Protected: I imagine watching you

Posted on April 17, 2009 in Kristen, poetry | Enter your password to view comments.

Protected: The Good Kind of Unbearable

Posted on March 23, 2009 in Kristen, poetry | Enter your password to view comments.

Enter your password to view comments. | Category: Kristen, poetry | Tags: desire, extended metaphors, falling in love, if january is for vegetables then what is march for, love letter, poetry, relationships, spelunking, stargirl, the opposite of war is not peace it's creation, this is terrifying but worth it (right?), when I let go of who I am I become who I might be, why I'm falling for kristen

Gloaming

Posted on January 2, 2009 in poetry | 4 Comments

I want you in the gloaming, in the grey
light of near-dusk, anxious to fade
the brightness of morning, midday,
the tragedy of sunset back into the
dim tones where we no longer strain

to see. I want to trace lines on your
skin until I find my fingers touching
paper, want to grip your hair until
it is all fallen. No twilight trysts,
though we do continue on through midnight,

through constellations, through antique
blue at five am before the sun remembers
itself an idea again. I want you without
shadow, without sun, without brilliance,
without cover, without cost, and there

we will soil crisp sheets, turn sugar
and heat into salted caramels, discover
the perfect angle of shoulder that becomes
landscape. I’m no cartographer, but I could
be; I long for a protractor, walking stick,

compass, to explore hidden openings to wet
caves I never knew I fit inside. Your eyes
glow willing in the gloaming. Your fingers
on my forearm, the grey light is pause,
poised, darkening, as fireflies begin

to rise from the ground. As we spin away
from the sun I want you, still, not reaching
or retracting, simply motionless with
anticipation, one singular breath at a time.

Partially inspired by Alice Elliot Dark’s beautiful story “In The Gloaming,” partially by the song Living in Twilight by the Weepies which I’ve been listening to on repeat for many days.

4 Comments | Category: poetry | Tags: a sweet slow burn, anticipation, cartography, desire, goals for 2009, poetry, relationships, romance

My Father’s Son

Posted on December 3, 2008 in poetry | 27 Comments

The Goat When I saw him in September we camped in his family’s cabin. My grandfather built it with his own two hands and gave it to his children; now his own two legs, the prosthetics he got after both were amputated below the knee from diabetes, are the legs of the cabin’s kitchen table.

My two younger sisters and I slept in the cabin’s only room on pillows and dusty weathered couches as Dad woke and stoked the fire. Mornings at the lake are chilly, even at the peak of heat in August when the summer has been baking the water to its depths and swimming is the best. I watched him add kindling and logs and sometimes dozed off. He spread another blanket over me. When I woke I saw a forlorn gaze in his eyes I’ve never seen. What was he thinking? Was he wondering how his oldest daughter evolved into this boy? This big-city dapper masculinity that is too faggy to fit in with him and his brothers and all my older boy cousins as they discuss elaborately the latest football game, the way they fixed their trailers and trucks, what they caught when out fishing, how to clean the geoduck, how to make a perfect sausage-and-egg breakfast for ten, how to put on a wedding, how to give away the bride.

Dad, are you wondering how I got here? How I went from that tree-climbing skinned-knee ragamuffin girl to this prettyboy? From that girl who worked through her teens in your sports card shop, flirting with the boys as my girlfriends came in to seek sanctuary from the juvenile delinquent park hangout across the street when their feelings were hurt, when someone dumped them (again), when they got caught smoking, when they were being sent tomorrow to rehab or summer camp or anorexia camp or gay camp or bible camp.

I never was your tomboy daughter, never got in fights with the boys in the neighborhood, never stood up to the bullies of my younger sisters. I was the artistic one, moody, on my own. Studying my peers as we metamorphosed into our adult bodies.

We used to go on drives sometimes. After dinner restless, this was when neither of us wanted to be home, neither could stomach my mother’s depression. We’d go on drives and this was when you first told me, “I want to open up a store, right there maybe,” pointing at the empty corner lot that used to be a restaurant bar, at the mall on the wharf. “But my dream space,” he whispered, leaning in, “is right by Foodland.”

That was back when we shared our dreams with each other.

It was on one of those drives, too, where he saw a little silver Saab for sale and said, “that’s the kind of car I want to buy you.” I was fourteen and wouldn’t have a license for nearly ten more years. I couldn’t see myself as a driver, just as I couldn’t see myself as a grown woman, a wife, a mother, a panic that plagued my teens.

Recently on a road trip I saw a blue 1970s GTO and remembered some photos from my mom’s college album. “Hard top, 1964,” my dad emailed back. “Midnight blue, the original muscle car. I got it up to 100 easy on the road out to the cabin. I called the car my “Goat.””

Once, I told a lover that I was considering taking T. She had a string of baby trannys, she knew how to break us in over her knee. “You won’t turn into Cary Grant,” she warned me, and stopped at a photo of my father in the hallway. “You’ll turn into him. Look. Is that what you’re thinking you’ll be?”

I didn’t grow up in my father’s footsteps, but suddenly I’ve found myself standing in his shoes.

And now, fifteen years later, he moved his store right next to Foodland, the only grocery store downtown. A prime spot for retail. He has all but retired from the environmental engineering business upon which our family was built and now sorts sports cards, comics, coins from his father’s collection, from when the store opens at noon – so he can sleep in – to six pm, every day except Monday. “I’ve worked enough Mondays for a lifetime,” I’ve heard him say.

Now, fifteen years later, I don’t drive much; I take the subway and taxis but I still miss the stick shift in my hand and the dance of the pedals, just like you taught me. Now fifteen years later I can imagine myself as my father’s grown daughter, this “man” I’ve become, your son.

Three daughters and your wife, our mother, all in one house for nearly half of your life. Did you ever wish you had a son, Dad?

I wonder what he’s thinking, as this fire, his fire, warms our morning. He smiles at me with a look I’ve never seen.

“I sleep just like that,” he says. “With my arm over my eyes. You look just like me.”

27 Comments | Category: poetry | Tags: best of, butch identity, childhood, driving, family, fathers, growing older, growing up, growing up butch, growth, how we become our parents, masculinity, muscle cars, poetry, revelations at family functions, stick shift

October’s Queer Activism

Posted on October 11, 2008 in poetry, theory | 15 Comments

On October 6th, 1998, Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming, beaten, and left for dead – because he was gay. He was taken to a nearby trauma hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, and died on October 12th.

I lived in Fort Collins at the time. I was not out, I was living with my high school boyfriend of five years. Nobody I knew was talking about it, aside from the brief acknowledgment in order to look away. There were protesters at the hospital. The Denver newspaper announced that he had died before he actually died.

I remember crying. I remember being so confused as to how this could’ve happened. I remember being terrified to come out in that environment, so I stayed in the closet for two more years.

Years later, after I was living in Seattle and came out and was building an amazing queer community, I saw Matthew’s mom Judy Shepard speak at my college. I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember a few things she said so deeply: “I’m just a mom,” she said. “I’m not an activist, I’m not a historian, I’m just a mom of a really great kid who died because he was gay. People ask me all the time, what can I do, and I always tell them: Come out. Come out everywhere, all the time. People discriminate because they don’t think they know any gay people. They don’t know that the guy they go bowling with is gay, that their office neighbor is gay, that their dry cleaner is gay. They think gay happens “over there” in big coastal cities. Until everyone starts realizing that gay people are just like them, discrimination will keep happening.”

I tell that to people a lot, especially baby dykes (or baby fags or baby queers) who are struggling with coming out. It’s our number one place of activism: to be who we are. To let the soft animal of our bodies love what it loves. It is not easy for any of us, but for some more than others, as there are still very real consequences to coming out and being out, not just with our families and parents (especially) but in our daily lives.

I was searching for some Judy Shepard direct quotes and came across this article from 2001, which relays more of the thoughts I’m trying to articulate:

Matthew came out to her at the age of 18, three years before he died. He decided in his own time and space when to tell his parents about his feelings on his sexuality and how that was important to him. After explaining how she and her husband dealt with Matthew’s coming out, Judy believes that “Your goal in life is to be the best and happiest you can be. Be who you are. Share who you are with the rest of the world.” Come out. Come out to yourself. Come out to your family. Come out to your friends. Be who you are and don’t hide in the closet of fear. Take pride in who you are through and through. [...] In closing, Judy illustrated her thoughts that if the corporate world of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals would come out and be true to themselves, their lives, and the world we live in would be a better place. Maybe Matthew would still be here today. ‘It’s fear and ignorance that killed Matthew. If fear is shed, the violence will go with it.’ Acceptance of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals would not allow fear and ignorance to exist as hate.
- Erie Gay News report on Judy Shepard at Mercyhurst April 3 2001.

Years after I left Colorado, when I was in Seattle and studying writing, especially formal poetic forms, I wrote an acrostic poem about Shepard. The acrostic is a form you’ve probably played with as a kid, at least – you take a word and make each letter in the word the first letter of the line of the poem. In this case, the assignment was to write an acrostic about a place, capturing both the essence of the geographical space and an event that occurred there. The title is a reference to the date he was attacked.

Framed in thick oak trees, equidistant, streets
Open to fields marching toward undisturbed horizons
Regulation-height lawns burn with summer’s oppression
Tearing boys from youth, from breath. Behind

Cinnamon foothills, anger and ignorance sprinkle
Obstructions in the north winds. An easy tragedy
Laughs. Tail lights disappear, tangled in this inevitable
Last night – train whistles whisper, keeping company
Infused with ghosts. Plucked from a fence,
No one blinks – hospital doors swing shut.
Shepard boy releases. The world watches the moon set.

15 Comments | Category: poetry, theory | Tags: activism, best of, coming out, hate crimes, let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, matthew shepard, matthew shephard, national coming out day, national LGBT history month, personal history, poetry, queer

box of darkness

Posted on August 18, 2008 in poetry | 6 Comments

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me a
box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver
from Thirst

6 Comments | Category: poetry | Tags: grief, how to transform suffering, mary oliver, poetry

Protected: the solace of solitude

Posted on August 1, 2008 in poetry | Enter your password to view comments.

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Protected: … I would say

Posted on July 17, 2008 in poetry | Enter your password to view comments.

Enter your password to view comments. | Category: poetry | Tags: heart, hypertext, poem

Protected: “I’ve seen you do that.”

Posted on April 2, 2008 in poetry | Enter your password to view comments.

Enter your password to view comments. | Category: poetry | Tags: breakup, poetry

ask and you shall receive

Posted on January 26, 2008 in DateDyke, poetry | 10 Comments

Thanks for all the comments & requests on the whispers, after poem – I’m glad to provide the audio of me reading the piece. Download it here: whispers, after mp3.

I’m most definitely not a recording engineer, and I get pretty impatient with the edits, so it’s messier than I’d like it to be. But I’m trying not to let my perfectionism about my spoken word get in the way. Thanks for the request, Viviane – happy to oblige.