I identify as genderfluid and gendervague, female by default only, and I don’t really understand gender except in the context of performative roles and learned social scripts. I enjoy gender and love the diversity of gender and anti-gender. I love the wide ranges of sexuality and asexuality that exist, and I don’t think they are always fixed concepts or identities in everyone.
I wasn’t sure whether I should even have a LGTBTQIA cateogry. Many of the poems here could have been written for anyone of any gender, and many of the ones that aren’t in this section could have been too. It’s a fuzzy and somewhat sloppy divide here, but in the end I felt it was important to have it because I care about queer representation.
mother cat
let me crawl inside your
stealthy quiet
leather urgency
calling to me
from across the
shifting earth
mother cat
let me crawl inside
through this ancient winding
Broadway trail
of tears and remembrance
where cities fade—
grass to rocks
to these cliffs we climb naked
by the sea,
locking waves and moon
in our starlit tongues…
for Anais Nin
You were every bit a child still, at thirty
when that afternoon in the hot mistral
you invited him in
and in
and in
until he tangled your conscience
with pheromones
and tender insistence,
drowning your homesickness
in his ocean of chromosomes
that gave life to your own
until he filled you up
and came out the other side…
Did you hear the story
about the girl who loved too much?
So much she couldn’t have it.
She’d lived through famines
and learned to count rice-grains.
There was never enough cake
to eat it too (or eat for two?)—
so she’d take a bite.
Save the wrapper,
put it back on the shelf.
Wanted it to last forever…
Knowing when something is over
isn’t an ending of love,
which has no beginning or end—
and nothing—not anger, or even indifference
can erase these stories written in Sharpie ink…
