Blurring borders in the queerest of ways
As another June roars into Pride, I’m witnessing queerness again refracted into a million rainbow pieces of LGBTQIA+ commodity. And I find myself reaching again for what queerness is to me. For me. Asking myself what I mean when I claim queerness as one of my primary political and embodied identities.
What does it mean to be queer, to claim and wield the jagged edge of queerness in this political moment? How do I want to live into my queerness in this moment of so much disconnection and devastation? In this nation-state of death? I recently learned the term necropolitics from Cathy Park Hong, and so much about what we are going through right now fell into place for me.
I’m thinking about all the transformation that needs to happen to move away from this moment into a different, better moment. Away from necropolitics into a politics that first and foremost affirms and upholds life. Into a way of relating to each other and all beings with love and compassion.
I’ve always believed that we have what we need to make such a transformation. But in the recent onslaught of violence in so many forms, it’s been hard for me to connect to that belief. To feel it truly.
And then I was reading a new anthology, Queer Nature, in which I am grateful to have poem. I found myself drawn in by the many poems where the queer human blurs into landscape or animal. Where borders and boundaries blur in the queerest of ways. It makes sense—that blurring of boundaries is often where my own poems go.
There’s Natalie Diaz describing a beloved’s body as “atlas of bone, fields of muscle / one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale.” Or Rachel Eliza Griffith describing the speaker’s own body transformed by queer love: “Look how I have become, as a valley, shadowed with clouds / My thighs, pulling and rocking / The last light from my center. I am changing…”
In Oliver Baez Bendorf’s, “Outing, Iowa,” the land where the speaker was born is both literal landscape and metaphor for his trans body—past, present, continuous. “If you’ve ever doubted that a body can transform completely, take the highway north from town,” he instructs.
The land where I was born was born an ocean, and that ocean born of ice. Researchers and floodplains have undressed its chipped-up secret: plates shifted, glaciers melted into river, into rows of corn that flipbook past your car. Park anywhere and follow the trail back in time toward the effigy mounds, the sacred piles of earth we’ve managed to preserve, and all that’s buried underneath. I still bleed, still weep, what we used to be matters.
And Deborah Miranda’s poem, “Eating a Mountain,” invites us into the most elemental cycle where the humans are eating a deer that had eaten of the mountain that will eventually eat the human. Most of the poem is simply a glorious list of the plants on the mountain the deer has nibbled on, which in turn the human is eating:
…witch hazel, pine, lichens, mushrooms, wild grape, fiddleheads, honeysuckle poison ivy, crown vetch, clover…
With this listing, Miranda evokes ritual, chanting a recitation of what sustains us and what we will return to. She evokes an endless spiral in which the queer human is just one part of the “wild, sacred sustenance” of life.
These poems, different as they are from each other, all remind me of one of the things I find most powerful about queerness as I experience it, and that is the intrinsic blurring of boundaries and borders. We are nature. Nature is us. The demarcations blur. The queer body, particularly but not exclusively the trans and nonbinary body, defies boundaries. Queer migrants challenge the legitimacy of borders. Queerness as an embodied experience, political construct, and identity refuses to be—cannot be—contained, defined.
Just try to give us an acronym—we’ll keep adding letters to it. Watch us make space for ourselves in the English language with the slow yet inevitable insistence of a moving glacial field.
And watch each generation blossom further into queer being, with today’s trans and asexual youth teaching us more and more about the transcendent power of queerness.
~~~
We are living through reactionary times here in the U.S. and around the world. The powers that think they are keep doubling down on control and repression. It’s a reaction to all of the ways that queer folk, BIPOC, disabled people, working class people, and poor people have been asserting our power and lifting up our own and others experiences, needs, perspectives, and demands over the past few years—all of it built, of course, on decades and decades of organizing and cultural work.
To the status quo, to the powers that think they are, radical queers are frightening in our beauty and our love. In our disregard for borders and boundaries. In our fierce insistence on care. We are life-giving, pleasureful, intimate, questioning, questing, and abolitionist. We break assumptions apart and put together new norms. We demand ever more care and ever more love; we choose connections, family, relationships based on equity and respect. We prioritize space for growth, space for rest, space for care of self and the collective.
We refuse—with our bodies and words, in our art and dance, with our organizing and our votes, in our loving and living—necropolitics and the racial capitalism it’s built on. That’s why those in power seek to outlaw our names, to deny our right to live fully into the bodies we were meant to live in, to scare us back into hiding.
But, like the dandelions pushing up from every nook and cranny of concrete right now on Massachusett land where I live and maybe where you live too, we will keep rising. Cut us down and a dozen more of us are back the next day, brilliant in our golden manes.
This is not to say we are not suffering, not traumatized, not despairing. We are, and we are, and we are.
But just maybe, ways that we are queer and brilliant are the ways that we will find the strength in each other and in our communities. Just maybe our bone-deep familiarity with transformation will be part of what unfurls and grows the revolution into a world is queer and trans and pro-BIPOC and feminist—a society that loves life and knows that as we eat the mountain, the mountain also eats us.
Prompting
Tarot spread for transformation and power
This spread can also be used with oracle decks, or you can use the questions as journal prompts.
What power is emerging inside of me?
How do I know?
What power is latent inside of me?
What do I need to do to nourish and nurture this power?
How is the earth supporting and feeding my nature?
What does transformation feel like in my body?
Poem/essay/story prompt
Go out into the world. This can be a “natural” setting, or human-made environment. Choose a place where you can move about, then sit quietly and write comfortably for a time.
Choose one feature of this landscape to observe. This might be a tree, a cluster of moss, a concrete wall, a splash of graffiti…whatever calls to you.
Spend time with it. Look at it closely, touch it if you can, smell it perhaps, listen to it.
Close your eyes if you are comfortable and sit near or on this feature. What is it saying to you? What would it like you to know?
Free-write about what you have discovered about the feature and/or you during the time you have spent with it.
If you can, repeat this process over several days or weeks, visiting the same landscape and feature.
At the end of this time, go back through your free-writes and circle or underline words or phrases that feel like they have heat or power. Begin your poem, essay, or story with these lines or phrases. See how they connect. See what they have to tell you.
Engaging
Fire Island. No coming out stories, no straight people. Just a group of Asian American & other POC gay friends loving up on each other, looking for romance, and partying it up in their underwear. I’m 100% here for Margaret Cho, for Asian American gay men portrayed as hot and lovable, for the subtle commentary of racism and classism within the gay community.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. I’m about two-thirds of the way through this tome (the paperback it clocks in at 830 pages), and I’m loving this feminist, queer love story in a world where queerness is unremarkable, dragons and other fantastical creatures can speak human languages, and trees hold the secret to immortality.
On Saturday, I had the honor of being part of the Lambda Literary Awards. I’m thrilled (and shocked!) that Last Days won, and I’m particularly excited to check these other winners:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie
Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
edited by Briona Simone JonesStone Fruit by Lee Lai
Community/Announcements
As you all know, I’m in the midst of helping to organize Brew & Forge’s Witches & Warriors retreat for poets and organizers. The retreat will culminate in an in-person public reading on Saturday, July 23, featuring faculty Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Cynthia Dewi Oka, at the Watershed Center in Millerton New York.
Details to be announced—follow Brew & Forge on Instagram or Twitter to get the latest updates.
As always, I’m grateful to you for reading and sharing this newsletter. I will be taking next month off but will be back in your inbox on the full moon of August 11! Until then, I hope you have moments to glory in the sun, be refreshed by water, and rest in the dark.