1/14/2025

The Epiphanies of Impossible Women: Tokyo Godfathers, the Virgin Mary, and Trans Nativity

The last flickering light of Christmas just blinked gracefully out, and like all good, fading lights, it portends a journey.

Last week was the Feast of the Epiphany for good Catholic girls like me. It’s meant as a commemoration of the final triumph of Christmas: the visitation by the Magi. 

Given its proximity to presents and my participation in things like "nativity plays" through my church growing up, the Christmas story has always been ubiquitous, but this year it hit me in an entirely new way. 

This particular bout of faithful introspection was triggered by my mother, letting me know that she and my sister just sat down to watch my favorite Christmas movie: Tokyo Godfathers. 

Directed by iconic anime director Satoshi Kon, Godfathers has unexpectedly superseded Satoshi Kon’s other famous work, Perfect Blue as my favorite movie of his. Set on a frosty Christmas Eve in Tokyo, the film follows three homeless people (Gin, a paternal drunk, Miyuki, a tough, streetwise teenager, and Hana, a theatrical trans woman) after they stumble upon a lost infant child. 

As they stumble through a night of intersecting pasts, yakuza bosses, violence, and tears, the group reconcile with each other, their lives on the streets, and their miraculous new infant in tow. 

And, of course, I am drawn to Hana, the caterwauling and kind-hearted woman of the trio, who jumps to conclusions, invokes providence, and demands better from her friends while sprinting away from her own traumatic past. Casting a trans woman as one of the Magi gently asked me to consider our role in the Christmas story. Where were the women like me? Was there room for us, even in the stable among the animals? And then I found it.

In the gospel of Luke, when Gabriel appears to Mary to announce the Good News, it is a trumpeting of pomp and bombast, festooning the portended babe with titles like Son of the Highest and proclaiming: 

…he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Mary's reaction is not joy or awe or fear. She asks a question:

How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

And the angel explains it simply enough, that she had been visited by the Holy Spirit. Her pregnancy is a miracle. And then he says it, my favorite verse in the whole big Bible:

For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Mary responds with her usual steadfast humility.

Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.

There’s a crude joke in the transfemme community: “Just because we can’t get pregnant, doesn’t mean you can’t try.” When I think of Mary, similarly faced with her own biology, I can’t help but think of the joke. The virgin. The trans woman. We both can’t get pregnant, but that doesn’t mean we can’t believe. It doesn’t mean we can’t try. 

Mary accepts the miracle, accepts the baby in her untouched womb, accepts her role in changing the world. Then she does what we all do: she tells her cousin, Elizabeth. 

Only to discover that Elizabeth has recently been blessed with her own miracle. Barren in her old age, she was given a child again by the Holy Spirit. When she saw Mary, her babe leaped in her womb. 

And she spake in a loud voice: Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of they womb.

And there you have it. The great beginning of salvation. Two women talking. Two women who chose faith over the facts of their biology. Mary, the suddenly pregnant virgin. Elizabeth, the once-barren expectant mother. In God nothing is impossible.

I know that joy. I know the hot light of God whenever I talk with another trans woman. That rapturous moment of appraising our changed bodies, our newly minted euphorias, and looking at each other with eyes that ask, humble as Mary:

Can you believe it?

And I suddenly find that I can. I can believe in my body, born a man, forged in coarse puberty, hardened into a life of depression, suddenly and slowly reborn into glorious femininity. I can believe that God knows me, that my transition is done according to His will. 

Behold the handmaid of the world. Be it unto me according to thy word.

I, too, am one of God's impossible women. I am blessed. As we near inauguration day and my state continues its almost gleeful restriction of trans rights, I have to remind myself of these blessings. I have to remember that in Mary and Elizabeth’s time, their world was also set against them. 

Mary feared for her life as an unmarried woman with child. If Joseph hadn’t stood by her, the Son of God would’ve died with her, put to death for adultery. The first thing the couple did after accepting the good news was flee. They did what they had to do to survive a world that would hurt them.

And then, of course, there’s the Magi again. I never paid much attention to them before. Three men that saw a star, followed it to a baby, gave those three gifts that seemed like the worst things to give a baby (what kind of baby wants “myrrh?”), and then left. And then I went to mass, and my priest offered more context. 

Herod, fearful of being usurped by the rumored birth of a new King of the Jews, ordered the death of every two-years-old-or-younger male child.  This stains the entire kingdom with innocent blood and the madness of a small men desperately clinging to his power with the chipped tip of a sword.

When the Magi announce their intentions to Herod, to seek audience with the new king, he asks them to return and send word to him, so that he can worship as well. As soon as they see the Christ child, however, they decide not to. They go home by another way and leave Herod in the dark.

The Magi witness a miracle and decide to protect it from a tyrannical regime, from oppression, from death. They are led to Bethlehem by the stars and led home by their consciences. As things continue to intensify in my state, I look up and see the shadows of Herod in the stars. 

I see the impossible women around me. I see the long journey towards our salvation ahead. I see the stars. I see a king who would put us to death to preserve his own power.

I see hope. Even in the cold. Even as bitter evidence of climate change melts all around after the largest Atlanta snowfall I’ve ever seen in my life.

I see us. In the greatest story ever told, I see us. I see women sharing in joy, and I see God in us and I smile in spite of everything. 

“For with God nothing shall be impossible.”

Nothing.

12/21/2024

Drowning in Coats: 2024 in Review

2024 is closing its great, heavy eyelids. This vast and impossible giant of a year, its great belly swelling and shrinking with each dwindling breath, lays before me. I can truly say this creature has exhausted, delighted, saved, and slaughtered me so many times over. When I say my friend and fellow writer June recount her year’s creative undertakings, I decided I needed to pay my own respects.

It’s hard to believe that it was only January that I managed to publish my first poem under my name. A love letter to my girlfriend’s top surgery scars, “Untitled” was a fitting omen for the year ahead. I had fully and truly fallen back in love with poetry, writing as much as I could. I also started performing as much as I could. To that end, let’s get into what I got up to this year.

Write Club ATL

I was invited by my friend to participate in this staple of Atlanta’s live lit scene. Throughout the evening, writers are pitted against each other and given diametrically opposed prompts (Hot vs. Cold, Come vs. Go, etc.) and the victor is determined by applause. I was given “Boil” vs. my opponent’s “Simmer.” I took it as an opportunity to write about Phlegethon, the boiling river of blood from Dante’s Inferno (and, in turn, write about violence, transness, love, and the rapidly expanding transphobia of American politics). Performing an essay live in front of such a responsive audience was an incalculable joy. The joy was apparently mutual, as I returned home with a tiny trophy and an invitation back this month. Now I have two tiny trophies.

PUBLISH US & Hundred Pitchers of Honey

In the new year I wanted to pursue publishing. I felt like I had enough of a backlog and enough confidence in my writing that I could return to something competitive. To that end, I took to social media. Around March and April, in anticipation of the National Poetry Month challenge, I reached out to a mutual for mutual feedback and accountability. We decided to start a discord group and invite some more friends. Now the PUBLISH US discord is going strong with four members desperately trying to keep each other sane. We were colleagues at first, but then we were all invited to read our pieces in the Hundred Pitchers of Honey National Poetry Month celebration reading on Zoom. Each of us were to read a piece or two amongst a host of other talented writers. When we “rehearsed” our poems we ended up doing bits and goofing off for most of it. That’s when we became friends.

Joy Deficit

In April, I also ended up reading some poems as part of a show called Joy Deficit hosted my comedy heavyweight and Atlanta legend Gina Rickicki. The show is centered around filling up the reserves of joy that are drained by modern living. Each individual is layered with a theme. I applied for the show themed on “comfort” and read poems about trans joy and romance. It was an exquisite pleasure to perform around musicians, puppeteers, other writers, and acts so esoteric they defied genre. It’s a stage and a group I loved so much that I’ve been back as many times as I can schedule and as often as they’ll have me.

The Z Word with Lindsay King-Miller

In June, just in time for Pride, my friend Lindsay made her fiction-writing debut with her horror action apocalypse romp of a novel, The Z-Word. When I told my favorite bookstore about the book, they leapt at the chance to host a reading and conversation with Lindsay. When it was time to fill the other seat in the conversation, I offered up some names, but ultimately Lindsay asked if I would do it. Despite writing and messaging for literal years, this would be the first time in ages we ever spoke to each other with our voices. We talked horror, problematic queerness, and I embarrassed myself praising her absolutely kickass book. You should buy it.

What Was Eaten Was Given Release Party

This year’s crowning achievement for me was the release of my debut poetry collection What Was Eaten Was Given with my publisher, Kith books. The book was such a massive labor of organization, writing, compilation, and creative stamina that to finally release it into the world was like the heaviest and most satisfying sigh. Then, shortly after, I was privileged enough to be a featured reader at my favorite bookstore, Charis Books to launch it. All my friends, my girlfriend, and family came to support me. I felt like the prettiest girl in the world, like a princess. I still do.

Monster Show for Monsters

One of the best times you can have in Atlanta is at the Monster Show for Monsters. With monthly variety shows featuring burlesque, drag, music, and comedy all celebrating monsters and queerness and fearless self-expression, it’s a riot of a time. Hosted by undead roller skate waiter Boris Karhop and inter-dimensional playing card demon Jack of Diamonds, the show consistently delivers experimental, engaging and often hilarious work. I was given the chance to read some of my cannibal love poetry in the persona of The Bog Librarian of Chanterelle, Georgia:

After the library sank into the bog, the head librarian of Chanterelle, GA survived by getting stranger. She learned to breathe mud, to drink blood, and to read and write the kind of poems that should never breach the surface. Lucky for you, she has crawled free of the muck to read these forbidden texts to shock you, to horrify you, and to turn you on.

It was an absolute blast to be able to read alongside these weirdos. I’d love to do it again sometime.

Chit Chat Club

This year has also been devoted to writing poems about my breasts for a possible collection. Inspired by artists like Henri Riviere and Hokusai, I decided to dedicate my time to capturing ekphrastic moments of my changing body in poems. When I found out The Bakery, an arts organization here in Atlanta, was hosting salons where people could talk about their craft, I pitched them a talk about my tit poem project. Sharing the stage with talks on Marionettes, Marvel theme park rides, and jiu jitsu, it felt a little silly to talk about my breasts, but luckily everyone seemed on board.

Horrors We Desire

Lastly, I applied to perform alongside burlesque acts and performers once again, this time for a one-off night of performances all about the Monsters We Love. Naturally I wrote about falling in love with The Fly from the The Fly. As the only non-burlesque performer, I felt incredibly awkward but incredibly lucky to wedge my little love letter in between stripteases from Lestat from Interview With a Vampire and Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas.

To conclude, I offer you this:

There’s a story about the Ancient Greek lawmaker, Draco, about how he solicited support from his people when his strict and punitive laws were called into question. The people offered their support by flinging their hats and coats and cloaks at the lawmaker’s feet. The love they had for Draco was so overwhelming, however, that they smothered the lawmaker, drowning him in comfort and love and coats and hats until he suffocated. That’s the myth of how the man died.

This year, choked with shows and support and poems and people and love, has felt like that. I’m exhausted and burnt out and frail as fine china, but, my God, I am grateful.

My God, I am warm.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

12/12/2024

Burn out and best intentions

Next to my bed, on my barstool-as-nightstand, is a new alarm clock. It is equipped with an attachment that slips into my pillowcase. When my alarm goes off it is loud enough to wake up my neighbors’ neighbors, and the attachment shakes my bed like an 80s horror movie special effect. This is so I can wake up. I haven’t been sleeping well.

We are well and truly burnt out now that the year is coming to a close and the dark is tight around the neck like a Dracula cape. My initial strategy against Seasonal Affective Disorder (working like a dog both professionally and creatively while hurling myself at every available social regardless of scale, duration, or proximity) failed me to the point we’re at now.

I am steeped in exhaustion. I sleep often, I rarely leave bed (thank you again, work-from-home job), and my workout regimen which gives me joy (and sweet sweet dopamine) has left my daily routine and become a hazy memory. More often than I run I find myself remembering fondly the last time I ran, like a highschool trackstar caressing both her first place medal and her bum knee in tandem.

Last week I performed twice. In between work, sleep, and languishing I got my ass out of bed, into a lovely outfit, and down to a performance venue to read some work. After Wednesday, another literary brawl at WriteClub Atlanta, I passed out for, earnestly, twelve hours. Upon waking, the fact that I had a second performance in a burlesque variety show a mere three days later hit me with apocalyptic force. Worse yet, I had not yet written a word of what I was slated to perform that evening. It was months ago when I applied for either show. The wolf of my hubris had all that time to whet its terrible teeth into something that could bite through my thigh.

I love performing. I get genuine energy from it. I’m convinced that it’s one of the key dozen-or-so reasons I never found any success writing longform prose or developing videogames. Too much of novel-writing or game development occur within the hermitage.

But I finally pulled it all together the morning of the show, and while I loved performing and spending time with the burlesque acts (always a wonderful thing to share space with artists of a completely different discipline than me) I knew my battery was blinking behind my eyes. I was in the red.

I have been since the end of October.

I look forward to the end of these dark days and until then, I will be John the Baptist. My dark honey and locusts will be the occasional phone calls with a girlfriend, minutes in front of my Happy Lamp (tm) or couple hours of sleep. I will await the return of my prophet. I have been avoiding everything from bible study to church to walks around the neighborhood. I am in my enclosure. I am atop my pillar. I am praying until I see the light. I know it is coming. The sun will be glorious as any savior. It will save me. It always does.

My girlfriend just met her own dawn as she finished up her latest semester at school. Her last exam was today and she celebrated with a tiny bottle of champagne, a plate of tacos, and the merciful permission to be, in her words, “a dumb bitch again.” After the way this semester has pushed her intellect and her fortitude, she deserves it.

We all do.

But until then, my ultra-loud super alarm will make sure I wake up on time.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

PS. I’ve attached a copy of my performance piece from the Saturday Show here. Enjoy?

12/12/2024 (Suppl.)

Get in the Telepod: Love Letter to Brundlefly

My love,

When you gripped the barrel of that shotgun, pressed it to your antennae'd head, and wordlessly begged Gina Davis to shoot you, I cried like my dog died. Like I was a child again, screaming "No!" as Scar let Mufasa hit the ground. I was ruined...even though I had watched you die a hundred times by then. 

I first met you when I was sixteen. And I didn’t understand you. You terrified me. You made me uncomfortable. Looking back now. I see you as you are. 

My Brundlefly, before the change, in all your twitching nervous, your long hair and uncomfortable suits, you looked like every one of my wedding photos:

Happy from the neck up, looking like you wanted to shed your skin like so much meat sloughing off of chitin. Watching you again, at 30, I finally recognized that look.

I saw the Fly again right after I started hormones. Right after I looked at my body and decided to get mad science involved. When you told Gina Davis that your machine takes you apart and puts you back together somewhere else, I knew what you meant. 

Within days of my first dose, I could feel the hard and unforgiving angles of my boy body melting, dissolving like film stock, like liquid latex, like the rounded edges of the estradiol under my tongue. 

I wanted to melt with you. I wanted to be purified and glopped together by an accident of science in the body I deserved just like you did. 

Because even as Jeff Goldblum won arm wrestling matches and did gymnastics and fucked Gina Davis to exhaustion I didn't want him. I wanted you. 

I could see you under his skin, gleaming and clicking under his tissue like a Christmas wrapped Geiger counter. You were radioactive and my half-life just doubled with my cup size. Brundle, we were made for each other. I saw mandibles and thought man...I want to fuck that bug. 

And then your ear fell off. And your fingernails gushed into the sink. And your teeth danced into a mason jar on your medicine cabinet shelf. You were sick, but fascinated by your own changing body. Brundle, that first three months of hormones I thought my tits were going to kill me. I thought the mood swings were going to break my brain. I thought my new body was going to burst through my flesh like knuckles through old apple skins. 

I was tired of feeling rotten, but amazed at the new tree sprouting from my past. You were afraid, but giddy enough to climb the walls. Baby, me too. 

I know what it feels like to be a monster. To have people look at a miracle and have nightmares about your kids. To see a brand new kind of beautiful, and reach for a shotgun. 

Gina Davis would never love you like I can. Would never let your spit melt her face while Howard Shore plays loud enough to rattle her bones. 

But I would.

I would get in the pod with you and back-and-forth until our genes fall in love. I would let slick, glistening plates replace my skin. I would stridulate my legs in public, crossing them tight like a teen at their first adult movie. 

You were my first adult movie, Brundle. And this is a new kind of puberty after all. A David Cronenberg baht mitzvah of broken glass and acid kisses. 

I want to KY and rubbergleam. I want to feel your wings beat the bed as you break me open. I have been dying to be soft my whole life. Lean down and melt until I can fit through a straw.

Brundle, your mistake was trying to be human. Your mistake was looking at the past and thinking that it would feed you. My darling, why do you think the telepod took your teeth? The past is spoiling, all you can do is kiss it goodbye. Trust me.

Right before I saw you again, right before I got you tattooed on my thigh, right before I started the hormones I left New York, my marriage, my job. I was taken apart and teleported to Atlanta. 

There was dissolution, but there was a bountiful joy in the fear. I know you know what I'm talking about. I saw it in your compound eyes when your old body started to fall apart. You kept your ear, your fingernails, your teeth, all your evidence of your glorious change. 

I've taken more photos of myself in the last three years than I have in my entire life. I am my own museum of change. I am a monster with the full film of my becoming frame-by-framed in my phone. The wigs. The waist trainers. The stuffed bras. The lingerie. 

My love I have thatched together a bed of our bleeding befores. I have ripped the shotgun from Gina Davis' hands. We’ve both had complicated breakups. We both have monstrous appetites. I have dreamed you a new ending. It’s right here.

Climb down from your canonical death and crawl towards me. Click your mandibles and find me writhing in a slick pile of old photographs, of cheap suits. Make love to me in a storm of chirping locust song. 

Pin me with your six legs and, like your failed telepod, like your misunderstood attempt to steal Gina Davis' baby, like my hundreds of miles in a rental car from New York to Atlanta, take me away.

Let's fuck like our ribs are chrysalis.

Let's fuck the butterflies in our stomachs into a storm of color.

According to film critics and congress, we're both monsters tonight, my love.

So climb down from the shadows, chitter your greased chitin one last time

and fuck me like one.

11/29/2024

Valentines, Vandalism, and a Humble Admission of Defeat:
Week 4 of November Writing Challenge

Today, the 29th, at 4:??am, I am a full week of poems behind. I've already fastened the celice, already tied the fraying rope to my tender chest. I've done my time and I've reconciled myself to falling off. It happens.

Sometimes you fail. I've simply been distracted by reading and traveling and eating and drawing and painting. Most importantly, I've been talking to people. I've been writing to people. I've been yearning. In the airport on the way to Vermont for thanksgiving I finished reading I'm Very Into You, a collected correspondence between Kathy Acker and Mackenzie Wark.

Replete with typos and ramblings and rantings and sloppy, rhetorical double-backs, these e-mails between two vast and crackling intellects were exactly what I needed. This whole month you may have noticed, dear reader, that I've had something of a creative crisis. I've been too project-focused. Disconnected from raw, reckless creativity. They were written for one audience, artfully riding the line between performance and vulnerability. Please like me. Like me as I am.

Their emails covered everything from the inherent eroticism of stuffed animals to the pitfalls of a rigidly defined gender binary. Meandering, playful, and gorgeous, they write to each other in their inimitable styles, but without a thought for posterity. The result feels urgent and in the moment, supercharged by its hyper-specific context. Letter collections like that always resonate with me. The voyeurism of them, the focus. I like how we talk to each other. I like how we write to each other.

I always close the book on a letter collection inspired, not to write poems or essays, but to fall in love again with the art of correspondence, with the thoughtful and meticulous craft without crowd. It reminds me to be present when I send someone a message, however trivial. I'm loathe to mention a book that's been so thoroughly talked about by popular culture but I'm Very Into You also brought me back to the splendor of first reading Ama El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War.

A perfect blend of science fiction and epistolary novels, the plot follows two enemy combatants in a temporal war, trying desperately to circumvent and re-pupae each other's butterfly effects before they result in victory. The women, known only as Red and Blue, find a begrudging respect for each other's artfulness. Neither had seen such a deft manipulator of time before they saw each other, and so they strike up a correspondence. More than the beauty of the letters themselves, the book treats the reader to Red and Blue's elaborate means to deliver them. They tuck their insults into the ash of paper not yet burned, their challenges into the taste of water left boiling and abandoned, their eventual love letters into the mournful sound of wind through scrimshawed bones. The mediums of their messages are messages all their own.

The novel is a celebration of that most delicious and elusive of experiences: courtship. I love courting. Maybe I'm a romantic, maybe I'm a hunter, but the ways lovers cast spells on each other seem to never lose their novelty. Whether it’s a stranger I’ll likely never meet outside of a handful of Grindr messages or my partner of many years after we’ve learned every haptic response and shortcut to each others’ hearts.

When I flirt over text, I dream of my lovers revisiting the message again and again. I delight in making a lasting impression. It becomes a game, an exchange of gentle fantasy, like Persian merchants of old, playing chess on their boards of air and memory.

Sometimes I feel like I do my best work, my best writing (certainly my most joyous writing) in messages to lovers and friends. I never leave any toys in the chest, invoking every book I've ever read, every movie I've ever seen. It's simply too fun not to. I want to delight in all things. It is only more pleasurable that these writings are limited to their audiences. I feel no pressure but fun and the pure joy of creation, no hunger for feedback but a simple reply.

One of my friends, possibly one of the best writers I've ever met, puts all their work on the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own. Using original characters and obscure tags, they hide their masterpieces amidst thousand page Sonic the Hedgehog smut novels and multipart Stranger Things AUs. To her, the true joy is in the writing, in the plotting. She paints with her eyes closed. For someone like me, who struggles to keep private even the most intimate of creative endeavors (I literally just waxed rhapsodic about my sexting, for goodness' sake), I both adore and covet this approach to creation. It baffles me. I write to publish, to perform, and somehow a part of me will always dream of the kind of self-assurance it takes to toil in self-sentenced obscurity. Like the nuns of eighteenth century France who created detailed miniatures of their own devotion cells, this friend of mine writes to reflect, to pray, to understand. Moreover, her work, buried in others' work, turns an eye to Archive of Our Own itself, and all its mad geniuses and fools that fill its Borgesian library of dreams. She honors the medium with her message.

The medium can also be incorporated into the message as a counterpoint. Less a harmony, more an act of vandalism. Another friend of mine will toss the breadcrumbs of her writing into discord servers where dozens of libidinous porn enthusiasts masturbate over voice calls.

Recently, Kevin Killian's posthumous collection of Amazon product reviews were released as a book. As much as I appreciate the blessing of another Kevin Killian book in the world, something is lost in removing his playful acts of painstaking hijinks from their original context. Stumbling upon a purple, loquacious, decadent review of Robert Zemeckis' Polar Express or a Wood Diner Birdhouse changes how we look at the chat GPT'd pulp ocean of text that Amazon has become. Killian's act of seeming self-sabotage, stuffing his considerable knowledge and skill into as easily overlooked as Amazon Reviews is a noble one, an artistic one. I am humbled by its largesse.

And so, to my failed month I prostrate myself. I whip myself wincing and bleeding. But as December 1st comes, I will salve my wounds with all the words I've written to lovers, to friends, to no one. I may not have risen to my writing challenge, but only in technicalities. This month I have wooed. This month I have won. This month, with seven poems between me and victory, I feel gleeful as an ingenue with a letter clutched to her breast. The right readers will find me, just as the right lovers have.

Many already have.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

11/22/2024

“A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come” :
Week 3 of November Writing Challenge

Come, you spirits
 That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex  me here,
 And fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty. 

Wednesday was Trans Day of Remembrance. For those not steeped in the unbearable tragedy of transness in these United States, it's the day where we gather and grieve our dead, our lost, our murdered family across the country. My people and I met in a park under the moon to hold candles and space for each other while we spoke their names. As we spread blankets on the wet ground and struggled against the wind with our candles, my friend leaned over and whispered to me:

“There's something kind of witchy about this, right?”

She was probably joking, trying to ease the unbearable weight of the night’s grief, but long after we wound up our charm and went out for pizza and drove our separate ways home, I felt her words.

There was something witchy in our ritual, in our solidarity, in our quiet defiant chanting in the dark. My friend June and I read poems, our faces in flame. That night, alone, I read the names of the lost again and said a Hail Mary for each one. We are blessed among women, now and at the hour of our death.

Together in the wet dark we were witches. We were the strange sisters of tragedy, upon the battle-bloodied heath of our own Scotland. In early translations, the witches were referred to as the Weyward Sisters. They had chosen their own way, cavorting in front of cauldrons and communing with devils according to their own ways. It felt like that, even beneath the grief-ful silence, we were casting our spells on the world. We were carving our siblings' names on the sky in flame. They would burn there forever where their light would outlast the stars.

Wednesday was a day of silence. It was a day of gentle respect. It was meant as a breath. Now, in the shadow of that silence, is a time for screams, for songs, for sound. I want to laugh loudly with my sisters at parties and concerts and in living rooms where there's so much joy that we weep from it. I want to write and howl poems at the sky. I want to kiss the wind until I swell with purpose like a bellows. There is a fire. It must be fed.

Macbeth and Banquo discover the witches on their way home from battle. These secretive, strange women who gathered together with a single purpose and an urgent question:

When shall we three meet again?

I think of my sisters. I think of the howling heath of my lands, the unrest of our new king, and I feel myself Weyward. I, too, wind my magic around fate and try with words to change it. I have wrought such terrible change upon my body, become such a hunched and beckoned daughter of Hecate, that extending that change to the world seems less impossible. The rhymes and gossips of witches, of refugees, of tragedy's strange daughters became the very threads of kings' robes, of destiny itself.

I want to find the spell underneath my words. I want to spin the dark prayer of my sorrow into the ruin of kings. They are already so terribly vexed by us, by my sisters, that it can't be impossible. My nation's new king saw me, saw my people, and saw their own dreadful fate.

Where hast thou been sister? Killing swine.

And so the terrible work of the month's remaining days takes on this grave pallor. I am to be a weaver of curses. I am to be a siren of graves. I am to be a Weyward Sister of hideous magics. A new king in January, an old tyrant again. The hurly-burly continues its raucous way. And my sisters and I meet on our heath. We pillory the world order by having pizza in public, by laughing loudly, by feeling joy in a world that would grind us into colorless chalk.

Sweet sisters, sweet brothers, sweet gravechildren whose names find me with wings of prayer, fill my tongue with curses, with rhymes, with ugliness to match your grace. Let us curse these times with terrible fate.

New king, old king,
legislators of our bloodied heath,

May you never know true sleep again, may your nights be full of distorted guitars and gossip.

May ever running water sound like a woman laughing. May your every troubled step echo with dance. May your food be flavorless as we women feast together. May you find no joy, no respite, no pride or purpose under your crowns. May they break your necks with ill-fitting weight.

Choke, leaders, on the smoke of my sisters as they scratch the ceiling of heaven. May you hear wings where your heartbeat would be, may your every second be a banquet of we contorted carrion birds.

We are made wrong, you tell us. Our origins are ichorous and foul. Let us drown you in wrongness, ill-fitting as power in your feeble hands. You cannot regulate us. You cannot paper a bonfire into embers. You cannot starve us. We do not need hormones to unsettle you with terrible beauty. We are dancing on the heath. We are timeless as battle. We love each other enough to ask, with limitless power, when shall we meet again?

There to meet with Macbeth.

Fuck whatever laws you carve with feeble swords. Fair is foul. Foul is fair.

I will honor the dead with ruin. I will honor the dead with kindness for none but my kin. I will honor the dead with poems and pizza and candles and flame and fucking and friendship and softness for my sisters. Softness for my brothers. Softness for my family.

Knives, teeth, and terror for everyone else.

Trans Day of Remembrance has passed. We are back to feeling nothing but rage. Rage that will haunt your bodies like sickness, you spoiled kings of rotten countries. For you there will be no rest, no respite from us.

We will never stop being hideously beautiful in front of you. We will never stop looking like the yellowed, open mouths of tigers. We will be bloody, we will be loud, we will be beautiful.

We will outlive you. We will know joy.

Peace, sisters.

The charm's wound up.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

11/15/2024

Phlogiston and the Beautiful Void:
Week 2 of November Writing Challenge

I am behind. Between work and winter, the urge to write has shriveled within me. It's already near midnight on the 14th as I begin this essay, and I have written eleven poems. I like about four of them. I feel tired, impossibly tired, having barreled through this first week of the month, seemingly face first. Every poem has taken physical effort to get on paper, even the ones I liked. As the days get shorter and the dark yawns to greet me much sooner than it used to, I feel something burning away. This is art by attrition. Art by removal. I am becoming less to make more.

Since I first heard of it in a Jack McCarthy poem, I've been fascinated by the concept of phlogiston. In a now debunked scientific theory, phlogiston was the element in all combustible matter that allowed them to burn. It was created to explain the weight difference between the aftermath of a fire, and the fire. That which is burned away. The parts of ourselves we lose when we are engulfed in flame. As the days get colder, I burn to make my poems, to keep warm. My poems are phlogiston. They are within me until they are burned away. Sweat of the fever, heat of the forge, the smoke that rises from the lathe.

A lot of my favorite art involves removal. My friend Samara does woodwork, carving and shaping and cutting away until she has something smooth and perfect. Since most of her wood is scavenged or budgeted, a lot of it subpar. When I asked her about her process she explained it:

"I'm kind of searching for the best form the wood can take as I cut away the less healthy parts."

To me, it sounds more like bedside manner and healing than craft. The wood is sick and she expertly amputates the rot until it is beautiful and clean and complete again. Samara is a healer of wood, a guide for the discarded to find themselves in a ritual of cuts. Being in her company feels the same way, the sickly parts of you burning away as she turns you in careful hands. It's not transformation, but realization.

Michaelangelo, a name almost too grand to invoke in reference to my own process, in addition to his masterful painting, sculpted as well. Whenever I stare at a sculpture, I am reminded of his wisdom:

"I saw an angel in the marble and I set it free."

From a stone, an angel. The beauty of Michaelangelo's sculptures, their staggering detail and meticulous form, it all feels as much a celebration of its surrounding stone as its artist. The beauty of the uncarved marble is honored and thanked in its obliteration. Phlogiston is a sacrament. It is the offering.

In addition to writing, I’ve been exploring painting in VR again. I’m terrible at it, but there’s something healing about being bad at something. I’m sure I’ve talked about it elsewhere, but it really gives me permission to be reckless. My “process” if you can call it that is to cover the canvas in a color, and then slap random brush strokes across its surface until a shape and color palette forms from the chaos, then erasing and blending around that form until it exists. I see a painting in the mess and set it free. As I wipe away an hour or more of frantic layering to distill the object, I feel the weight of its erasure. I feel time reversing itself. The fox coming back together from soil and maggots. 

One of my favorite works of art in the world, currently the home screen on my phone, is Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing. In 1953, Rauschenberg wanted to make a work purely through erasure. Similar to Michaelangelo and other sculptors, he wanted to make by unmaking.

Unlike them however, he wanted to start with a completed and perfect form. He saw the void in art and wanted to set it free. At first he tried this with his own drawings, but found they had no emotional pedigree. They had no phlogiston. An artist can throw out or unmake his own drawings infinitely. (With as many crossouts and false starts as I have in my notebook, this is also true for poets.) If his void was to mean anything, Rauschenberg would have to carve its portal into the flesh of a far nobler sacrifice.

There are few painters with the pedigree, skill, and spanning career of Willem de Kooning. His abstract works are breathtaking and the art world took notice. Art critic Peter Schjeldal called him an “an intellectual giant among painters, with an analytical grasp that registers in every move with pencil or brush.” For Rauschenberg, there were even fewer more perfect choices to unmake. To erase, stroke by stroke, something as vaunted and thoughtful as an original de Kooning drawing, that’s how nothing becomes art. Staring at the blank page, in its gilded frame, I am lit on fire with imagination. What could the drawing have been? It summons the void and begs you to fill it with something worthy of its sacrifice. 

Everything I write or make this month is a celebration not only of its own creation, but of the time and strength I had before it existed. I was a stone before I was rubble and a poem. I was wood before I was sawdust and a poem. It’s effortful to make art of one’s own raw materials. 

I was a hunched and troubled man before I was anxiety and depression and a poem. I honor that man, his sacrifice with each gentle erasure of the body before. Even in his complete erasure, I am a work of art paying homage. I am the gorgeous void of the burning boy. 

Trans people have the unique perspective of being their own Christ, dying for their own salvation and being born again. We are the de Kooning and the mischief of Rauschenberg all at once. We are the body horror and its catharsis. Auteur filmmaker David Cronenberg, in an interview about his movie Crimes of the Future, offered this perspective on trans people:

They’re saying, “Body is reality. I want to change my reality. That means I have to change my body.” And they’re being very brave and they’re investing a lot in these changes, especially these ones that are not reversible, which most of them aren’t. I say, go ahead. This is an artist giving their all to their art.

Whether I fill this void, this darkness of winter, with nineteen more poems or nothing at all, there is phlogiston. There is my reality. There is my art. As long as I give it my all, I can be satisfied. No matter how much I burn, I will be kept warm.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B

11/7/2024

Fearless for the Fuck of It:
Week 1 of November Writing Challenge 

The days are getting shorter. Halloween has passed and left me with all the ghosts it always does, and now I am plunging into the dark of another month of dedicated writing. Unlike her sister in April, writing in November feels darker, colder, more effortful. I'm an interloper, intruding on National Novel Writing Month to hold myself accountable for writing poems. And, of course, almost on cue, I am grappling with the spiny tendrils of seasonal affective disorder. Hope is harder to access. This first week of writings has been closer to surgery than art, pulling words and feelings out of body unanesthetized. I've been theming my work around home. Around the homes we build and their relative safety, the homes we are denied. But, most importantly, I am attempting to treat each poem like a single piece of kindling. 

I want these works to be flammable. I want to burn any tethers to respectability or publishability. I want this to be my joke album. My fuck you. I want to dislodge my need for acceptance from my writing process. I've gotten too scared. 

In 2002, singer/songwriter/tin-can-full-of-aquarium-gravel Tom Waits decided to release two albums, Alice and Blood Money, at the same time. The albums are wildly different, Alice being full of largely softer, fanciful songs and Blood Money is full of bleak, violent howling ones. This decision made no commercial sense. They could've been a double album. They could've been staggered at least months apart, but Waits would not be dissuaded. It was an experiment. It didn't need to be a successful one and, based on album sales, it wasn't. Tom just wanted to do it. 

Alice has gone on to become a classic. Blood Money has gone on to be one of my favorites, because I'm a little freak. Having confidence enough in your artistic vision to fully flaut the rules and expectation of your medium and its culture? I aspire. I crave. I covet. 

This month will be dedicated to chasing that level of supreme artistic assurance that I'm almost certainly projecting onto a musician I like. In Tom Waits I am hoping to find a lesson, a medicine for what is ailing me, artistically lately. Part of that is coming to terms with this panic from pressuring myself through my second full-length project. I recently sent it off for a look-over with my editor and ended up having to completely rewrite the foreword. 

Despite their many helpful notes on the draft I sent, I couldn't see anything salvageable in my first draft, but staring at the blank page and tasked with introducing and summarizing the work of last year I was equally hopeless. I had entered the ugly realm of absolute certainty that my work was garbage, that any attempt to front-porch them with an essay would be like putting Christmas lights on an abattoir. 

While I eventually got those lights up on the slaughterhouse and rewrote the foreword, I have been dealing with a debilitating case of imposter syndrome since then. To refamiliarize myself with my own artistic confidence, I've decided not to publish any of my work from this month. No submission, no putting it up on the blog. No "oh maybe this will be a book" or anything of the sort.

Writing for the book, for the outline, these are scared tactics for me that take the fun out of my work. Writing cannibal poems because I love my girlfriend and want to eat her? A-ok! Writing cannibal poems to publish a book of cannibal poems? Scared. I will not be scared. I will not let my work be water, matching and warping itself to fit every container. I will not write for the market. 

Similar to Tom Waits, Michael Haneke ignored conventional expectation, solely because he had a specific vision for his movie Funny Games. This is incidentally my favorite movie, but most remarkably, Haneke also directed the American remake. Rather than compromise, Haneke painstakingly recreated his first film shot-for-shot. He swapped out the German cast for a bankable Hollywood one and called it a day. Imagine that kind of self assurance. The only problem with my art is its audience.

It's a perfect distillation of the movie's own aggressive metatextual sentiment. Funny Games is off-putting and problematizes audiences' relationship with spectacles of violence. Once he realized the Americans who most needed to hear this message weren't going to see a subtitled movie, we got the remake. Again, fearless devotion to your own art. I need this energy back. 

So far what is helping is the continued exposure to challenging art, to stories of unwavering faith, and to weirdos in Atlanta's live performance scene. As I read my little poems and essays I share the stage with puppeteers, burlesque dancers, storytellers, and musicians all capable of unfathomable weirdness that leave me feeling aspirational, hungry, and ready to wear out the little pen that came attached to my travel notebook.

One woman, in one show, led the audience in a twenty-second communal and primal scream. It was formless and tempestuous and accomplished more catharsis in seconds than I have in entire essays. It was reckless. I want to be reckless. I must be. 

The elephant in the room as I write this is that we just wrapped up yet another Presidential election. I have nothing profound or hopeful to say beyond the simple admission that despair won't stop me.

The least qualified person in the world is the president.

Again. 

Imposter syndrome is dead. 

Again. 

This month will be a celebration of that death. It will be a dance on its rancid grave. I will sing into the loam of its final resting place. I will be weird. I will not be stopped. 

I have poems to write. See you next week, friends. 

Yours with an open mouth, 

-B

10/29/2024

Bruce Springsteen, Ice Cream, and Bartimaeus the Blind

I turn thirty-three years old today. For the first time in my life I feel, on the day, differently than I did. I feel older. Thirty-three is the first time I see a clear drift between younger people and me. I suddenly feel a ravenous hunger for connection, for community. I am going to more concerts. I am playing more shows. I am going to church. I am going to Bible Study. For whatever reason, being as old as Christ purportedly was for his crucifixion weighs heavily on me. I crave community. I crave ministry.

At this past sunday service we heard the story of Bartimaeus in the gospel of Mark, the blind beggar on the road from Jericho who called out to Jesus to restore his sight. Jesus tells the man that his faith has healed him. Bartimaeus could see again.

The homily was quick to remind us that, in the gospel of Mark, this was Jesus’ final miracle before Jerusalem, before the garden and his sacrifice. Bartimaeus is given sight just in time to follow Christ and bear witness to his death. From a humble son to a blind beggar to apostle to witness. A miracle is a promise as much as a gift. It is an invitation. What will you do with this?

I am given thirty-three years today. I am given my third as a woman. I am given a tongue and a desire to write. What will I do with this?

Last night I performed for free to a sparse crowd in a variety show about spreading joy in dark times. These are dark times. Standing on stage reading a piece about ice cream and Bruce Springsteen I heard laughter and joy and whoops and applause. I used my gifts. I found community and ministry. I found a miracle onstage, like I always do.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

PS. If you’re curious, I’ve included the full text of the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen piece below. Enjoy!

Eating Ice Cream With Bruce

I don’t even like Bruce Springsteen. As far as I’m concerned he’s got two songs worth hearing and plenty to press skip about. Not my genre, not my flag, not my red and black flannel. I don’t get it. But here’s how he changed my life.

I heard somewhere that Bruce Springsteen buys himself an ice cream cone every time he gets a gold record. This could be a lie, but the best kind of lie, where it sounds so true and immediate that it’s accepted. Like Richard Gere and the gerbil thing the press put out to discredit him after American Gigolo and during his full-throated defense of Tibet. You hear it. You picture it. And your brain accepts it.

The boss, using the same tongue that sung “Born to Run,” to slowly erode the sweet cliffs of a waffle cone until it drips down his fingers and he wipes it on his blue jeans. Picture it. You’re welcome.

I think about this a lot. About the boss and his two scoops.

It’s the only logical reaction to something so huge and inaccessible and ephemeral as 500,000 people buying an album of something you thought up (at least partly) on the toilet somewhere. I can’t picture more than 35 people at a time. 500,000 is a number so big it feels stupid. That can’t be real. 500,000 people sitting in their living rooms or bedrooms with headphones or with speakers at full volume, humming songs you almost threw out because the bridge wasn’t working.

The ice cream cone, I think, is a way to make that real. I have no idea what it feels like to have fans like that. I don’t think the Boss really does either. But we both know what ice cream tastes like. And from now on, it tastes like 500,000 people screaming about “Dancing in the Dark.”

When I started taking hormones I bought myself a crawfish boil. It’s my favorite food and it felt like the only thing I wanted in my body besides slowly dissolving sublingual estradiol. That night, while I pretended to already feel the changes coming, I broke beautiful things out of their shells until all that remained was soft and prepared perfectly. 

I ate the hard boiled eggs last. Something about the way they greedily stuffed themselves with crawdad guts and old bay seasoning and everything else in the bag (because BAG FOOD IS THE BEST FOOD (fight me)) made them the best part. From now on, even two and a half years later, transition tastes like cajun food.

These little sensory metaphors for the impossible ways our dreams can come true matter. They give us access. Wedding cake. Birthday cake. Retirement watch. We need totems. Mementos. We need to make true love smell like red wine when it’s half price at the Tapas place you both like. We need to make victory taste like champagne. I needed to make leaving my apartment and throwing out my last pair of boy sweatpants sound like the crinkle of a White Castle bag.

I’m not the Boss. The best thing I wrote was a really good joke about cassowaries which we don’t have time for tonight. But the best times in my life still feel like a crowd of 500,000 reasons to remember them exactly as they were, down to the taste and sound of them. 

You deserve ice cream and firework smoke. You deserve aquarium gravel running through your fingers. You deserve to fill the stadiums of your hearts with applause you’ll remember. 

Make this night, this show, this moment, an unforgettable memory, catchy and complete as a Bruce Springsteen song. When you find the one you love, eat an olive right out of the jar. The day you decide you are done being anything other than the beautiful woman inside you, feel the delicate, chitinous crunch of a crawfish shell snapping in your hands. 

Record sales can plummet. They can take away my hormones tomorrow through a stroke of the pen. You might lose the next race or game of Mario Kart, but I will always taste the truth of my body in cajun food. Bruce will always smile when he eats ice cream for reasons he doesn’t have to sing about in front of 500,000 people. You can still remember a Cheetoh melting in your mouth because you’re smiling too big to chew.

Dreams do come true, sometimes. We are always awake when they do, even when we’re not paying attention. Pay attention. Pick something to remember them by. Make them small enough to fit in your pocket.

Sweet enough to melt in your hands.

10/09/2024

Church in the Wild: North Carolina, God,
and the Book of Job

Recently I visited my grandfather in North Carolina. As my brother and I shared a car, winding along the countless crooked spines of road that snaked around the state's mountains, I found myself thinking of God. Ever since I was a little kid, the mountains of Appalachia always felt like God's home, beckoning me closer with furry green fingers and mist-heavy, sunset eyes. 

Even with the chapel at the top of the summer camp I grew up going to, I always found Him waiting in the open places: the fields, the forests, the lake. We built chapels for the people, God's house was already there. In the tender kiss of crickets and stars, in the quiet rush of wind over Carolina grass, it is easier to hear God's call.

Since I came back from that trip I've been going back to church. I've been answering the call of the red spruce and Fraser Firs, of the smoke-grey voice that rattles their leaves. As my brother and I wound our way back home to Georgia I felt myself straighten, the rosary of my vertebrae falling, uncoiling, and righting itself like the weight of the crucifix falling from my fist. I was heavy with new intent. God was there. He talked to me in the same language he always did: in unrest, in wind, in heavy, oil-black darkness.

Being back in a church, sitting in the bright wood pews, singing songs I thought I'd forgotten ages ago, was easier than I thought. I'd been praying the rosary and exploring my faith in smaller ways, but still worried that a church would be too great a step. But the prayers, the calls and response, the promises and offerings of the Eucharist had not changed.

Kneeling before the transubstantiated body of Christ and drinking the blood in a little, plastic, covid-conscious cup, felt like being saved again. Against the back of my neck, on my knees before the cross, I felt the wind of North Carolina.

My older friends, the ones who knew me before transition, are stunned when I tell them of this recent development. I was the kind of obnoxious atheist that read Christopher Hitchens and couldn't wait to rain on any faith-based parade. To them, it's as startling a conversion as Paul's on the road to Damascus. My ex-wife recently told me that of all the changes I've gone through, from gender to kink and polyamory and beyond, this newfound passion for Christ and God is the only one that truly threw her.

I don't know how to tell my friends, my family, that living within the mausoleum of my birth-gender was too dark to even hope for light. Walking around absolutely certain that my skin, my body, my name, my life was inexplicably and inextricably wrong was enough to convince me that faith was a luxury for other people. I didn't have the space to hope for a resurrection, for a greater faith. I wanted a life without witnesses. Whenever I let God into my life it resulted in terrible pain. 

When I was a counselor-in-training at the same Christian summer camp I'd been going to for eight years, I was entrusted with the care of a cabin full of boys. I would teach them fencing. I would teach them canoeing. I would lead them in prayer. I would do all of this while hiding from myself and feeling profoundly out of place at an all boys summer camp. I thought it was because I didn't believe at a Christian summer camp. It would be years before I realized the way my repressed transness played into my faith. I would spend night after night on the flat plateau of the soccer field and ask God why He closed my heart to Him.

Now that I am home in my body, I can let my spirit soar and seek and stumble and find without fear or shame. I can even listen to gospel music again without the sneering, self-effacing hard-heartedness I thought was protecting me.

Lately I've been reflecting on the folk hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." A staple at camp chapel service, the song's slow, simple melody has remained with me even when my faith did not. The lyrics, while listening to a Sufjan Stevens rendition, came back to me in a flood, perfectly. The song vacillates between unbridled love for God and a melancholy about the soul's wandering nature. It calls for song even as it sings. 

"Teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above" it cries, as though its simple human tones would be insufficient. So deep is the song's love. In the song's second verse it offers up the song as an offering. "Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy help I'm come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure; safely to arrive at home." An Ebenezer, or helping stone, was first raised by the prophet Samuel to commemorate God’s intercession in a battle. Standing amidst the smoking dark of a North Carolina night, I felt at home. I felt like the stone in the stillness, a monument to the God that brought me back safely from a decades-long battle to that moment, a son who fled His warmth and returned transfigured a daughter on fire with His love.

Writing about North Carolina's majesty and impact on me feels insurmountable right now. The entire state, particularly the city of Asheville, my beloved, licks its wounds after a devastating battle with hurricane Helene. Floods, power outages, and devastation pockmark the land that I love, the land that I believe closest to God. It would seem that God turned His eyes away from the land I love and left it at the mercy of the elements. Much of my heart lately has been occupied with reconciling that.

Last night I attended a Bible Study with some queer friends of mine. We were discussing the book of Job. Often misunderstood as a story of a man's dogged and illogically enduring love for a God that permits suffering, I came away from the text differently this time. God allows the Devil to test Job's faith by taking his children, his land, his health, and his joy. 

Throughout his ordeals, friends and learned men close to Job offer their advice and counsel: atone for your sins, understand that this suffering is part of God's plan, accept all this with tranquility. Job, shockingly, rebukes these friends and their advice. Job responds to one of these placating voices in Chapter 12:

"No doubt, but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. But I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?"

Job believes in a god that accepts his rage, his resentment, his outrage, and his hatred for his injustices. To try and rationalize or accept or moralize the random tragedies as part of God's will is to blaspheme. It is to assume knowledge of His will we cannot have. It is to lie with His tongue. 

To Job, cradling his dead children on his ruined land with his scabrous, boil-choked arms, there is no greater sin than to speak with God's mouth. To Job, the only faithful reaction to a God who would permit such horror is to hate Him. It is to rebuke Him and interrogate Him and curse Him. God allows this. We feel it and therefore it is within His will. Job's friends are fools to deny this humanity, the thing that sets us apart from all of nature.

I remember the wind of Carolina and the gentle kiss of God, and I hate the gails and rains that ruined lives, that will strand and leave people deserted and destitute. I remember the hymns in the hills and I curse these horrors with the same lungs. The God of my heart knows I will do this. He loves me still. He loves that I can hurt with those who are hurt.

A church that says otherwise knows not wisdom. A church that claims this is punishment or part of God's plan, that claims to find a lesson in this suffering, is a temple of idiots. Job, one of God's most beloved and faithful, lost everything and cursed his Father's name. I am no less His child for my hatred. I am no less His child for my grief.

Here are some links to charity efforts in North Carolina as they recover from Hurricane Helene.

I hope you will donate as you can.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

9/25/2024

Time, Tits, and Talking

As I hurtle towards my self-imposed deadline for my second book, I find myself in that uncomfortable overcast forever-afternoon where excitement about the work I’ve done is hard to come by. I’ve been writing my tit poems since last November, since my fateful trip to the Asian Art Musuem  I’ve written forty-one poems about my breasts in an ekphrastic tradition. Forty-one postcards to the molten country of my bubbling, volcanic body. Xoxo, wish you were here. It’s been a time-consuming and emotionally exhausting journey and I’m not even sure we’re finished writing them. My only comfort in this arduous journey is my devotion to the numerology. Thirty-six views. No matter how many poems my hands compel me to write, they will percolate into a set number. Save me, thirty-six. Save me.

When I feel stalled out on a project I try to reinvigorate my enthusiasm by performing and publishing. I find myself clawing desperately at the “real boy” feeling of seeing tit poems in print, or speaking them into a crowd. This craving led me to giving a lecture on my poems, on ekphrasis, on the nature of my work, to a small room of interested people a couple of weeks ago. 

It was part of a local Atlanta organization called the Chit Chat Club, which gathers artists across disciplines to give presentations about topics they’re passionate about. My night included a playwright who spoke about Marvel Comics and theme park rights, a puppeteer who spoke about marionettes, a theatre manager who spoke about jiu jitsu, and me, speaking about my tits. 

Thankfully it was everything I wanted it to be. I want to finish my book. I want to add my name to the list of poets who transcribed their obsession on the walls of their heart and their pages. I want to be done and on to the next. I am ready for my views to be visible to more than just me.

You can read a transcript of my talk below. 

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

It was the third day of Thanksgiving break, which is, as anyone who's spent time around family knows, the day where you've finally exhausted all small talk and have two choices: leave the house and do something or kill each other. 

My sister suggested the Seattle Asian Art Museum. I'd never been and love art museums more than my family, so I agreed. There, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, was where my family would occupy themselves for an afternoon and I would occupy myself for the better part of the last year and a half. 

Hello. I'm Billie Sainwood. I'm a writer and poet here in Atlanta and today I'm going to talk to you about ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a form of poetry rooted in describing a work of art in great detail. But, because I'm a poet, because I'm insufferable and, because I, like any insufferable poet, see metaphors everywhere, we'll be talking about ekphrasis more abstractly. Now, back to my Thanksgiving.

At the Seattle Asian Art Museum they were hosting an exhibit featuring the art of Hokusai, in conversation with Henri Riviere. Hokusai's ukiyo-e woodblock prints evidently moved Riviere to the extent that the French artist ended up making his own tools to imitate this master of the form. Hokusai's greatest work, The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa, comes from his collection "36 Views of Mount Fuji," depicting the iconic mountain at various degrees of scale and at different vantage points. It's essentially a love letter and tribute to the majesty of Japan told through the lens of its snow-capped crown.

Riviere's contribution to the museum culminated in a book of the artist's own love letter: 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. However, despite his reverence for the legendary artist, Riviere was not content to simply imitate. His project not only jumped around in perspective, but also in time. Two artist, talking across continents, across years, across cultural landmarks without ever exchanging a word.

And me, desperately trying to avoid my family in an art museum and staggered by the beauty of these perspectives. I knew I wanted to write about them. About the feeling I got seeing the great wave, about seeing Riviere's four squat starts to one of the greatest icons of Europe, But I was lost in how. What ekphrastic could honor these titans?

And then I saw it. Same museum. The final piece of the puzzle. Dark and Sweet by Pinaree Sanpitak. This abstract work by a Thai artist showed me a simple and beautiful window into her obsession: breasts. Her entire artistic career is charted along the curve of breasts. Through painting, through sculpture, throughout her life, there are more breasts. New breasts. All shapes and sizes. In the dark mirror of Dark and Sweet, it all came to me. Views of perspective. Views of time. Tits.

Like Hokusai, like Riviere, I would honor the homeland of my body by writing it down its changes, its views, through the lens of my tits through transition. These would be the icons.

When people ask me what I'm working on. I tell them I am writing a book about my tits. Because through obsessions, we find greater and more beautiful truths. Riviere showed us Paris through the tower. Hokusai showed us Japan through Mt. Fuji. I am showing the joy of my transition through my tits.

Tits, when pressed against the chest of my girlfriend some years after her top surgery

Tits, 3 months into HRT running down stairs 

Tits, at age eleven, at summer camp, during "Come on Eileen." 

Since last November my life has been all tits, all the time. It's become an obsession. Rest assured, my mother is thrilled and not at all mortified by my inspirations. But don't worry, mom. I'm not just writing about my tits. I am taking part in a great literary tradition.

This alchemy of obsession and secret truths is not new to poetry. Maggie Nelson's Bluets is as much about longing and remembrance as it is about the poet's love affair with the color blue. Lauren Elkin's No. 91/92 is about Paris and the fragility of people after tragedy than it is about people on the bus. We are all hurling hooks at the rafts that drift by us in the endless ocean of nothing.

This is what I mean by a greater ekphrasis. This is what I want you all to take with you:

Look. Connect. Obsess. Throw your hooks and pull yourself closer to the things that tell you about yourself. Allow yourself to be swept up in great works of art but don't limit yourselves to merely describing them. Bring them inside. Take them with you and talk to them. Find your mountains, your color blues, your Eiffel Towers, and your tits and connect them. If you write, write about them. If you paint, paint them. 

If you simply live, live with them. Breathe in the world around you in exhaustive detail and find all the pieces of yourself that flaked off into the night while you were dreaming. You have left your skin, your spit, your air in everything. Find it again. 

Talk about your tits, metaphorically speaking. Talk about the changes in your body, in your life, that fill you with joy and terror. Let obsession, art, and Thanksgiving trips where a museum is the only thing between you and a fight with your family become occasions for song. 

Ekphrasticize the world around you. Study it. Scribble it. Speak it. Sing it. 

Open your arms to the world, and you will always be shocked by what you can hold, by what will hold you.

“While Crying”

A symphony in time with the brandished wand
the red cheeks, the staccato’d singultus
and h-h-h-h-h-h.

The nervous birds of my shoulders in formation
With the loping, turbulent glide and pitch
of my chest.

To cry, with breasts, is to heave.

It is to sob.
It is to fly in formation with a legacy
of noble hysterics.

It is to spit in the face of stoics
with the same lips as Andromache
Who heaved when she saw her husband 
When the spirit returned to her breast.*

It is to cry with a body that suffers
the violent rapture of the mind in the beloved object.**

It is to cry a cry that is
Just sobbing. Deep shoulder-heaving sobs***

It is to cry with other women.
Heavy.
Surrounded.

It is to heave with a salted ocean.
It is to cry with weight.

It is to fill the very air
With feathers
With wet wind
and a chorus of song.

*Homer The Iliad 
**Jacques Despars Commentary on Avicenna
***Ryka Aoki “Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies”

7/14/2024

Oh No, She’s Writing About Haunted Houses Again

This is the third summer back home and I am staggered by the joy of being swallowed in heat. To exist in the heat requires resilience and a willingness to expose the flesh. It locks you into the body with every step on the heat-rippled sidewalk. New York was hot, but never Atlanta.

When I sweat through my sunscreen and stumble back home to my air conditioned apartment, I know that I am where I belong. I know that every drop of sweat I left on the sidewalk is a benediction of salt I offer my city. It wasn't mine, not really. The salt of my body always belonged here.

I've been thinking a lot about belonging lately, about community and language and the choirs we preach to, not to convert but to hear the choir lift up its voice in return.

Being back in the South is a gospel song. The trees are flaying themselves alive with the songs of cicadas. I've talked elsewhere on this blog about my qualms with publishing a book. I was worried about returning to the frantic and thin feeling of needing others' approval when I write. I was worried about losing the healing confidence and sense of self that propelled me to write again after my eight year hiatus. I was worried about drifting, rudderless, a ghost in search of a house to haunt, of a place to belong.

This month I’ve been invited to give a reading to celebrate my debut collection of poems, What Was Eaten Was Given (pre-order here) at my favorite bookstore, Charis Books. I still remember being a closeted teenager in the back of the room at Charis, almost too preoccupied with whether or not I belonged in a place so aggressively feminist to hear the poets and authors and singers of the monthly open mics. I think, even though Charis was always welcoming, I could still feel the chitinous scratching of my own discomfort at being a “boy” terrified of their own inevitable femininity. I always felt at arm’s length.

I'd made the drive from New York to Atlanta countless times.The last time I drove it, watched one of the most iconic skylines vanish behind me into an unraveling landscape of asphalt and sunlight and billboards that still believe in God, it felt like Odysseus.

After renting rooms in Jersey and Queens and moving back briefly for a week, with no set address beyond a few weeks, it still felt like coming home. Like crossing over. New York, for all its charms and for all the sincerely happy memories with my ex-wife, never felt like that. I never felt home in my body.

In Mike Flanagan's phenomenal miniseries The Haunting of Hill House, based on Shirley Jackson's phenomenal novel of the same name, the matriarch of the doomed Crain family explains to her daughter:

“A house is like a person’s body. The walls are like bones, the pipes are veins, it needs to breathe, it needs light and flow, and it all works together to keep us safe and healthy inside.”

The wickedness and neglect and petty resentments and unsettled spirits of the house are what made it lonely, made it hungry, made it sick. It was as much haunted by its living occupants than by its host of ghosts. Perhaps that's why New York felt so alien. The house was unfinished. I wasn't home in my bones, felt the disrepair and garish incompleteness of my skin. Even with the first clumsy attempts at remodeling, with wigs and skirts from Amazon, I could feel the sun coming through the windows of the house, could feel air flowing and my bones shaking themselves dustless and new. I could live here, in this body that was no longer a tomb. 

I was no longer buried alive, I was living.

A quote I can't for the life of me attribute, but has always stuck with me is "what is home if not the last place they find you?" I've been approaching life and belonging this way ever since. The city, the hearts of lovers, the art, and the body I am found in must be a home, even after I have left it cold and vacant as a winter pool. I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, and bodies, and what we do to them to live.

Perhaps it is the constant drumming of panic about hormones from right-wing politicians. There is a concerted effort to take away the things that make me feel human, that quiet the ghosts of my house, that make this skin something to live in. Whenever I read about a new proposed bill or a new court decision about HRT I can feel the ghosts of my body grow restless.

In Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, the magic of the witch’s curse in the castle manifests as an uncanny human-ness to the house. Arms hold up candelabra. Fireplaces have faces. The house turns its attention to the new woman walking its halls. Even amongst the joy of first taking hormones, I could feel the tension that this could all be taken away, that this couldn’t be so simple.

I felt my body watching the strange new ingénue making a home in them, the hope so bright and splendid it was almost painful to hold, like a tungsten light. It burned to have the hope of being beautiful inside me, to feel it becoming real, and then, once it was real, becoming threatened.

That’s part of why I wrote What Was Eaten, to chronicle and make concrete this dream of this body. I want to feel the tangible story of my splitting skin, my unhaunted house, even in the event of its being torn down. Cocteau’s movie, the Haunting of Hill House, these stories of ghosts and houses and hope always feel like dreams. I can’t afford to be a dream anymore. I am skin. I am blood. I am fat. I am nerves. I am bones. I am tits. I am words typeset and pounded into paper reality. I am vibrations in the air. I am a book, now. I am bound here. 

This reading (which you can sign up for here) is a celebration of that bondage. I am home in Atlanta, in my skin, in my lovers’ hearts. I am something new and my sun-kissed doors are wide open to guests. My lights are on. My ghosts are quiet. If they take the hormones that gave me this body away I will be vengeful and haunted again but eternal. 

I will be eternal. I will be home in the last place they find me.

The body of a woman.

5/29/2024

Ultraviolet Light and the secrets of I Saw the TV Glow

There are some colors humans can't see. Ultraviolet, infrared. shades and hues beyond the spectrum of our vision. Moths, butterflies, bats, they have the eyes to see the world bathed in this secret light. 

I spent most of my childhood in basements watching movies I was too young to see. My mom agreed to stop policing my media consumption when she stopped recognizing the movies I was watching. If I knew enough to be passionate about them, I knew enough to watch them. And so, night after blue night, I watched grainy footage and arthouse opulence until I fell asleep in the green leather chair in front of the TV. I was bathed in light. In color. 

Walking out of the theatre after watching Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow, I couldn't breathe. I felt like a butterfly, like some insect version of myself and finally, after years of squinting, someone told me what the color was. The color I'd seen my whole life, without seeing it. The color at the pink, crackling core of that TV in that basement.

TV Glow is a parable about what it means to find yourself. And what it means to lose yourself. At least, it looks like that. If you have the eyes, if you've bitten your way out of the cocoon and greeted the true sun, you see what's really there, lit up like a blacklight Christmas.

The film opens with our protagonist Owen, a child, sitting too close to the TV. Our first glimpse of Owen and they are bathed in light, watching a commercial for a show they are too young to watch about two girls fighting a world set supernaturally against them. Later Owen meets a cool girl, Maddy, reading The Episode Guide to the same show: The Pink Opaque. Owen and Maddy strike up an unwieldy friendship centered on the show and around their respective parents. 

The kinship the characters feel with their show in the basement, the awakenings and discoveries therein, are ultraviolet. Even after our protagonist's father scornfully tells them that the Pink Opaque is "for girls," Owen is snuck tapes by his friend to watch in secret. I know these colors. I have seen them, hidden before.

I first saw David Cronenberg's Videodrome when I was in high school. I couldn’t look away, watching a wan, basement-dwelling James Woods discover his new flesh in grubby TV shows, in trash art, in videos, in the flicker and hum of a CRTV as the only light in the world. I thought my kinship with Max, with Cronenberg's philosophy, was more abstract. I thought the New Flesh was an idea. 

Even when the TV Missionary Brian O’Blivion told the camera that “Brian O’Blivion is not my name. It is my television name. Soon we will all have special names,” I didn’t think about the way I would bend my tongue around the name “Kimberly” as a kid, marveling at what the world would be like if it was truly mine. 

Even when Max's chest opened into a quivering, vaginal orifice and swallowed the gun from his hand, I just thought it was a cool movie. The thousands of potent mechanisms of self-delusion were so in place, they wouldn't allow me to see something as painfully unsubtle as a yonic mouth eating a phallic symbol in a movie full of people shouting about the New Flesh. It was just a movie that made me feel weird, without saying why.

I’m a firm believer that, with few exceptions, spoilers aren’t really a thing. A postcard will never be Paris, and a friend telling me the ending of a movie will never be the movie. That said, if you care about such things, skip to the next paragraph. Eventually, Maddy’s home life becomes untenable and she disappears from Owen’s life. After eight years she returns and tells Owen that the Pink Opaque is real, and they are the main characters of the show, Tara and Isabel. The possibility that Owen is actually this psychic, plucky girl destined to save the world, and Owen’s reaction to it become the emotional molten core of the film’s second half.  

Dodie Bellamy says “Bad metaphors are the only way to talk about the important things.” I’ve quoted this elsewhere on my blog, but you don’t throw away an umbrella because it kept you dry once before already. Watching Videodrome, I found my way to talk about the important things. For Owen and Maddy it’s The Pink Opaque, a show that seems cobbled together with themes and aesthetics from The X-Files, Animorphs, The Secret World of Alex Mack, and So Weird. These shows about the unexplained, about the truths beyond the truth, about kids changing their literal bodies at will.

Every trans person I know has a piece of media that they point to as, at least subtextually, “trans as fuck” regardless of its actual transess or the involvement of any trans creators. We hold these close and credit them with our shattering discoveries. When Maddy confesses to Owen that the Pink Opaque feels more like real life than real life, I felt that. Watching Videodrome or The Fly, now, becomes a museum of all the clues I missed as a kid. All the nascent clues to the mystery I failed to solve. We want Owen to listen to Maddy. We want Owen to solve the mystery and defeat Mr. Melancholy, the Man in the Moon determined to rule the world in The Pink Opaque. We want Owen to be Isabel so badly that it physically hurts to watch Owen be Owen. 

It hurt when I was who I wasn’t. It hurt to be lost and not know why. To let time pass for years that flowed swift and unchallenged as seconds. To look up from autopilot and feel like I skipped scenes that were instrumental to the plot of my life. The brutalist title cards of ONE YEAR LATER and EIGHT YEARS LATER in I Saw the TV Glow feel like gunshots. We want to know what happened in those years. We want to know if we missed anything. I missed so much. I missed so fucking much before I found myself.

In his poem “Gray Side of the Moon,” Bucky Sinister chronicles his journey from the wastelands of Arkansas to the art scene in San Francisco. He finds a central metaphor in the Wizard of Oz. 

“I watched Wizard of Oz on a black 
and white TV when I was young.
I had no idea Dorothy’s world became 
color once she landed in Oz.

This was long before we people like us had
VCRs.
Either you watched it when it came on
once a year,
or you missed it.”

There’s so much longing and despair in this simple fact of the poet’s poverty. It also is exactly how it feels to watch Owen struggle. It is also exactly how it feels to live in the closet as a trans person. There’s the ever-present anxiety, the dooming fear that you missed it. That you had your chance and didn’t learn the truth in time. The lie is your prison and you’ll never be free. Your world will never be color. You missed it because of something wrong with your glow, with your eyes, with how you see.

I Saw the TV Glow dares to be a movie for those with eyes to see. It’s a staggering achievement of thoughtful filmmaking in black and white, but to those of us who can see it, it’s a masterpiece. It is a movie for butterflies, for moths, for those of us with wings.

It dares you to change with the watching of it. It dares you to open your eyes, and see your real eyes, in the pink opaque of a lit up TV. It dares you to see your reflection in a new color.

I am daring you to go watch this movie.

I’m begging you, don’t miss it.

There’s still time.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

5/23/2024

Airports, Horror, and the Love that Bleeds

I told myself that I would take the month of May off from writing to focus on editing my existing 36 Views poems and do more reading, but here we are. I have been reading, and am currently halfway through the Letters to Eugene, a correspondence between writers Herve Guibert and Eugene Savitzkaya that starts as hopeless romance and ends as something richer, deeper, and rooted in their craft. 

It is perhaps because of this work that I need to write again. Something about the book’s longing, the book’s persistent howling for company has calcified into an irresistible need to express myself. And trust me, no one is more disappointed in my breaking my fast early than I, but allow me this: a small plea in my defense.

After a week-long visit, I dropped off my girlfriend at the airport to resume our long- distance relationship this past Friday. Watching her shrink in my rearview as I injected my borrowed car into the infected, clogged arteries of airport-to-highway traffic broke me. I felt immediately like a wandering tumor of pathetic lovesickness metastasizing across my city to bloom in my apartment. Since it's still considered rude to rend my clothes and carve the sky outside my building with scythes of my shrieking melodrama, I am writing. And I'm writing about horror.

My mother likes to embarrass me with stories of how fearful I was as a child. She will recount with a sly smile how, when I was very little she took me to the symphony and how, during a bombastic rendition of In The Hall of the Mountain King, I got so worked up and screamed so loud that we eventually had to go home. The sounds and the impending doom of the piece fell on my small ears like hard rain. The panic I felt in my body like a current likely still has a home in my veins. 

A glass of wine and my mom might also tell you how when my sister was in a production of The Christmas Carol and when we went to pick her up from rehearsal a Jacob Marley was in the room in plainclothes reading his lines with maybe twenty percent of his regular fervor. Again, the red cheeks, the wailing, and the quiet request to be removed. Fear was a constant companion who kept a cold hand on my shoulder, leading me away from the pastel innocence of the children's section of my local video store and into the narrow caves of the horror section. 

The infamous poster for Child’s Play 2

I can still perfectly recall the imperiled Jack-in-the-Box nestled in the V of Chucky's massive scissors, the rest of the frame disappearing past the killer doll and into a dark, inevitable void. Everything scared me. Until it saved me.

More specifically until Vincent Price saved me, sneering over a trembling theatre critic in Theatre of Blood. I was a small child in a brand new house, most of my toys and distractions were still packed up in cardboard when I saw him on TV in my parents' room. It was the start of an obsession that still seizes me twenty-two years later. I instantly got over my fears and became obsessed with finding more horror, more Vincent, more of this day-glo blood red fantasyworld with its neon skies made of organ music. 

While that lifelong passion for horror has expanded to everything from early 2000s Japanese cinema to the grungy 1970s world of Italian giallo, the movie star, gourmet chef, art historian, and amateur demonologist still has a picture in my wallet, a tattoo on my forearm, a cookbook on my shelf, and roughly twenty seconds of every minute I'm awake. Through him I unlocked my love of art, my love of horror, and my love of Old Time Radio. I used to listen to his Colorslide Tours of art museums and his how-to-cook tapes of The Beverly Hills Cookbook to fall asleep. Something about his reedy, operatic voice worked on my heart like the nimble hands of a master thief. 

It wasn’t until later that I learned about Vincent Price’s bisexuality. I didn’t have the language then, just felt the brocade tendrils of queerness wrap around my confused, frightened boy body until the cold went away and the fear turned into something like belonging. I was being called home. Queerness and horror are such ubiquitous bedfellows that I’m hardly breaking any new ground here, but I’m still surprised at how often it comes up. When I write, when I text, when I flirt, and when I try to explain myself, I keep reaching back for horror films. 

Ever since I met Vincent all those years ago, horror has served as the constant elevated dialect of emotions larger than my body. It reminds me of how people talk about opera. The wide open mouths, the vowels, the language that transcends language and becomes pure feeling that reaches across time like a gorgeous doom. As the protagonist says in Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo after ordering his men not to shoot a charging army of Amazonian tribespeople and instead decides to play an opera record to soothe them, “This god doesn't come with cannons. He comes with the voice of Caruso.” 

My god came to me on the velvet wings of Vincent Price, the murky liquid latex flourishes of David Cronenberg, the elegant blood and desperate romance of Takashi Miike’s Audition. The extremity of these aesthetics, the meringue-stiff peaks of their emotions gave me a place to hide when I was hiding, and a place to exalt myself now. 

When I want a metaphor for a love I can’t seem to healthily hold inside myself, I reach for the cannibalistic overtures and opulent gore of Hannibal. I reach for torture, because like in Hellraiser the feelings are so visceral as to be found only in the further reaches of experience. The same flame that moths me towards kink applies here. There is a pleasure so rich within me as to be mistaken for pain.

The tagline for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre asks “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” 

To be in love is to ask the same question and admit, with a rueful smile, that the only way to know is to keep watching, and suffer in delight.

I miss my girlfriend, and so I turn to Theatre of Blood and remember that to love is as to bleed. To sigh is as to scream. To hurt with the want of someone who wants you back is to be alive, and in a horror movie, being alive at the end is all that matters.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

5/2/2024

Clay Pots and the Haunted Wilderness: Week 4 of National Poetry Month

Of course we are a day or so late with our last recap of National Poetry Month. A little too much exhaustion, a little too much reveling in our success, but I deserve that joy, that laziness, and no deadline should keep me from it. 

I’m pleased to report that we did it, folks. We wrote thirty poems in thirty days. We (almost) wrote a recap each week on top of that. We submitted some of them. We need to write even more of them, but a vague and beautiful book shape is starting to come into focus. I’m immensely proud of myself. Moreover, my friends accomplished their goals, too. More than the body of work, that’s what I’m happy with. It really is the friends we made along the way. 

I’ve read more poetry this month than I have in the last three combined. I attended workshops, remote open mics, I tried to better my craft. I feel like I have. Too often, at the end of a writing challenge like this, there’s the feeling like the protagonist’s discovery of the psychic in Clive Barker’s prologue to Books of Blood:

“He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she’d seen them, touched them…”

It’s easy to feel like you’ve been beset by ghosts, all carving their stories into your skin with a vengeful impatience. I felt carved up, cut open, and somehow beatified by that injury. And now, with all the blood on the floor and all the violence done with, it is time to edit, to heal.

“And after a time, when the words on his body were scabs and scars, she would read him.” 

I look forward to letting you read them, to tell the stories of these ghosts. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are about my breasts, part of my 36 Views project that I started in November. I now have forty of them. Forty poems in only a few months. Forty wailing ghosts finally laid back into a well-tended garden of words. Surely I, these poems’ humble undertaker, can finally rest or move on, but no.

There are still poems about my breasts to write. They won’t seem to let me go until they’re satisfied and they are far from satisfied. My gender feels very much like a seance in these moments, calling forth all the unruly souls of the girls and women I could’ve been but for a maelstrom of societal and circumstantial factors. Now it is my duty to put them to rest in the graveyard of my body, to give each of them their flowers. I am a field of gentle epitaphs. I am a haunted house full of so many soft hands and quiet songs. These women have finally found a mouth with which to scream all their sadnesses and joys. It would be rude to plug my ears because I’ve “done enough.” 

One of my favorite movies is Chi-Hwa-Seon, a Korean movie known internationally as Painted Fire. It tells the story of Jane Seup, a 19th Century Korean master painter known as Oh-won. Throughout the movie, he learns his trade and develops his craft and, most interestingly, grows old. It’s a beautiful meditation on what it means to let a passion grow with you in every sense. From imitating other artists to developing his own style to being renowned throughout Korea, Oh-won remains the same as much as he changes, until the movie’s incredibly memorable end:

After all his decades of life, Oh-won decides to join a monastery of potters. He is a master painter but has never tried this other discipline. He’s terrible at making pots, but he derives incredible satisfaction from making one. It makes him feel complete. Knowing that he cannot conquer it, that there’s not enough time in the world to completely master it, gives him a sense of peace, of finality. I want that.

I want to feel that way, to never tire or discover the limits of what my art can be. I want to continue to reinvent the ways I honor the ghosts inside me. The many graves of my heart. These lovers who are so close, but distant, still. 

I talk to my girlfriends every day. I look at pictures of them and so I see them every day. I feel close to them, and yet, they’re miles away from me. Long distance relationships can feel like a haunting sometimes, too. Their absence becomes a presence, echoes of the last time I saw them. To invite the distant lover is to host a phantom, a poltergeist whose touch could be the wind, whose love letter are written in the fog of mirrors. They’re omnipresent but distant until they’re not.

Ghosts are just the unfinished business of the living. Love and writing, for me, are businesses I hope I never finish. I hope I die vengeful and in need of more. I hope there’s a warped clay pot at the end of my life, a garden that’s still growing. I need it. If this last year has shown me anything it’s shown me the breadth of my inexperience.

My girlfriend loves to level this quote at me when I get to bogged down with life or in my own head, which is frankly too often. It took until literally today for me to look it up and, of course, it’s from Adventuring Party, the post-episode talkback series for Dropout’s Dimension 20. I shouldn’t be surprised, honestly. The most profound shit always seems to come from the strangest of places. One day I got a fortune cookie with five fortunes in it that I’m pretty sure predicted my next relationship. I got the title for my next writing project from the Chipotle app. We don’t choose our muse.

Anyway, they’re talking about Little Red Riding Hood and Emily Axford says “maybe there’s no moral.” And Brendan Lee Mulligan, the fucking Frisch’s Big Boy come to life, says it out of nowhere. 

“There’s no moral. The wolf eats you one day and until then, the forest is beautiful.” 

I spent so much of my early life literally calling out to the wolf to come early. Now that I actually want to live, I’ve been noticing the forest. It is beautiful. It’s full of so many interesting trees and animals. I intend to look at as much as I can so when the wolf comes, I can die with my blood thick and full of all the regret of what beauty I let slip away, so I can better savor the beauty I managed to hold onto.

That’s what writing is, for me. I’m holding onto beauty. I’m trying. All month I’ve been writing about my breasts to better hold onto the miracle that they exist at all. I write about the loves in my life to hold onto their smiles and eyes and memories. I don’t want to lose the forest for a single moment.

All month long I’ve been remembering that. 

Now that April’s over I have unfinished business. 

I have so much more to hold onto.

Yours, with an open mouth,

-B

4/23/2024

Hardcore Slump: Week 3 of National Poetry Month

Week three. We are twenty-three poems deep into the month and, folks, the tank is just about empty. I'm starting to burn out, feeling and fearing the weak sparks of my brain continuing to write over and over on the same topic. On the one hand, no one is holding my hand to the page, but on the other I feel like I owe it to myself to finish precisely because I'm closer to finishing this cycle than I ever have been. It doesn't make the feeling of sitting down with my keyboard or pen and notebook any less demanding, only more urgent, which makes feeling stuck even sharper and more unbearable.

My most recent salvation from the unholy feeling of Stuckness came this weekend when my girlfriend invited me out to a local hardcore show. Some bands were traveling from out of town and a five-bill gig got thrown together. Unsurprisingly, I am not typically a hardcore fan, but I wanted an excuse to leave the house (and put off writing the day's poem).

Immediately, within the first seconds of the first band I was glad I came. There was a chaos to the noise, to the sudden and undeniable shift in the room.

When a hardcore band starts, the room goes quiet, save for the building whine bleeding out of the amplifiers, and then. And then the fucking noise, friends. Roiling oceans of sound teeming with tentacular nightmarish schools of notes and percussive blasts. The singers scream and each syllable is a water droplet that blasts out like a firehose. The drummers are fighting a war in 4/4 time. The strings are a frenetic whine that doesn’t even feel like strumming so much as strangling a live cobra. Each song is a burst of chaotic violence, but my girlfriend is quick to remind me that despite the crashing and roaring of the music, everyone is tight and playing together.

Even when the lead vocalists are moshing with the fans and thrashing the floor and literally leaping off the stacked speakers, there is control. How they manage this is the adoption of a needful truth: they invite and accept chaos.

They don't try to be perfect.

For me, in all my poetry and writing and perfectionism, this notion was revolutionary. I try so hard to limit my frenetic energy and my tantrums to the privacy of my home. I tend to think of my writing process like a howling forge, all the noise and fire in the world, but at the end, a quiet, brilliant piece of steel. Fire, for me, is the freedom to throw my notebook across the room when nothing comes to me or to practically vibrate my laptop with shouted swear words. The possibility of integrating the frenzy of my process, unafraid, into my work feels like a betrayal, but one I must make to get better.

One of my favorite songs is "I Put a Spell On You." It's just so beautiful, desperate, sinister and lovely. My favorite version is Nina Simone's. Something about her voice and the hunger inherent to the act of magic just makes sense. The way she sings "I love you" near the end of the song is the closest we've ever come to the sound of loneliness itself. Nina brings a classical discipline to even her emotional resonance in the song.

Conversely, there's the Screaming Jay Hawkins version. Soaked in a near-lethal amount of booze, it's completely unmoored. Hawkins slurs his words, he shouts, he warbles and screams, but none of these "mistakes" hinder the momentum or artistry of his version either.

I don't need to illustrate why trying to "be Nina" in my writing is a fool's errand. I've been chasing perfection too long. Watching people sweat and shred and slam their instruments with trembling hands reminded me that, at least in the drafting process, I need to be more Screaming Jay.

I need to be bold.

Whenever I feel completely hopeless, I pull up a picture of one of my favorite pieces of art in the world: Ellsworth Kelly's Green Curve. Something about its frank and unrepetant commitment to itself soothes me. It is not trying to be more than it is. It is not hindered by a frame or a context. By being so green, so curved, so perfectly itself, it challenges even the white wall of the museum on which it hangs.

I want to write like that. I want to stand against the white wall and be so fearlessly, purely myself that I change the room around me. When I was waffling around about how to arrange my manuscript, I stared at the Curve and immediately realized how I was holding myself back.

I was playing it safe.

I promised myself I would write these poems about my breasts with no regard if they were accessible. I told myself I would treat it like an exercise. Lately I've been wrapped up in whether or not the various contexts of my tits would be interesting to a reader, editing myself even in the writing process. That is not Screaming Jay. That is not Green Curve. That's not hardcore.

I realize now that I'm being chickenshit, despite my best efforts. If these poems find any audience at all, it will be through the lens of my authentic interest in them. I am fascinated by my tits in the bathroom mirror, in old t-shirts, in so many places I feared were too quotidian to write about.

I will use this judgmental silence, this awkward pause to plug in my instruments, to crank up the amps, and spill a joyous chaos tempered by playful control. I will curve and slope so greenly and purely that no frame can contain me. I will put a spell on you, because you're mine.

And, I suppose, too, that I am

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

4/16/2024

You Must Submit: Week 2 of National Poetry Month

We've reached the middle of the month and the first major challenge to momentum. Life gets in the way, our friends are distracted, and the rest of the affairs in our life get their shit together enough to pose a serious threat. There's diminishing returns on that first howling romp into adventure. Eventually your feet hurt on the long walk to paradise. Eventually you run out of songs to keep your spirits up. If you're me, you run out of immediately accessible memories about your breasts to write about.

But we plow on, we find smaller ways to motivate ourselves. We think in terms of days. We try to be less grand and bombastic. One trick I've found? Submit. The added benefit to national poetry month is an increased fervor amongst literary journals and magazines to get work to publish. And we poets just have all these brand new poems rattling around in our cupboards. It's a beautiful symbiosis that keeps one engaged and keeps one's eyes on the ball. But like all second-quarter stimulants, it has its nasty downsides as well.

One of the reasons there's so much joy and pleasure in the first blushes of NaPoWriMo is the way it feels like taking charge. We hopeful poets make this grand descision to write, to commit to this endeavor. We plan and plot and strategize for each day's labor. There's so much to take charge of. There's so much control, and then we ride that high right into the submission process where we...wait to hear back, which can take as long as multiple weeks. It's a brutal contrapasso to the hubris of creation. Congratulations, you little gods of your little notebooks, you benders of metaphor and alphabet, here is your boulder. Here is your pool and apple tree. Here is your canto in the Florentine tapestry of deserving. How dare you. Now sit there and think about what you've done.

Never before have I felt that cruelty as acutely as I did this week when I managed to finish compiling my first full length collection. I toiled over title, I toiled over composition and placement of each poem, some of which I'd written years ago, and then slotted them into place patiently as a carpenter. This was my chair. But, of course, by the time I was done with it I had no remaining sentimental attachment to even the most recent pieces. They became alien and impersonal. They became tetris shapes. They had lost their music.

One of the most enduring references that I've plucked from the ether is from the EDM artist DeadMau5 in the trailer for his Masterclass on Electronic Music. It's during the trailer's more somber section dealing with the frustrations of making EDM. A world-weary DeadMau5 explains how in ProTools: "See, that’s my life right now. Because if I could just play it, I'd play it, but I can't so I have to draw it."

Poems were just blocks of text I chunked and slammed into different gaps in the structure I'd built, like spackle in a riddled drywall. It wasn't until I finished and could step back and see the entire wall that I felt the warm return of a sense of pride at making something. That's my drywall. That's my spackled slab of plaster. And then I sent it off. And waited. And let's be clear, I have no issue with anyone taking any amount of time to read my work. Whatever the outcome of any submission, I could at least rest assured that my work was being read. That's a genuine comfort in this choked air of content.

Incendiary content creator and writer Ben Croshaw once said in a YouTube video that "Releasing videos on YouTube is kind of like throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea made up entirely of messages in bottles. The chance of your message getting noticed and someone being sent out to rescue is punishingly slim."

And that can be how it feels. It can feel like howling into the void. Normally I feel a kind of comfort in that. I like writing for myself. When I need validation I perform or pepper my girlfriends with whatever poem it is this time. But I have sentimental and contradictory need to make a book. I want something solid. Something real.

One of my friends is a metalworker and sculpture artist. I see her work on social media and immediately feel the positive and negative charges of a uniquely artistic kind of lightning: genuine admiration and bitter envy.

I love seeing the lens through which she interprets the same anxieties of gender and identity and politics and the euphoria of living within one's truth. Their work is also about their transness in the same way my poetry is, but it's bent and blown into metal, into machinery, into solid rust and intractable honesty. Their work takes up space in a room. I want that for my own work, but am forced to take succor from posts like these, that fire off into the ether and disappear into the charnel house of the online. I don't need or want to be famous. I want- I need - to be real. I want to carve my heart onto the world in a way that will outlive me. In a way that won't expire when my domain name does.

And so I want to make a book. And so I must wait. And write. And wait. And submit. I must acknowledge that I have no more power. I must submit.

I must wait.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

4/9/2024

Chocolate Convulsion: Week 1 of National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month and, to people who fancy themselves poets and people who fancy themselves in need of a challenge, this means writing a poem every day until May.

I am one such person. Just like in November, I'm filling my larders with an entire month of labor. This also marks a year since I started writing again, a year since I lost my job, and a year since I met my best friend and changed my life forever. That's a hell of a Terminator from which I hope to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

But I have faith, friends. I'm motivated. My efforts in the year have not been in vain. In that intervening year I broke my deadname embargo and got published under my real name, performed a handful of times in my city, and got more comfortable with all the new words I found stuffed under my tongue. A month of writing poetry is rewarding, especially when you're not doing it alone. The communal endeavor of poets feels exactly like how Nicholson Baker described an international poetry convention in his novel The Anthologist:

"They were all being international poets in one place. The noise was incredible. Poets jabbering, poets laughing, a few poets looking hollow-eyed and glum."

Working with other poets in a crit circle for an entire month can feel dizzying like that, all the people around you just as committed, interested, and invested in their own craft as you. We get together and inspire each other, critique each other, and encourage each other. In the discord server I'm in, everyone posts their day's hard work and vents about the near-impossible ardor of writing under deadline with consistency.

A number of them are writing to a specific prompt that requires a different form every day while I committed to finishing my breast poem project. Of course, despite my best efforts I got a bad case of form envy. I wanted to have fun like my friends! So yesterday I gave myself the tiniest break from the bouncy castle of tit poems long enough to write a sestina. It was a nice reprieve and reminded me how much I love those complicated little French spirals.

We challenge each other. We influence each other. We inspire and poison each other. It's lovely. There's also something to be said of the pleasure of reading so many poems. Of hearing so many poems. None of the people in my little writing circle write like me.

I read their work and watch their words crash through the wall like Aerosmith barging in on Run DMC in the “Walk This Way” video.

Suddenly I'm faced with how a new person says what's on my mind. There's so much joy in putting the pen down and becoming, as Wayne Koestenbaum so beautifully describes in his masterwork The Queen's Throat, "pure receiver." He was talking about listening to opera. In the right circumstances, poetry can feel like the same thing.

That small self-erasure that comes from letting someone else's thoughts in the driver's seat. When the right poem gets in, it's like a low-grade hypnosis for as long as your eyes lick the page. And I always get so hungry for good words when I need to cook, and there's no better place to eat than the kitchen.

Early on in getting to know each other, before we fully put our tongues to the terrible third-rail of a long distance relationship, my girlfriend sent me Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke With You" with a caption that read "shot." Just as I finished reading it, she hit me with the chaser: "Having "Having a Coke With You" With You" by Mark Leidner.

I couldn’t believe it. I actually laughed out loud. The absolute nerve of her to send me two poems in conversation with each other, the latter of which is about the joy of hearing the former from a beautiful woman? I was utterly hooked. It happened, just like the end of Leidner’s poem, “and this was when I knew I wanted to be with you forever.”

I knew from that moment, without any doubt that I would love her as brutally and fully as a graveyard loves good rain. So much of our early courtship was simply hurling good quotes and excerpts and poems and snippets at each other. I let ornate coffins of memorized lines and half-remembered poems push through the soft loam until they kissed the close air at her feet. It didn’t have any of that electronic hum of googling things from the air, searching “good poems” on google until we felt clever. It was about diving into the pool naked with nothing but our memories. It was about teaching each other before we could become experts.

I wanted to lay all my inspirations bare for her appraisal. When two good people with good taste meet up it can feel electric. It can feel like the other half of The Anthologist’s thoughts on international poets:

"There was something wonderful seeing them in the room together, but also something a little perverse about it, too, like those kinds of chocolate cake that are filled with inner goops of extra chocolate, that have names like chocolate seizure, chocolate convulsion, chocolate climax."

When poets huddle around and share with each other, when my girlfriend whips out her terrifyingly close-to-full book of quotations that have resonated with her, I feel that convulsion and get sugary jitters of energy. I pick up my pen or my phone or my keyboard and I write something.

There's almost a recklessness to it. When forming our crit group, my friend and I decided that we could give each other feedback, but the main focus of our group would be validation and the doing itself.

We could edit our work in May, it's time to grind, to splash canvas, to shut up and tune out and fucking write.

But, for all our efforts, it's impossible not to want more, not to generate excess whirls of that naked lust for poetry. It gets too hot. It spins the turbines red and groaning. It has to be expelled. So I find myself more eagerly looking for open mics, for sub calls from magazines, for books on my shelves, new or otherwise.

April is one of those rare times where I find myself truly getting obsessed with poetry. The old ghost from my pre-transition life come back last year. It's suddenly all I want to talk about it. All I want to be around. It sweeps me up and thumps inside me. And so far it's the sweetest thing I've felt in weeks. So far it's almost decadent.

One week down. Three to go.

I listen.

I read.

I write.

I applaud.

I validate.

I praise.

I recite.

I convulse.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

3/17/2024

The Invisible Cities of smell and wine

He’s patient, his breathing is steady, and he’s pressing his nose into the glass and taking a whiff before speaking with a machine-gun speed, the bright brass shell casing for each word clinking from his mouth as the shots landed directly at the back of my brain. 

"Wine number four is a red wine. This wine is star bright. This wine is a bright red ruby color that fits into a hot pink variation. Medium concentration. Very very light staining in the tears. Viscosity is medium plus. No gas. No sediment. On the nose the wine is clean, no obvious flaws. This wine has a moderate plus intensity. Moderate plus power on the nose. This wine is very young, very bright, very youthful. Sage. Truffle. Wet forest floor. Decaying soil. Decaying dried red rose petals. Decaying animal skin…" 

It's a small moment in the early minutes of the documentary Somm where master sommelier candidate D Lynn Proctor describes the tasting notes of a particular wine. He just seemed to conjure entire visuals, entire histories and worlds with just his tongue, his nose, and the wine in front of him. It was less of an example of “by the grid” deductive tasting and more of a magic spell. Later in the documentary, before his exam, D Lynn confers with his doctor about his nose, and uses a neti pot to keep his nostrils clear and in fighting shape. The entire process had me spellbound.  

People with exceptional noses, or vocations and talents rooted in the sense of smell have always fascinated me. Whether it’s wine experts like D Lynn Proctor or perfumers, a part of my brain lights up when I follow those who follow their nose. I suspect it’s because I can't. I was born with anosmia, a uniquely trifling disability that translates to a diminished sense of taste, and a life bereft of smell altogether. So much of poetry is rooted in smell, I sometimes feel like I’m operating at half-capacity without this evocative sense.

It doesn’t help my hopes that there's such a romanticism about smell, too. There's this whole secret world of musk and memory and stink and splendor that I am forced by circumstance to stand just outside of. When I was younger, it would irk me to the point of misanthropy. I was angry at what I couldn’t access. When I first read Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer, I couldn’t help but relate to the protagonist, who was vengeful at the world for being born with no scent of his own. Of course, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had a prodigious sense of smell that eventually drove him to murder. 

I understood immediately the covetousness of the character. He wanted to have a smell despite smelling the world. I wanted to smell, too. I want to press my nose to the flowers and feel something. I wanted to decode the mysteries of the mist wafting from every dish like the super tasters on YouTube. I wanted to drink wine with my nose like D Lynn Proctor and find myself standing (in very expensive shoes) amongst a decaying forest floor. My envy even propelled me into the lifelong project of writing down my dreams of what different Yankee Candles smell like (You can read that kind of madness here.).

As I've gotten older however, my anosmia has taken a newer shape. A more subtle kind of ache that almost crosses over into joy. When my girlfriend describes a smell, whether it's garbage or my hair or takeout from our favorite Hawaiian restaurant, I treat each description like one of Marco Polo's in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. 

“Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.”

(Only a paragraph earlier, Calvino sets the scene with “odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers” so even in my comfort media I am confronted with what I will never experience).  

Since reading Invisible Cities and then rereading Perfume: Story of a Murderer I learned to marvel at the wonder of my girlfriend’s descriptions and the impossibility of ever experiencing them myself. With every candle, every cologne, every soup and scent of my skin that she told me, I was Kublai Khan in the garden, closing my eyes and basking in the unknowable, reveling in myths only given life through her words and her fervor. The scents took on the second secret life of all things: recommendation.

When my best friend Raina is feeling down, I send her books. Books I love. Books we talk about. Books that have been given that special secret second life. I get to relive the book through her: tasting with her tongue. I have always recommended books to people but this was the first time it really sunk in what I got out of it. It wasn't the connection or book club gentility of it. It was hungrier, more immediate. I wanted to live in the garden again. I wanted the unforgettable experience of reading my favorite books for the first time again. I could drink these books with her nose.

Oddly enough, I don't get this same high from recommending movies or video games or albums. I assume it's because of the inherent collaborative process of reading a book. You generate the field of play, the characters , you cast the play, decorate the sets, direct the action. Game developer and writer Sisi Jiang, when talking about interactive fiction, makes the argument that all books are inherently interactive. Mystery novels require a curious and inquisitive mind, adventure stories require a desire to see new worlds. Starting with Raina, and then bleeding into my girlfriends, I get to visit my favorite books again with their new tongues, their eyes, their noses. And, lucky for me, theirs work.

Becoming a sommelier is a way to become an expert, a trusted voice when recommending a good wine. I want to be that for my friends when it comes to books. I want to hold up the perfect book in front of them until the lightning strikes and the paper and card-stock come alive again. I want all my books to have their secret life. There’s a new book on its way to Raina right now. I know when she opens it the first thing she’ll do is say thank you. The second thing that bitch will do is thumb through the pages and describe the smell. 

She has a real nose for that kind of thing.

Yours with an open mouth (and a nonworking nose)

-B

3/7/2024

Write Club ATL, transness, and blood

Well, it’s been two months since I updated this blog so let’s get into it.

The new year has been good to me. I’ve been writing, performing, and reading, all of which has been going about as well as I could hope. My friends are also writing, which fills me with an unrepentant joy. There’s an ethereal magic to knowing that people I love and care about are building worlds in their head and doing the work.

I carried that enthusiasm with me when I was invited to perform in one of Atlanta’s longest-running reading series: Write Club. The format is essentially a writer’s duel with each performer writing to oppositional themes like Us vs Them, Sweet vs Sour, and Simmer vs Boil. I was assigned Boil. Once the themes are assigned, we prepare seven-minute pieces about our topic and the audience votes on which ones they like best. I was lucky enough this time to win my bout despite Simmer performer Zack Linly absolutely destroying the audience with their piece before me.

It was an honor to perform with the eclectic group of writers and performers at the event and, if you’re in the Atlanta area, look up Write Club, it’s a hoot. You can read my piece below.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

Phlegethon

Lately I’ve been going back and reading the things I loved as a kid. Old comics, old books, reintroducing myself and seeing if I find anything new.

For example, when I read Dante’s Inferno to establish myself as the edgiest fifth grader at Christ the King Middle School, I never gave much thought to the moment where literature’s favorite gay sightseeing couple stumble upon a river in the seventh circle.

The less famous little brother of the River Styx, Phlegethon. It’s this boiling river of blood in which those sinners who were violent against their neighbor are, well, boiled in blood. They reveled in blood, and are punished with an embarrassment of the stuff. It's classic Dante and now I think about it like once a week.

You see, there was a teensy little moment when I was spending my birthday driving needles through my girlfriend's butt, where I'd stopped to wonder if I'd become a more violent person since I transitioned.

The whole time I was a guy, I had trouble being rough in bed. Literally couldn't even give a classic, happy, hetero slap on the ass. It caused fights! I would hang my head, cry my eyes out and tell my partner..."I just can't be that kinda guy."

In all fairness, I was half-right.

Ever since I cast off my name, ever since I wrapped my manicured hands around the throat of the boy I was and squeezed 'til my voice changed, I'd become one of those snuff-dreaming, too many impact toy owning, "is it ok if I choke you a little bit?" kind of Sapphics they warn you about.

All I can say is that it kinda just sneaks up on you. Like a frog in a pot of erotic violence. One day you read a couple of spicy poems and tumblr posts, you look at a different kind of porn than you’re used to. Next thing you know you're sitting with your girlfriend at a seminar about spanking technique and using words like "flensing" when you sext. Everything's gradual.

The blood slowly builds in temperature and before you know it, foams over the shore in thick, viscous, cauterizing waves. And you just get carried away.

I take drugs every day to change my blood into the death of my boy-body. They say the true death is when everyone forgets your name and I am killing myself to be new. To be trans is to be violent at least one time to at least one person. To be trans is to know violence.

Over a thousand anti-trans bills have been proposed across the country since I came out. The rhetoric has escalated to the point where people on national TV are fine saying we need to be eradicated. When I went down to the capitol last year to beg for healthcare, I saw it. I saw apathy and mistrust. I saw hatred and condescending smiles. I felt my blood boil.

The spittle that flies from pundit's mouths is the froth of pitched cauldrons.

The river is hot. The blood is churning. It is flowing through congress "Here they wail aloud their merciless wrongs."

And what are my wrongs?

I am more violent, I guess.

I am also gentler and more inflamed with passion than I have been in my entire life.

I bite lovers until they bleed and hold them until the bleeding stops.

I have looked the violence of my birth, the mutability of my flesh, the fundamental lie of the body in the eye and spat in it. I have seen the river of blood and chosen to be its naiad.

When a kettle is boiling it screams. Since I realized I could be anything, I could be anything but silent. My blood is the loudest sound I can make. I make it every day. Like tea. I sit with the scream until I can put my lips around it. Until I can take it like medicine.

My morning estradiol boils my blood until my skin bubbles up into hips and tits and a body I can't look at in the mirror without weeping for joy. When things boil for long enough they become soft. It is a cleansing heat I hope everyone gets to feel.

Once every six months I get my blood tested to see how my transition is going. I watch the blood pour into the tube and am amazed that it is not boiling. So much of me feels molten, feels like a volcanic vent has replaced my heart. I feel like a burning ocean, like a river hot and thick enough to flood and spill enough to scald the world pink and new.

When we are born, we are all covered in blood, like we'd been swimming in it. We had gills in the blood. We could breathe in the heat.

I and my sisters, my brothers, my non-binary anointed family of chemicals and clothing and binding and packing and change, had the courage to dive back into the river. If that is a sin then I would grin at any Dante on the shore and beckon them in.

I would ask all of you to think of the river that splashes your bones, that ferries your air to the tips of your fingers and back.

Think of the Phlegethon in the hell of your hearts. Think of your blood.

It is a miracle, a teeming river of cells, where each one of them is a gasping lover in heat. I would ask you to turn, just once, toward the flame, to let yourself catch and boil.

What steam would rise from your skin as you swim?