try succeeding in "not finding poetry."
Sometimes I want to throw it all away and move across the world
STEPHEN BO YER 53
Sometimes I think you're the only person I'm having a 4D interaction with
But obviously that's not gonna feel as good as blindfolding me so I can get sexy on it
All this mortality gots me hella horny And I'm still hoping my skeleton will be wrapped around yrs
Why does every word and idea and affection that comes out of my mouth make me feel like I'm disintigrating into increasingly obscure fragments??
As Dan Choi explains to Mattilda Bernstein, there's certainly a moral argument here...
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But when you get there, there's a bit of an anti climax.... it's the imagining of what could be which is ethereal and dreamlike.
11 (an autoethnography of performance) Tyler Conaty cw: bullying, sexual harassment, & suicidal ideation
A not-quite-comprehensive list of musical indexes to middle school play: 1 “Anti-Pleasure Dissertation,” Bikini Kill In middle school, everyone might’ve been gay. Straight boys feigned fag, fanning their hands & frisking the quiet ones for laughs. Maybe I felt something real for just a moment
For months in eighth grade, Lucy called me late at night to tell me he loved me,
TY LE R CO NATY 55
Gay boys played too, performing their affect of effeminacy. By effecting a masculine satire of effeminacy, a boy affirmed his own heterosexual facade. Did you get a good laugh?
then every day after he would tell the jocks about the wedding we planned. Lucy initiated me into games Did you win that race? Did you score that point? of footsie under my desk, but made fun of my voice along with all the other boys. Lucy was only one. Are you so fucking cool fucking cool now? 2 My dad tried to teach me how to hold my hands, toss a football, & lower my voice. He should have taught me how to walk away. 3 There were never headlines about me. Football was the only game that made headlines.
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Homewood’s football team came home from games, beaten & bruised, but with honor. I never understood trials of honor. The team consistently lost, but they were celebrated &
crowned princes. I never came home with bruises & bloody lips, tasting the bitter honey of honor, but falling into bed every night was a small victory. “Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.” 4 “Bluebells,” Patrick Wolf Lucy, remember the smell of that fall the fires, the fungus, & the rotting leaves
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I called him Lucy because it was his last name & because it brought him down to my level. The only way to be seen as straight &, before I knew it, cis was to emasculate another boy, asserting dominance over him by bruising his masculinity. I never wanted to be seen as straight so much as to be
left alone, confused ; there was no method to my game. I fell off the wagon & into your arms & into this long month of Sundays The risk associated with being a closeted queer who plays the jocks’ game is that your performance might begin to fuse with your volatile teenage emotions. You might want to kiss him on the mouth during Sunday school, which is against the rules.
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Now this is our final December Our game ended. I went to high school downtown & stopped going to Sunday school. I’ve seen Lucy twice since then. But I’ve had dreams in which it’s Christmas Eve, hours before dawn, & he’s sleeping in his button up & boxers barely a ripple in the
sheets away. I’m awake with anticipation. 5 “Iris,” Goo Goo Dolls Bullies never drew tears. There was no winning their game. I quickly learned their rules : if shame & validation were enacted fleetingly, they were also cyclical. & you can't fight the tears that ain't comin' or the moment of truth in your lies I was surprised when my best friend Charlotte gave me this song & didn’t ask me to fight for myself, to play their games of honor. Even my mom & dad had told me to fight for myself. Charlotte never asked if what they said about me was true. 6
TY LE R CO NATY 59
Marriage equality isn’t a relevant issue to kids at thirteen. “It gets better” is supposed to conjure images of complacent satisfaction : of a white picket fence
closing in two kids & a dog. But I was still performing the tragedy of divorce —hating those controlling images that my dad must have seen. He played straight for over forty years, following the gay American dream of a white picket fence closing in two kids & a dog. 7 “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows,” Brand New My parents called a family meeting six days before my thirteenth birthday. My dad opened the conversation clinically, “I am a homosexual. Do you know what that means?”
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Reports of lovers’ tryst were neither clear nor descript It meant mom would cry in her sleep & at the dinner table for three years. & I was “the man of the house.” I kept up dinner table conversation, & made sure my siblings got to bed on time. Tommy was the strange man
at dad’s house. I slept in their closet, on a blow up mattress surrounded by the clothes that never got unpacked when they moved into their new house. It meant my brother started taking medicine. So did my parents. It meant family therapy sessions culminating in months of silent protest. It meant I couldn’t tell mom I hated him, because she did too. I couldn’t tell her about my bad days anymore. It meant I couldn’t tell her, if I could ever admit to myself, how scared I was I’d end up like him. I wanted to forget I was his as much as I was hers. It meant I couldn’t tell her, she had to ask.
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There’s nothing new to talk about & though our kids are blessed their parents let them shoulder all the blame Years later, after my first fling’s parents sent him to private school to keep him away from me, my mother said, “You shouldn’t hate your dad. What he did changed me. I would’ve tried to fix you too.”
8 Eighth grade boys with their blood stirred don’t know what they want, only that there is want, & it warms their bodies to contact. Ass-smacks between classes mean nothing to administrators, but if I miss the boy that hits me & burns me with his cigarette-sucked lips, all for the sake of show & tell, if I miss him late at night, sweat-licked & asleep enough that I can pretend I’m only dreaming, what then? I’d masturbate to the memory of honey eyes filled with laughter, for many weeks after Grant pushed me up against the lockers. With his warm, athletic body flattened, grazing against my own, he said to me, “Do you like that, faggot? I bet you like that a lot.”
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9 I can’t personalize or politicize this poem enough.
I’m exhausted with seeing faces I know, young faces that could have been mine, in obituaries. No more headlines about ‘giving up’ —as if suicide is somehow an escape from scrutiny. There is no honor in living for shame. Exerting final control over what has already been taken is not an act of weakness. 10 “Famous Last Words,” My Chemical Romance I’ll be forgiven
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I know you’ve been still thirsting after quiet orgasms, kissing your imagined abusers whose saline leaks leave blisters. I don’t blame you for wanting to sleep through your reaping or whisking to death. No part of me wonders why. I’ve sucked on my breath, cradled it within my body & felt empty.
I am not afraid to keep on living I am not afraid to walk this world alone Honey, if you stay… The aftercare is always the same. You’re not stronger or braver, but you’re too tired to sleep tonight. You hold your body down as if it could blow away, lightly billowing as your sheets. 11 Nine years after middle school games look less benign. Bullying has become a national sensation. Boys who won’t be boys will still be treated accordingly. Violence now necessitates sensational journalism. I could’ve been one of eleven out of one hundred-thousand.
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Or, “one too many.”
CONTRIBUTORS
Alok Vaid-Menon is a south asian cultural worker and community organizer. to read more of their work visit www.returnthegayze.com xx james, also known as cody vander clute, currently lives in dc suburbia. they are deaf, queer, and bitter. interests include power dynamics, spiritual esoterica, and, of course, the body. their work has been published in ability maine, collective fallout, and the outrider review, among other places. they can be reached at angelfeast.tumblr.com. Dane Slutzky writes about gender, technology, societal collapse, the invasion of the body snatchers, and anything else that could go wrong tomorrow. Dane lives in southern Oregon where he enjoys a healthy dose of locally grown food and social isolation. Erika D. Price is a writer and social psychologist in Chicago. She writes at erikadprice.tumblr.com. Jamie Berrout has a B.A. in English from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. She lives in deep South Texas and blogs at desdeotromar.tumblr.com. Her first novel Otros Valles, about a trans Latina living on the Texas/Tamaulipas border, is forthcoming in December 2014.
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joshua jennifer espinoza lives in southern california. she is in a love/hate relationship with having a body. more of her work can be found at blankslate.tumblr.com.
Lily Clifford recently finished her undergraduate degree and currently lives in Orange County. She is currently working on MFA applications, various knitting projects, and making new friends. Jean Paoli is 24 years old and lives in Brighton (UK) without a map or compass. They're rather be a cyborg than a goddess manuel arturo abreu is a poet and artist from the Bronx, currently based in Portland. Their work has appeared at MCA Australia, The New Inquiry, Gauss PDF, and elsewhere. See more work at twigtech.tumblr and @Deezius. Sara June Woods is a writer and artist living in Portland, OR. She is author of the books Sara or the Existence of Fire (Horse Less Press) and Wolf Doctors (Artifice Books). Her work is published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Guernica, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Diagram and The Yolo Pages. She is a trans woman and a scorpio. http://healthydogpoem.info
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seeley quest was born in 1976, lived in California and the East Bay from 1998 till 2015, and has since migrated north. The Crooked poems are from 2000, written on the cusp of coming to terms with identifying as disabled and trans. Following that, sie began performing around the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. More of hir work's at http://sinsinvalid.org and a poem's published in the book Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. Sie's excited this journal's happening! Sonya Ellis used to be a boy, but she got better. Now, she can often be found wearing fancy dresses and muttering under her breath about how pants are the clothes of the oppressor.
Stephen Boyer most notably wrote Parasite (Publication Studio 2013), Ghosts (BentBoyBooks 2008) and led the compilation of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Their poems have appeared in many zines, magazines, and all over the web. The #UploadingNature poems are part of a new series of poems focusing on identity as a singular experience and as a transformative-universal experience. Nature vs Nature. Maybe one day these works will help form a book. Tyler Conaty is an artist and student living in Sarasota, but they can't stomach the sunshine and rainbows, so they're looking North. They have received accolades for poetry and non-fiction from YoungArts and the Alabama Writers' Forum. Their work can be found in Right Hand Pointing, and forthcoming in Educe Literary Journal.
CONTRI BUTO RS 67
Alok Vaid-Menon Dane Slutzky
[REDACTED] Erika D. Price
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza manuel arturo abreu Sonya Ellis ed:
Jos Charles
Cody Vander Clute Jamie Berrout
Jean Paoli
Sara June Woods
Lily Clifford Seeley Quest
Stephen Boyer
Tyler Conaty
SA Smythe
Emerson Whitney
ISSUE TWO ©2015 ISSN: 2332 – 0354
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