Seven is a fine number of poems

Making friends is hard. I go to poetry events and share my piece, and I try to be neighborly and share of myself in the ways I understand, but it mostly falls flat. They call it the poetry community, but I still have no idea what it means. Apartheid is always in the room with us, and it does nothing but divide.

Nobody seems to know what community means. It's a hollow word, an empty vessel you can pour anything into. Usually it just means taxonomical alignment: that you and I share the queer community or the neurodivergent community not because we show up for each other, or because we share resources, but because we are both disjuncted from normal in exceedingly generic ways. All we have in common, in community, is being outside the illusion of the typical. The poetry community seems to mean that you show up to certain events occasionally, that you know what "new shit" means, and just about nothing else.

Youngsters forget that the L G B T emerged as a political coalition through community organizing. Once upon a time, it wasn't clear what exactly lesbians and gay men had in common. Whether cis women could be drag queens was a question of affinity: what have you got in common with us faggots, really? "You're fish already, outsider; you wouldn't, couldn't, know cunty like we do." The question "ain't I a woman?" (attributed to Sojourner Truth by a white woman's fabrication) first concerned apartheid dynamics over womahood. In 2018, Laverne Cox repurposed it to interrogate the construction of cis womanhood, flipping her hair and begging the real question: "ain't I fish too?" (And if you don't know what fish is, youngster, stranger, normie: Janet Mock's Redefining Realness can clue in an outsider.)

This reflects the fracturing of queer militancy into matters of identity, of self-authorship within or against a superstructure that is both internal and external but primarily individual. A woman in what culture, Laverne? A woman of what tradition? The European occlusion of third gender roles creates a kind of trap in modernity, in which trans womanhood's binary nature cannot escape a form of assimilationism: that we are women, even as no one can yet answer what a woman is. Gender is a sacred mystery, unanswerable except as lived experience -- and that's alright, but it means these questions of identity are a political dead end. The problem remains, comrade, not that the boss, the landlord, the cop, or the politician can disenfranchise me for dressing or acting a certain way, but that the violent hierarchy which empowers them exists. Keep your eyes on the big fish, and together we'll fry that leviathan up good.

I don't really care if cis women want to be drag queens. Through aesthetics and theatrics, drag illuminates how constructed and performative our notions of gender are. I'm not much for drag, honestly, but I don't see why in the 2020s, being fifty years distinct from 1970, we can't pull back the veil and confront that every form of normal is fake, cis included. Intersectionality doesn't mean we are only divided, neighbor. It means we intersect: we have one great foe in common, whose many faces live even in our own minds, whose foolish cruelty cannot overcome a diversity of tactics. It means our differences are our strength. I want community as strong as the muscle that breaks the slaver's arm.

Anyway, here's some poetry.

Untitled (soothsayers)

Both scientists and storytellers
are soothsayers
differing in their nature as oracles
only by the manner of the prophecies
they each impart.
When a scientist tells you what lies
on a distant world
how is it so different from a tale
illuminating what gleams
in your own heart?

Masculine Love

bell hooks
was a complicated
landlord.
Nevertheless she offered astutely:
people want masculine love,
but men are bad at it.
Why?
Why would men, the designated masculine caste
be bad at masculine things?
Patriarchy. Duh.
Patriarchy creates the caste we call men
apart from the caste we call women
and shapes them for its own ends.
Men become emotionally stunted,
atrophying all but anger and arousal.
Men become critically limited,
turning to hubris over humility.
Men become violent
because patriarchy wants them violent.
Of course men are bad at masculine love.
Masculine love is not patriarchal
and the body knows it.
The illusion of privilege can only obscure
how apartheid sucks for everyone.

Sorry I'm Awkward, You Just Make Being Human Look So Natural

(This poem is dedicated to fellow ptown poet Cien)

Wow, you make it seem downright easy.
It's like you've been human since the day you were born,
as if you don't remember anything but!
It seems to come to you so effortlessly:
the awkward struggle for authenticity,
the anxious vibrations of your own vibrancy,
the way eating and loving and crying
can all feel good and bad and so much else.
you must have been practicing for a while!
I'm pretty new at this, do you have any tips?
I'm still getting used to not being able to
reach for the skies with bark and branch
or plumb the earth with root and trunk
on a mangrove tropic with magenta skies.
Now that I'm in a body like this, even nutrition is
messy and particular and subject to industrialism.
You eat like you've never photosynthesized!
You consume life like you've done it your whole life.
I'm still wondering why salads aren't also murder,
and if murder is OK sometimes,
then why don't we eat the rich?
Wait, that's right. Prion diseases.
I'd hate to see you zombified by billionaire brains,
so let's stick to birria.
Maybe over a bite you can tell me
how it is that you make being human,
in triumph and rage and grief and joy and love,
seem like the only thing we can do.
I don't want to trouble you in your travails,
but if I were your student,
what would you teach me?

How a Sun Forgives

Chalchiuhtlicue,
our goddess of the jade skirt,
our lady of living lakes,
have your tears yet dried
in the light of the fifth sun?
When you governed the sky
as our cherished fourth sun,
where did your love come from?
Bountiful, your compassion;
boundless, your mercy;
blessed, to be of your design.
You gods made us to worship,
but with you, to worship was to love.
We swam a watery world,
thirsting only for your light,
hungering only to adore.
Goddess, let me be clear:
I miss it. I miss you.

How challenging it must be,
to be divine:
unchanging in the folds of eternity,
cursed with a permanent nature.
Can you learn? Do you forget?
Or do you just sit with it all?
Is that where your kindness comes from?
The knowledge that we are who we are,
that we do what we do,
as we always have and we always will,
and you love us anyway?
Then why did you drown the world?
Then what made you stop crying?
Gods can be so jealous and petty,
thinking your love was selfish,
our reciprocity, merely mechanical
like dolphins jumping for treats,
so they bullied you.
Doubted you. Smeared you.
Did you know they would?
Or can even the eternal be surprised,
and betrayed?

Huiztilopochtli,
the southern hummingbird,
the omen of war and dawn,
he does not ask us for kindness
but delights in our cruelty.
He promises the return of daylight,
if we promise him beating hearts.
Even the settler worships him in this way,
granting in insensate sacrifice
the exposed,
the unsheltered,
the distinct,
the noncompliant.
They do not drive obsidian into chests
to recognize the weight of an offering,
to bear in one’s hands the gore of it.
They gift to the hummingbird
corpses alone in the cold.
They gift with massacres as footnotes
and call it economics, the dismal science.
With each new day, I suppose
the dead must please the fifth sun
whether or not one honors their sacrifice.
Could the god of war be as hungry
as slavering Cipactli,
the maw of maws and countless claws?
Does he taste the difference?

Chalchiuhtlicue,
how do you forgive us?
How do you forgive Huiztilopochtli
for fashioning worshippers as cruel as us?
My beloved goddess,
do you too yearn for the sixth sun?
For a change, for an end,
for the humility of oblivion?
Maybe the settler’s poisons will summon
Mictlantecuhtli to govern an age of death,
but I pray for your refreshing return.
I contemplate how you abide in heaven,
your forgiveness as fresh as lake-water,
your salvation as vibrant as salmon,
and I pray I could be as gentle as you.

Regarding the Orange Tree

Let us begin with the seed.
Allow me to tend it gently,
to give it time in the sun,
and water, but not too much.
The seed knows its own way
so I am only here to listen
and lend the hand it asks for.
It draws life even from soil
soaked in bloody pasts.
Soon that crimson muck yields
a green shoot greeting the day.
Does it know the taste of history
like I feel it in my skin and bones?
Let us honor each other
to show heritage is not destiny
but proof of love passed down
to take new forms under a new sun.
When the sprout turns brown,
the soft green to sturdy bark,
I will fortify it with a guide
so it does not hunch under its own weight.
Lean on me, little one.
Let me point you to the sky
so you never stop reaching.
I will not spray you with pesticides
but observe what comes to live through you
and carefully dissuade what hurts you
by coaxing what bolsters you.
A tree is stronger than fervent gales,
yet do not the strong deserve rest too?
When after years you offer me fruit,
I will not discard it for the bruises,
nor disregard it as unworthy of the grocer,
but accept it as a gift in all its glory.
In the sweet taste of your flesh,
the laden soil lives transformed,
its ghosts given reprieve in your being.
Cruelty cannot prevent how I cherish you,
nor deprive you of your nature to rise.

Raised by Dogs

I became an adult at the age of 7
which in dog years is about 47
which means I was a slow learner.
Huckleberry and Nikita took care of me
before I could speak or walk,
but I could crawl and yowl.
That's what a pup needs to know anyway,
so they didn't call me a runt.
Huckleberry gave me an important lesson
which my face still bears
when at the age of two I wondered
what lies at the other end of one's tongue?
My research led me into his mouth.
Huckleberry taught me about consent
with a scar I bear proudly,
but the humans around us didn't understand.

When a dog bites a human,
it often marks their end.
Hushed voices debated Huckleberry's fate
while I meditated on pain and otherness.
I wasn't yet fluent in English.
Ear-flicks and nose-twitches were my first tongue;
wagging tails and tense muscles.
Dogs are a verbose people if you listen,
but most humans don't,
not even to each other.
Huckleberry sat outside solemnly,
thinking about the dog that came before him,
the one that was already old
when he arrived as a pup,
like Nikita had been a pup.
He knew things he wouldn't tell me,
and passed peacefully with those secrets
when I was only three,
or 29 in dog years.
The humans let Huckleberry live
in part because
he was already dying.
Losing a guardian at 29 is hardly uncommon,
but nobody seemed to mourn quite right.
Men don't cry, so my father didn't,
and Huckleberry wasn't my mother's dog --
a distinction I didn't understand --
so she didn't cry either.
Nikita didn't cry because that isn't how dogs mourn.
Instead, together, we howled at the moon.

I knew I wasn't like Nikita or Huckleberry,
but I assumed I simply had a separate role
in our shared society of equals.
Dogs are thoughtful and clever and joyous,
but they need our hands for doorknobs and medicine,
and we -- I needed them as friends and family.
I presumed my function as a human adult would be
to feed and walk dogs, to attend them as peers,
like apprentices to philosophers.
This seemed to be the only thing my father did
that was of any discernible value,
when he wasn't away on "business trips"
to made-up places like "California."
He didn't feel the need to explain to me
what it means to say one owns a dog, or
what it means to speak of their breed, but
I didn't ask, because I'm a slow learner.
That's why I went through kindergarten twice.
I became an adult when I understood
the gulfs that separated Nikita and I.

I've known human children as old as thirty, forty, fifty,
and I don't mean dog years.
I've looked down on a craggy elder, decades my senior
as if she'd just humped my leg
when she told jokes to try and flirt,
jokes she didn't understand.
"It's like Cheech said," she smirked,
maybe two years on HRT to my twelve,
"Mexicans are just Indians without the reservation."
"Do you know what he meant by that, paleskin?"
"...That Mexicans are unreserved?"
Oh, to be a child at seventy.
"Little one, most Mexicans are Indians.
Where do you think they got their melanin?
It wasn't from the Spanish."
She cocked her head like Nikita would
when Huckleberry said something a bit too heady.
Nikita had always been the little one,
until the new pup Loki arrived,
and too many things made sense to him all at once.
I'd never known a dog to commit suicide,
but he did.
It takes a kind of intention and knowledge
that only a fool would mistake for foolishness.
Loki didn't understand where his new brother had gone,
or why,
and I wasn't about to explain.
Instead, I taught him to howl at the moon
like I'd been taught.
I was sixteen by then,
or 94 in dog years.
Downright ancient.

When I was seven, I saw a dog in a shock collar
at the park where we let Nikita run around.
"It's for training," this neighbor explained.
The dog screamed when the human used a button
to reinforce commands with pain.
"Will they use that on us, at school?" I asked.
My father laughed with the confidence of a ten-year-old.
"Of course not. Such things are only used on animals."
Being a special kind of slow, I asked:
"So... are humans a kind of mushroom?"
"No, no. Humans are animals, kid,
but not like dogs."
Nikita and I examined the fear in the stranger's eyes
as they scratched at their collar with the electrified prongs.
Nikita asked, "Will they do that to me?"
I said in words that humans can't hear,
"I won't let them."

I didn't know I couldn't keep that promise,
but I meant it all the same.
Ten years later
when my mother insisted on using a shock collar
programmed to enforce an invisible fence
because Loki had proven adept at great escapes,
I strapped it to my own neck
and ran at a wall nobody else could see
just to show Loki that
no matter what this world does to you
whether it can defeat you is a choice
they can never take away from you.

Untitled (talk)

We can talk a big game
about solidarity.
We can talk a big game
about hating Donny T.
We can talk a big game
about community.
We can talk a big game
about what’s revolutionary
but with all due respect,
struggle is not a game
and I tire of talk.