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06/22/2016

I am driving my friends’ car all the way down Flatbush towards the Rockaways, my legs aching from a long day and an intense acupuncture session, my partner Z feeding me folded-over potato chips as I steer between four lanes of weaving Brooklyn traffic. We are on the date that’s been inaccessible to us for over a year: too long a bike ride for me, too many bus transfers, too much walking on my swollen knees and ankles. Dead Horse Bay, a beach sparkling with broken bottles, refuse from four boroughs caught in a confluence along the shore, trash and sea guts emptied onto a sliver of sand.

My first collection of poems is getting published. Each piece is about longing, the abandonment of living in a slowly breaking body, the parts of myself that slake off as I tremble through the world. The trash of Dead Horse Bay makes sense to me, its insistence on piling into something almost beautiful but still rotting. 

12/23/07

It's Christmas and C has keys to the Bellamy Mansion. We look for ghosts and knot together in the foyer, evergreen oozing cedar into the carpet, the old furniture creaky with dust, 150 years of austerity abandoned for party rentals, ghosts of the rich. K takes photos of us in the mirror, documenting the moments that I couldn’t forget. I have nothing to write about; I feel whole, stuffed with love and winter in an old mansion.

This winter, I learn that I can’t go home again. My home hibernates in people, their mouths and the stories we made together, the swarm of sweetness when we press into one another on a dance floor, in my green sedan, smoking on the empty trails out to Wrightsville Beach, how warm I am when they are there to grasp at my outstretched hands, how we never need more than thin wool to swath us even by the ocean’s whippeting breath in January, how the beach holds a place for us to vanish into when we need it.

01/07/08

I have always been close with cis gay boys, the flaming kind, with limp wrists and tons of eyeshadow, red Jeeps full of rainbow flags and takeout wrappers, too busy being fabulous to cook. I admire their directness, especially about sexuality. Honey, you are too pretty to be standing here alone. You want to meet me out back? We are in public all the time, our concrete dormitories too small for our egos, our insatiability.

I have spent this whole fall making out with everyone I can. I surprise myself at how easy it is. I’ve heard that fat girls don’t get attention, that smart girls don’t get attention. Maybe I am good at making out because I am not good at being a girl. Too loud, too critical, too funny, eyeliner too crooked, my femme role models all boys, at least a little bit.

11/04/12

I am starting to hurt. I close myself into my room, my own bathroom luxurious with 6 housemates. The untilled garden, the sunroom, all full of Marlboro butts, the deck awash with white queers drinking Longhammer IPA, gossiping about each other. I can no longer keep up with the dishes, the glass bottles stacked precarious like bodies, the chatter, rooms blooming with familiar faces, rushing past me in waves. I retreat, aching. 

This is not the first time crowds have proven too much, but it is the first time I can do something about it. In a surge of self-reliance, I find an apartment with a porch, two rooms, a kitchen, French doors. My own, showered in ivy, a gravel lot out back for my hunks of compost. There, I can hurt alone, or at least control who comes in and out, fill my bookshelves with Foucault, Barthes, Nelson instead of my roommates’ popular fiction. 

I hang delicate strands of lights, fold linens into the front closet, buy a sturdy low-light plant. It’s not exactly quiet, but it’s mine. My anxiety about material wants vanishes, and I retreat into my things. I am reading all the time, writing poetry about horoscopes, fermenting sugary liquids into tea, riding my scooter to work in the mountain early winter. 

11/24/05

I always feel a little out of place, spending chunks of time in the bathroom at every house show, washing the blood of the mosh pit off my forearms. At D's house, I feel a little safer. I can leave my coat on his bed, take the pills in his medicine cabinet to loosen my taut, ease into things a bit more. We host art openings, hang streamers and make hats out of foil and smoke inside. The living room blooms with a blue leather couch, a stereo, the front porch creaky the night it splinters into the front yard, the vodka/water-got-turned-back-on party a haven of weird and eerie, bodies caked with sweat engulfed by each other, every corner full of seething skin.

This is a femme look for me: gauzy, flimsy, airy, tartan scarf holding down my ethereal second skin. I watch E from across the apartment, hold hands with G, kiss M on the neck, a small flutter. I hope this is a fraction of the world I will once inhabit: open, warm, endless clear liquor, a notebook in my jeans pocket and a pen behind my ear. 

06/12/2016

I saunter into work, Shakespeare & Co. tote bag slung over my shoulder, eyeliner still smooth before I sweat it off over a sink full of dishes and bleach. Today I will learn the gulf that divides me from friends who aren’t queer, who aren’t lugging around a sack of grief and bodies smoldering with the ash of toxic masculinities, American homophobia, fear of the subaltern in all its form. 

M, in their blue eyeliner and thrifted Florida t-shirt, sidles up beside me. Are you OK? I hug them, wanting to ensure that their heart still beats in their little queer body. J, recently married to his longterm partner, slips behind the bar to put his arms around my shoulders. We all lock arms and hold each other, the bar full of customers with no clue as to the power of this moment.

07/09/2006

I am 16, and I am no longer the only weird one. My blond pixie cut neutral against shades of blue, purple, the theatre kids with rainbow streaks and flowing skirts in unimaginable shades of violet, fresh grass. All bodies fill out dresses, experiment with bright eyeshadows. I am studying poetry, and I slip my sandals off before entering the carpeted classroom with sprawling windows. 

After class, I paint my nails black and feel simple, skip across campus to gulp an iced coffee, for an ice cream cone like I am again 6 years old and living across from busy train tracks, the soft-serve summer spot melting down my knuckles as I scurry home. 

05/07/2015

My girlfriend’s feet are splayed in the pristine concrete, her converse laces fraying, Scorpio moon casting her aglow, her blond hair a cascade of glimmer. In her lap, Crush flops open and she reads, her low voice breathy in my ear, on my neck. 

Our closeness, my hands in her hair, 2AM in the gated neighborhood in the small mountain town where we met, where I trailed her in every room we occupied together, feels warm, like home, like a place I am returning to after a long time away. Time flutters away, and we crack logs under our bodies as we roll in dirt like dogs, pawing at each other like summer. 

In the morning, we drink coffee on the hill behind her duplex, waiting for the day to spool away, for us to be dragged apart by geography, her cutoff jeans and bare feet a warm reminder of how it feels to belong somewhere. 

11/13/2012

My best friend R messages me on Facebook: They’re looking for writing by queer Southern women or whatever! You’d be perfect!

I have never called myself queer, though somehow everyone can tell. My deep voice, my short nails, my crosscut, tiny bangs, my blazers, my Docs? The women I love secretly? The way I resist being called girlfriend, especially with male partners? My entirely queer pack of best friends? Whatever it is, R knows something I have never told them.  

I send a poem about gender, how I’m scared of my body and what it does, how distant I feel from it, how I long for it to make sense to me, how universal and minute this all feels, about fucking and how I can get somewhere mystical through closing my mind and opening my body. 

I’ve never come out; my hair clipped short, nails trim, denim jacket tossed over a nearby seat; i thought my persona was always enough. I surrounded myself with femme masculinities, hip and political women who slipped from the art opening to smoke Camel Lights and sip tequila from cowboy flasks, jean pockets worn thin. 

We traded poems, spent long evenings on docks we broke into in the off season, water lapping the thick blocs of darkened red cedar, the spooling smell of salt and metal flaking. I would park the car along the water and perch on the hood, swilling old coffee, Kate Chopin my only company.

I read women and femmes who tell me my stories matter, stories of queer genderweird women with pockets full of little stones, leaky pens, Carmex. I curl in the blue velvet recliner by the back window, my altar smoking sage and prisms, belonging entirely to my self, carving a place for my self wherever I want to bloom into.

10/13/2011

I am in love with a couple: M & M. They write fiction, have tattoos, are waify and dress all in black, drink cheap beer and have too many bookshelves. They are, somehow, very queer together, despite their different genders. They curate a femme-centric reading series in the small mountain town where we all go to school, and when they get into prestigious MFA programs, they leave Juniper Bends in my care. I am self-assured, but terrified. 

My chubby, weird poet identity cannot hope to complement their easy cool, their low-key townie charm, the way M sneaks cigarettes when M is not around to scold him, the way M has a collection of sex worker zines and wins dozens of writing prizes, has stories is the most prestigious magazines. 

Nevertheless, every three months I drag folding chairs from the storage room of the industrial used bookstore and uncork cheap bottles of cabernet sauvignon and pinot gris, pull together authors from all over, host traveling book tours, read my own weird, self-conscious poetry in front of a room jam-packed with friends, writers, my best friends with their perfect haircuts. 

03/22/2012

I am bored of Donne, Marlowe, Blake, Shelley. A small school means a restrictive version of literature and I am feeling the compression of this smallness. I slump in the back row of Medieval to Renaissance Literature and doodle. 

When I am done with readings of whiteness and maleness, I read Lorde, Baldwin, Mia McKenzie, tough queer femmes whose identities and work subvert narrative convention. I am turned on by these, and I quit reading Tennyson, Shakespeare. 

I am writing autotheory, curling into armchairs in the writing center with my composition book, in the first row of chairs at every reading featuring women, I am writing poems that don’t break lines, nonfiction stanzas, lyric everything. 

I need a new genre, a de-genre. My advisor lights up, even in his office swaddled by Romantic poets, his theatre company posters reframing Blake as all-gay, all-male. He has been known to experiment. All I want is to experiment. He lets me; he proposes a workshop for me to teach: experimental multigenre writing, lyric essays, prose poems, creative biographies. New ways to tell new stories.