@Lesbian_animals

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Robyn Maree Pickens

In one photo a rainbow-coloured toy guinea pig—that looks very much like a live guinea pig—stands outside on green leaves. In another photo a yellow snail looks up at a red ladybird crawling over a black and white striped mushroom. There is a topiary horse in mid-gallop over a field of yellow flowers, a chain of koala bears hugging each other, a red Virgin Mary whose dress elongates into multiple octopus feelers. A hairless cat wears a rainbow spotted turtleneck. I learn that so-called lesbian iguanas have a third eye on the top of their heads. This is a retina-like structure that connects to the pineal gland in the brain. The photo shows one iguana licking the top of another iguana’s head with its red tongue. Their claw hands are clasped and the lickee is eyes-closed blissed out. There is a beaver, a lesbian Mexican axolotl, flamingos, a panda wearing a suit, kittens, owls, dolphins, and a little girl standing on a baby crocodile.

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Trauma Hygiene

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Cee Devlin

On certain days
body conspires against pen
Such is the unpredictability
of shame’s conjugal visits

On these occasions,
Sometimes I think to ask:
Have I told my hands today
how well they have taken to carrying?
Thanked my thighs for walking,
and living to tell the tale?

It is in these moments
that I must pour myself into mirrors
using an inside-smile
The kind of love that
coats the mouth and
warms the throat

To seal the offering
I fill a bath with incantations
Scatter petals for the voyage
and
make sure to soak in
every
last
drop
of courage
it takes
to be
alone,

afloat,

unfinished

When conducting such rituals,
it helps to abandon verse altogether
and instead:
make yourself cum
like you really mean it

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Horoscope for My Queer Self, Two Years Ago

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Madison Godfrey

Maddie, pay attention. So there’s this TV personality called Antoni who you don’t know yet. He is a bisexual man who doesn’t shrink under spotlights. He’s on a show called Queer Eye which will make you cry one day. No, not the older series. It’s new. I don’t have time to explain. Stay with me. Anyway, one day there will be this show with this man who looks like he could have grown up in an adjacent bedroom. Same shade of hair and same hungry eyes. And he even likes The National. They’re a band of sad white men. Yes, I know that sounds shit. Just go with it. Anyway, so there’s a popular television show that everyone you know has been watching. And there’s a man who looks a little like you. He’s one of six gay men who give people makeovers but more than that, they understand. What I am saying is, there’s going to be a Sunday afternoon where you’re curled around a microwave meal in your pyjamas, and you’ll be entirely alone but feel like the traffic understands you. One day you will find love that writes a new syllabus for your heartrate. You will hold hands with someone and squash expectations between your palms. You don’t realise this yet, but your love might not look the way that others have told you it will look. That’s okay. Remember you’re still allowed to take up space in rooms that do not make you feel welcome. You are not a plant waiting for someone to water you, you’re the ecosystem itself. And Maddie, one more thing. You don’t need to apologise for the time it takes to grow into yourself, this pace is perfect for you.

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Love Transposed

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Ian Iqbal Rashid

Here I thought it was a warm, bright thing
A slant of sun on a still life
The rehearsed embrace of a spotlight
A curl of cat under a table lamp
Something lit and framed and smiling.
Punctuated by unnoticed beads of perspiration.

But long love is a runny muddy thing
It fills eyes and nostrils,
Is coughed up and sputtered.
Its dead leaves catch in our hair
Fly into mouths like papery tongues.
It stains fingertips, and weighs down footprints.

And it is also that dark moment before truth.
The revelation dreamed before waking.
Unknowable and yet understood.
A kiss as familiar as a returned afternoon,
As false as always, as true as perhaps.
It is the curiosity in what happens next,
A continual reinvention of stories. It is the absence of never.

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CARP

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Alison Whittaker
Fat carp smack up
our boat. Far up,
far out, flap out t
he tarp. The sad
thing sags — a barb.
A barb.
 
A Barbara at Coonabarabran
eyes our jackets and
my pierced nose. But
she gives us coffee
to be scrambling up
the escarpment to park
our car. Put a
fist in my hair
while I feast.
 
What strange love have
you brought me, gub
carp from the city?
If we were fish,
like we are almost
now, parsing east the
river veins. And say
a Barbara, a pest
a barb like a
carp, pulled you up
far up her boat.
 
          I don’t want to think about it.
 
You’d flop on a
hot tinny floor you
fellow, with your lot.
Gut both you gubs
so you don’t pop.
 
          The   Fisheries   Management   Act
encourages, but does not mandate, such
things.
 
And then hello, yellowbelly
bedfellow. Bellow gasping. Fold
like this foil on the
fire — lips together to
vent, I think, and
lips and lives together
for Centrelink.
 
If we were fish,
like we are eating
now, yellowbelly sweeping in f
rom the west. Then
idly resting your breast,
knowing what love we
know to detest. A
proselyting tide spreading up
the highways.

The carp didn’t start this. This is my ways.

We are afflicted with
these disgusting,
mud-sucking
creatures—bottom-
dwelling, mud-
sucking creatures.
 
The only form of
control is a version of
herpes; it is the only
thing that will get rid
of these disgusting,
mud-sucking
creatures. We will
move forward on this
because we believe
 
that we should be
getting rid of these
disgusting, mud-
sucking creatures in
order to support
some of the better
animals of our
waterways—the
silver perch, the
yellowbelly, the
Murray cod, the
 
 
 
Eastern cod and the
catfish. You have to
go to some extreme
measures at times to
make sure that we
 
 
 
 
 
keep our economy
and our environment
healthy—even if it
requires a version of
a venereal disease to
deal with the carp. If
that is what is
 
required, then that is
what is required.
We…are going to
make sure that we
have healthy rivers
and a healthy
economy, because we
are going to get rid of
the carp.

— Barnaby Joyce,
     May 2016.

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Blue

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Broede Carmody

for Kat Muscat

Three years on and your husk-sweet voice so close I could lean back and touch
it. Cigarette spirals and eggshell blue. Winter sunlight skidding sideways
gutters heave with rain. I am knee-deep in a wide-cut river

arms spread out

afraid I’m about to step on something sharp.

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Everything including the obvious

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Tricia Dearborn

for Cynthia

how can I describe you, my surprise, my unpredictable
your mind encompasses multitudes while I
am down on my knees squinting at the particular

your brain works sideways like a crab but in every direction at once on many levels
no point asking what you’re thinking – too many things to list
though sometimes I ask you to toss me three at random

the tips of all ideas have handles, their wholenesses dangling below
you flash the handles and I learn to catch them

for the sake of internal peace you’re learning to winnow
but your taste for multiplicity expands me,
flavours our life together, my habit of discernment a seasoning

by comparison I’m a slow simplistic one-track wonder
gathering towards potential actions in my steadfast cumulative felt-sensed way

shake it up! you say
willing to lose it all to gain it all
in your world everything including the obvious

just one of the possibilities

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IX

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Ruben Quesada
Last night as we lay in bed we talked about one-night stands we’d had you told me about the time in Salt Lake City when you went away to college when you’d spent a night in a sling high on heroin with a line of married Mormon men waiting their turn to be inside you the smell of the fireplace filling your nose is what you remembered most beyond the window mountains blanched with snow and this morning before you awoke I kissed your half-open mouth I watched the blackening snow bank along the curb as people slushed along the sidewalk above us a hunk of clouds formed grackles crackled above a church lot nothing more was said

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Watching Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at Yours

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Alice Allan

For Steve

This side of Melbourne, the river is a family trust.
Mummy houses, Daddy houses
and the mural of Kanye, which,
this side of Melbourne,
is a mural of Kanye.

Laughing in the lift we are
two queers who work too hard.

Now the prince is shirtless and covered in sweat.
Now Odette is shirtless and covered in sweat.

Standing at the window telling me
He was first and last.

Now you are staring at the train line.
Now I am staring at the private school.

Walking to the station telling me
Not a hopeless romantic anymore.

Now I am holding onto you.
Now I am saying I want to conjure you a boy.

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I IN THE EXECRABLE EXCESS

Posted on November 1, 2018 by B B P Hosmillo

The country looks at them just once: the dogs (notice iron rings
in their droopy ears) soiled and shaved
on the immobile palm of deep
breathing without exit door. The word PATHLESS rolls sideward
and then hits what
probably is a wall made up of water.
As if seconds are for drowning.
As if eyes are boiled clams that can’t open.
Say hmn.
Say human.
Say subhuman. That seismic circuit
for some life
wherein the essential parts are ruined, which is to tell
there are two Is in the word EXTINCTION.
I’m tired of doing love
only in private—that’s the first I,
randomly scratching the obscene
screen of television with motel key.
There are many long days when I imagine you
murdered in a movie,
pale and dead and unreal and I can still fuck you—that’s the other I,
sun-kissed and shirtless just like the first.
(notice XI XXIII MM tattooed along their spine)
They fuck for a long time, they see
you in each other, they have been fucking for a long time,
someday no dog of any kind will survive
in the country and they will still be fucking secretly.
When they were both laid
off from work
unpaid and saw it in the eyes of Brandon Lee that fucking
in front of a mirror was a ship
above great tides of fire, they fled
to the nearest motel, one after the other,
(notice the table looks
jabbed by its own swallowing
varnish, a world with torn-
rutted cities as its being)
and started the scene in front of a wall mirror.
(notice the plastic fruit basket is a lovely bungalow
if it is just its shadow)
One day last June—as every year in June—
gunshots dashed across
the archipelago to honor its independence.
Does it matter which man remembers the gunshots and wants to be free?
Does it matter which man is saying I cannot convince my self anymore,
I don’t know why we have to do this;—
Because with the mirror: four men sharing the same war
but no one among them is ready to die;—
That though they duck a story of slight survival, speaking
of how tragic slow death can be the haunted little life in it remains
shapeless, wretchedly there, more or less there.
How over the years things they meant have never birthed any surface,
no light
in the want for sunshine, no better country in the reflexive word HOME;—
That they have always seen the word and another roll back, crash,
and then immured.
(notice how the flight of their words is never to take the speaking
anywhere far)
To apologize to each other, that fantasy of ending in peace
they afford in surrender, and kiss once more—
and yes, they do so like in a dream,
but not as quicker as their senses turn into a pure obstacle;—
Does it matter which man knows they cannot help each other
by inconsequential fucking?
They sit tired and sweating on the floor for a long time, they have
been tired and sweating for a long time, they see
you (notice the old discolored doll that is a crucifix from afar
shouldn’t be there)
in each other, but better than any of you
they understand misery in sex.
When they were lanky boys they met
another who killed himself with a pen at school during lunch break,
twenty-some days since his late circumcision; he left
no note, which gave the living all the reasons to be uncertain.
Suspicious.
Quietly inconsolable.
To wonder all the time,
sometimes with a knife
tucked beneath the belt.
Not more than a week
after they wrote I will not pull my self out of my life
and laughed for saying it
is a promise to have a different ending.
When they were younger they didn’t know
hurt is sometimes felt only in the future.
And when the future is now in person
they say what was not written has stayed
true: person is a container for earth and spit,
I in the execrable excess.

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Spooks

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Emily Crocker

I, a ghost of myself (groans and all), and you, cumbersome
with so much opacity. Itching in the aisles of hangers.
Each point of contact enacting a five-star violence
they don’t know to call a violence; grinning and belted.
Glitching in the aisles, mate ah ma’am.
I knew I was a worryman when I began using my form
as a floatation device, a skeleton key, a dustpan –
corrections in neat brushwork v, v, v, v, v v, v, v, v, v
I knew you were really alive each time your body
ingested the words a lie, a lie, a lie, like
snips of red felt by the traitor ah, tailor
placing pins in the lack of it all. Grief is a puncture in the lobe
that never quite closes – a moaning o, o, o, o, o
How desirous you are, at times,
to slip inside a different mass like a lapel pin,
if it could only hold you close ah closed ah clothed.
All the while I am holding mybreathself open
where I have nothing for you. Which is to say, so much longing
it haunts us both. Undress yourself and slip inside my body,
elusive as it is, anytime you want to.

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Knitting A Poem By The Hoover Dam

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Michael Farrell

Knitting a poem for Husker Du by the Hoover Dam
And other monuments. The poem looks like a bee (to
Knit Keatsianly). Knitting poems by the Harbour
Bridge, letting moisture into the wool

As it rises, as it sprays from the wake of the ferries
The life of the sea. Knitting a poem by Arthur’s Seat
My Dad looking on benignly. Knitting a poem for the
Pogues at Barrowlands, and other

Bands. Knitting a poem by the Big Sheep, so waxily
Figurative, an old bad feeling creates knots and
Fissures, like some poison or prison’s got in the line
Knitting a poem for my nephew, so

He might climb out of any white life that’s made for
Him and his. Knitting a poem by pine trees (symbols
Of longevity) for purring black cockies to eat; or by
The Great Buddha of Toganji Temple

In Motoyama. What’s Bob Mould doing today
Tonight, I wonder? The knitting grows a tail like an
Unfazed gecko, becomes a poem of two tones. To
The poem the needles are home

Knitting by the Amphlett memorial in Little Bourke
Us boys desperate to get it done. Knitting to the sound
Of a gypsy band, late in the forest where gay poets
Dance, a plate of gelato and WWII

How swans make the sky look blue. The Avalanches
And Jean-Luc Godard: all get a garter. Ian Hamilton
Finlay, I’ve been knitting this poem all day. I’m going
To wear it at Little Sparta

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Namumulaklak ang tanrangkahan

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Ivy Alvarez
The North Sea: a drama queen pounding the shore. You led me to the dark; perhaps to reveal a hutch, bring out a rabbit for me. You proposed a confusion. The rabbit was missing and the box in your pocket. Inside, a reward for weathering the hardest winter, one of near sundering. In the beginning, there were roses, a locked gate, and radiating out, a pattern in the rock, a circle.

Filipino idiom meaning will soon marry (literally, the gate is blooming).

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ROADBLOCK OF WANTS

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Angela Gardner

Witness into (then out of) after-image.
Hunts, full moon into (then out of) mouths.
Violence. The hearts frenzied climb
into searchlight on poison-baited hills.
How it costs. Lives made forensic
by their reasonable grounds (or not).
Stop and search. Safer, they say.
How it’s not too early or too late
: how the streets expose hold-up men
and do-nothings. Expose what the stars
or we will bring.

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Moonface

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Lune Loh

The Sea of Fecundity is acne from an eternity of puberty. The dark side is always covered by hair. Acne erupts in a forest, unseen. There is no face without hair. There were phases without hair. They still insist on long hair being a phase. Being new was supposed to be the absence of a phase. Being new is being unable to face having no face. Especially without hair. Gibbous curls shift in an eclipse of a hundred years and everyone watches. An oblique profile. Picture it. Eclipses are a return to hiding. To be full of courage for one night a month only. To phase out every other day. To be up every night. To return to light pollution as home. To smile or frown without eyes to see yourself. To see eternity as a phase.

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Butch Dancing

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Alison Coppe

We go out butch dancing
Poets and lovers
Get lost in a vertical groove
Scale the room of eyes legs glitter
I ask
are you a dancer?
ultimately, they say.
Beats pop
soda or salt
rush against the impulse to stand still and stare
eat up gorge the sight of queers—
I didn’t know I was hungry
Until I
clash bodies anonymous brushing beating balance of too late wrong way wrong time
right girl boy queer no after you.

We’re standing around talking about Janelle Monae
I like what comes out of her mouth.
Oh, yeh.

Unsure
it’s almost a two-step dad-dance
two-step Highway Hotel cover band booze dance
except that my Dad is an excellent dancer.
In our tangle dipping down passing through
I keep time in my legs bent knees and wide thighs with insides against outsides each
other all the loose tightness of denim vs flesh always busting pouring stuffing
—like that time
I heard you pop.

Our bodies might move differently better
If we were some other kind of trans-queers
And I would need sex or something like it to really get to the bend of my body to go
to the soft edge of my body to stop staring
But I watch her instead distracted elegant nervous
And think about the poem I will write when this is done
And it will be years until we are here together again
poets dancing watching more beautiful more glitter more butch more daddy fag dyke
femme boy power and
your motorcycle grip revs
arms stretched out
hips locked
somehow loose
beneath denim
beneath the cloth of a week of talking reading diet coke but not diet coke anymore
just soda water with lime or tea or coffee and
conversation
shouted ear to ear because it’s so fucking loud
they ask me
Who is your mother?
and it’s complicated but of course not
I sort of shrug and move back and forward
a blonde femme spills over me
hangs from my shoulders
Do you have any MDMA?
Sorry, no.

Must be the bandanna, Al. Screams dealer.
Yeh, must be.

Two cops stand on the mezzanine above the bar
watching the queers on show
just the gentle presence of the state come to visit the party which we know is not gentle
we know is not soft butch boy is not
hard femme top girl
has none of their charisma
has none of the bells
does not moan like Saturday morning
of slow fuck love I give you
none of your gentle mouth.
That’s’ Sydney, he says.

The drag show is about to start
music and lights come up down and beat
we position ourselves in a curve by the front of the stage
our bodies all loosely connected touching here and there
in the split
recognition
the moment before articulation:
you got the best of my love.

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passing

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Liz Duck-Chong

she dealt me a quick hand
across the dim table, the
smell of stale menthol, day
old breath in a lined face,
though she hated the term
‘trans elder’, made her laugh
like gravel underfoot; spitting
words shuffling rounds, we
couldn’t help it, we held her
in this heightened esteem.
she said darl are you in or
do ya fold, punctuated with
drawl, no shame at all that
she’d aged out of the space
where people still called her
brave; girl to my left throws
down a hand and says the
magic word, we savour the
part where we still laugh in
this closed dealing coven.
pass, an admonishment, a
tapping out from this hand
and we still share knowing
looks, laugh behind loaded
glasses and sip; we carve
space from expectation, sit
here and deal with anything
but, fast game’s a good one
and outside this room don’t
we take on the house and
lose it all, but here, in this
place full of smoke there’s
no hackles left just chips
and bets none of us can
actually afford; pass again
and the pot’s swept to my
right, leaves me thinking of
this room and these people
hidden out of sight behind
doors and the kindness of
night, of this woman before
me, the face of a model ten
years before, like what’s the
deal (oh, mine?) with this
weaponised invisibility held
over our heads; passing as
the elephant in this room,
passing as a policing tool,
passing as just a man in a
dress, passing as a fucking
surrogate for status quo,
passing as a sitting down
pissing contest,
passing
as maybe the only safe way
to leave the house alone. i
sit back and she chews ice
at me, reveals her hand
and smiles.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Asylum Fashions

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Liz McQuilkin

Why not slip on this jacket, check if it fits?
It’s just arrived from England. You’re the first
to try it on. We’ve had just a few old ones
until today – we don’t use them much.

Let’s see you put it on. Yes, I know
the sleeves are long, the end cloths well beyond
your finger tips – this is the latest style.
Note the firmness of fabric. It’s ever so strong.

Now for the matching trousers. Like to try them?
I’ll hold the waist open while you step inside.
The centre seam that stitches the legs together
is well thought out and perfectly discreet.

The outfit is complete with these two mittens.
The same tight weave, and with a novel feature
of metal clasp and lock, defining the wrist –
an elegant innovation, practical too.

Let’s leave the mittens for now. See how the jacket
keeps you snug when I tie the sleeves around you.
No more hugging yourself against the cold –
this latest model neatly does the trick.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

I need to stop comparing myself (to every other trans guy on Instagram)

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Kait Fenwick

Every time someone makes a social media post about a t shot,
my heart shifts
clenched fist
“There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve”
17 years old, smoking cheap dope on Jayde’s floor-bound mattress
I need not lie through my teeth. There’s a knock at the door.
Mother.
She was not concerned I was stoned. Rather,
I was safe.
Walked me the block home, tucked me into bed with a bottle of water
cottonmouth
I giggled as she left the room.
Helen recognised that allowing me to spend some time on the ceiling
Allowed me to recline back into myself,
if only for the night
They say that adhering to the gender binary,
promotes social cohesion
I feel anything but cohesive when I see fragments of myself dismantled,
lining the horizon
A bit like your arse encased in a pair of RodeOhs,
flicks my switch more than the prescribed attachment
I rip it from your holster
+ ram it into the seam of my regular BONDS briefs
Mine now, anyway,
always was

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TASHA

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Eileen Myles

She prefers
my phone &

using my
computer
w out the burden
of her life
last night
I described
it open
a circle
she kisses
my knee
its life
that is
my name
they thought
she had
a lot
I think
it’s enough
I mean
it’s astonishing
if I had (his)
I could
feel everything
but as it is
I know
what it is
I love your
lips.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

ETA

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Adolfo Aranjuez

Fingers slick with smell,
hippocampus trick filling gaps.
From tram stop to rooftop, a kiss
still fresh on lips. This love’s been
all spanners, heaps to work out—
work through smuggled touching

between seats. Duration deficit:
twenty-six ’til the 96, hit snooze
times five. Maribyrnong walks and mud
on shoes, I’m on my way. Sneaking in,
I’m on my way: ETA unknown. You say
you’re with me. Nail-biter, make me
lightheaded—limbs weaved, must I bear this

wait? I need to learn how to trust
when you’re not there.

Faraway daze, covet constancy.
Microsecond split, I am too
in my head. 7.25 ’til showtime—
the next stage in my view.
Wurundjeri then Whitehall,
bridge over river. Last one before
the long one, amygdala multi-shot.
Double latte, stolen breakfast:
10.16 won’t seem that late.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Queer and Desperate Poetry

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Amber Dawn

I was costumed in a white tiger stripped bodysuit when I found out
I’d been accepted into the graduate creative writing program at the University
of British Columbia. The bodysuit was one size too small
and my labia majora squeezed out from either side of the gusset
whenever I sat down.

I sat with the other sluts, most of whom I loved like stopped clock
around a vinyl topped card table inside a corrugated steel barn
in Huntsville, Alabama. Our hosts brought warm tamales
wrapped in tinfoil and homemade moonshine.

From the moonshine
I expected what I expect of every spirit
stronger than seventy proof. I expected a methanol spice akin to grappa
and I yearned for the zippered mountain road between Sulmona and Pacentro
along which I once vomited in the passenger side footwell of an Alfa Romeo.

The Italian word for vomit is vomito. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but vomito sounds so cute.
Cute enough to name a small pet.

Moonshine flint behind my ears. My cell phone lit with a 604 area code.
The admissions secretary’s voice was bright and high
despite her calling from four thousand plus kilometres away.
She said “I’m so happy for you”
and “your acceptance letter is in the mail”
and “you should apply for a scholarship.”
The secretary knew my livelihood was pussy tap.
It’s likely the entire selections committee knew.
One can only write so many poems about men’s billfolds.

Our MC, Rose Anna, announced my big news to the audience. Their clanging
applause surprised me. It shouldn’t have because a whore that goes to collage is adorable.
Live-nude-crook turned hit-the-books is a narrative string
any fella can feel good about tucking a fiver into.

The rough decked stage caught my stiletto. The sound of my knees
pounding plywood was barely audible against the sonic boom of burlesque.

And besides what’s another bruise?
What’s a bruise? What’s a bruise? What’s a blue moon bruise
to do but pull young blood to and fro like the tide? What’s a bruise
but a testament to the sharp art of surrendering to place and time?

And how I surrendered to that stage. Quit the clamor
of spectator expectancy, the scream-pitch ringing in the round and instead
bowed down to the ageless filth of glitter and leaked fluid. Oh, hallowed ground
oh striptease stage, I prayed to spirits of every hustler who turned rock ballads
into rent, turned grind into gold. Face-downed belly-rolled until I met god
or a staph infection. Same difference.

This is definitely nostalgia talking. Don’t let me (and my propensity
for glorification) fool you. The truth
is I uprighted myself
and finished my routine
just like any other night.

I sometimes wonder, though do not care in the slightest, if pity
was the reason I was accepted into the creative writing program
at the University of British Columbia.

An anagram for “creative writing” is “tragic interview”

The one concrete detail I recall about the mother, who after the show
presented me with her virgin teenage son, was her pearls. Nacreous
is the adjective that describes the specific lustre of a pearl.
Her pearls had flawless nacre. Not like the poor flaking strand
passed down to me by my Nonna.
And we were in Alabama.

The mother in pearls was interested in buying sex for her teenage son.
“He has to become a man before going off to college.”
She was certain it was his virginity that hindered him
from the kingdom and the power of predestined manhood.
What she was unsure of was how much I should be paid for my service.

I would have to veer into fantasy to continue.
There’s nothing I remember about the teenage son.
To write what little appears on this page, I’ve superimposed the Geek
from the 1984 film Sixteen Candles and alternatively
Brian from The Breakfast Club.
A John Hughes-constructed outcast crying
over thwarted masculinity and a tenuous ability
to subjugate young women’s bodies.
I grew up with movies that taught me the meek
shall inherit the prom. Or, according to John Hughes
the Geek shall inherit access to a blackout-drunk cheerleader.

But life rarely mimics a Hollywood ending and sex work isn’t going anywhere.
I took my pussy tap money and went to Pacentro for the 553rd Corsa degli Zingari.
In the village dialect Zingari describes he who is barefoot.

Barefoot young men walk the mule tracks up Mount Marrone
past malnourished stray dogs that haunt the village cemetery, past
their ancestors resting in the high walls
past cicadas keening in the warped heat. Higher still, past
stone huts where shepherds have slept since time immemorial
past drags of scorched secondo dopoguerra earth, past
brown bear and antelope tracks, past prayer caves, past
consecrated bedrock, past unmarked graves. For the past
five and a half centuries barefoot young men have waited at the top
of Marrone rock for starting bell to echo through Peligna Valley.

This ringing bell made me cry for reasons I still do not understand.

I lined up with the other spectators to watch barefoot young men race
to the finish line. Bloody footprints on the church floor: a rite of passage.
Those who reached the Virgin became good men, heroes
spread in a dusty huddle before the altar. The Virgin of Loreto (or the Virgin
in this particular church) was pale blue, gold and haloed
in the kind of electric lights that reminded me
of a golden age of Hollywood dressing room.
And because I’ve seen every Fellini film,
I too knelt before Her and prayed.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been afraid of what I’ve seen and what I know
and now that I’ve refashioned this memory into a poem I choose not to show myself
praying the rosary, psalms or any grace I learned as a girl.

I prayed “Please, I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I’ll do anything, please
Ho paura. Paura lasciami. Please. Unafraid. Please.”

You (literally you) are reading queer and desperate poetry, and so
I already love you like a stopped clock, but if you’re wondering whether or not
I took that Alabamian mother’s money to fuck her virgin son then you too better
kneel down and pray.

The other sluts in dropped me and my bag full of small bills and animal
print lingerie off at O’Hare airport in Chicago. They travelled on to Milwaukee
maybe onto Minneapolis, and eventually into lonesome sphere
of memory. (These days, if I can’t find an old friend through google
I assume they are dead.) I flew back to Vancouver to attend the University
of British Columbia, where more than one professor warned me
not to confuse creative writing with therapy.

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

play animals

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Trish Salah

not this, or this
woman’s a waterline

you can’t crow your way home
with October banging round town

the weather settles early
waste erasing up and down

a brute dog after
all murky
and down in the details

cause the weight grows fire too
how you show curls
to school me a good time

cute as a kiss or
stealing covers

missing a way to come
away with only

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Review Short: Kristen Lang’s SkinNotes

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Nathanael Pree

SkinNotes by Kristen Lang
Walleah Press, 2017


Kristen Lang’s SkinNotes articulates an intense poetry and poetics of the body through a holistic series of lifelines in which skin, bone and organs are not so much dissected as regarded, reassembled and given human or other animate agency. Lang’s deft, original and at times startling use of metonymy places bodily parts and other material of daily life into alignments which convey an expansive range of meaning, dimension and depth.

The collection encompasses multitudes in both its scope and strata, with each skilfully edited section notable for a standout poem at its outset. ‘Glass’ is one of these, remarkable for the nuanced and multi-layered interplay between visible surfaces and what lies beneath: 

The stained fringes of the shore
remember the water. 
And the skins of the stones  
sketch their memories of the waves.

What is glass but sand, broken down and recomposed into the possible illusion of a level plane? Its transparency is both deceptive and a means by which a more complete perception of whatever it covers may be obtained. Just as stones contain water, so their own intrinsic elements are held in by a surface that despite its visibility remains imperceptible. These reanimated self-objects resist isolation or definition other than by shifting their constituent parts. This is reaffirmed by the luminous presence of ‘The horse’ that presages the third section of the book. By this point, Lang has already proposed that ‘none of us / are angels’, and this Rilkean thought expands through the equine incarnation and immanence. ‘How the angels are not ourselves’, she muses. Nevertheless, there are angels we fabricate: ‘We dress them’, possibly to cover their stark and frightening essence. Her eloquent rejoinder continues: 

Much, though, is familiar. Are they here? The presence 
or absence of angels – how their songs 
dissipate in the slanting gaze of our search and we cannot
guess what we would know of them.

The uncertain searching conveyed through the ‘slanting’ elision implies the same estrangement Rilke knew, that ‘we are not really at home in the interpreted world.’ Lang also concedes, despite ‘the familiar’ presences, this is mediated territory for human beings. Unlike us, the horse simply exists without apprehension of the terror that derives from the beauty each single angel encapsulates, even when its form seems to be within unsteady reach.

The animal world features in several, often shorter poems here, allowing for more condensed imagery when the discursive voice makes way for the emergence of ideas without reflective commentary. An example of this can be seen in ‘Dog quantum’, which begins with a simple physical sensation followed by creaturely emergence: 

Swelling in our hands,  
her horse chest, bear paws,  
the loose giggle of her skin

This composes a gestalt of the immanent being, through connections that commence with the most palpable of feelings, moving seamlessly into ascription and metaphor that come off as effortless, despite the leftfield ‘loose giggle’ collocation. Another poem describes the recovery of a bird: ‘We follow the tide of its lungs, / the slow opening of its beak.’ The interplay between inside and outside space elaborates an instinct elaborated throughout the book, as the section ‘Blood harmonies’ ends with a poem for a young child, where

The birds of his heart  
flutter into my arms, swoop 
through my chest

Like the one recovered, whose ‘feathers hum with flight lines’, this literal embodiment moves in projective beauty and delight. The trope resurfaces, becalmed, in the wonderful and deceptively simple ‘Candlelight’:

the frayed flight-lines of the self,
somewhere in the body’s cells, are as real
as the flame you have painted by,

as real
as the stone.

The exact corporeal location may be uncertain or unspecified, but is also entirely perceptible and solid as its components coalesce into concise and incontestable articulation.

Contact in more overtly self-contained contexts consists of interlaced elements that at times elude comprehension, if not apprehension: ‘The touch / we cannot choose to extinguish’ in the opening poem, in one example, leading in to the initial section where the creation of new life and the changes that occur in the body involved predominate. A longer poem, central to the tropes Lang follows, ‘The small house of her body’, is structured like the book in four parts, expressing the pain of an unnamed trauma, that hints at either abortion or violent parturition (‘the torn haze of what she had done’), and in ‘Lake’ – as a coda – ‘she is torn by the ripples.’ Around the repeated rupture and aftershock the encircling stones are ‘dark as eyes.’ These simple seeming lines convey the concept of deep song and unfathomable nature of duende: love and almost inexpressible loss, lines that can be strummed like Lorca’s best when stripped down, as

skin folds the shadows of her bones, 
lays them on the bed in the slip 
of the hour. Her lungs grip.

The poet returns through assonance and music to stark physiological consciousness, night and a phoneme removed from sleep. ‘Lake’ is one of several poems here related to the oneiric capacity for ‘crumbling’, a word used more than once throughout the book, as well as heightened sensory reception in its stages or absence. In ‘The slight translucence of the sleepless’, for instance, tiredness assumes the simile: ‘like moonlight / on the inside of her skin.’ Once again the reader is returned to the inside, complicit and becalmed at the source of things.

One characteristic of complex and original works is their confidence to operate outside established genre. SkinNotes contains Confessional and Imagist overtones without being dependent on either sensibility, creating enough space to manoeuvre and draw breath. Lang’s liberal use of personal pronouns and dedications punctuates a controlled discursive stream, with moments of spellbinding clarity and quietude that stop the reader short in sheer admiration. ‘Do play on’, she urges the body: a source of such splendour with its finely tuned and calibrated organs. As methodology, statement of intent or an invitation to start reading again, this underlines and understates a resonant tour-de-force.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,