1/30/2024

The Great Wave: Perspectives, Tits, and 2024

It's the end of the beginning. January's newborn blood runs off the year as we look at February. I'm long overdue to update this blog and here we are: an update. 

Things are going pretty well, all things considered. I'm writing. My habit of writing in series and along thematic lines continues. When I visited my sister in Seattle I found myself in the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Amongst the traditional art from Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere, there was a visiting exhibit about the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on French artist Henri Riviere. Posters for Chat Noir hung alongside the iconic work of the artist Hokusai. The pieces, in conversation with one another, swirled around like shadows on the wall until I was pulled forcefully toward the exhibit's focal point. 

The Great Wave by Hokusai

Hokusai's most iconic work is The Great Wave from his series 36 Views of Mount Fuji. This breathtaking image with its meticulous composition and simple shapes had such a profound impact on Henri Riviere that the French artist created his own tools to approximate their technique. In homage to Hokusai's Mt Fuji works, Riviere made his own 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. 

Staring at the work of both artists in the museum, I was swallowed up completely. Here was the singular and inimitable Eiffel Tower broken into a kaleidoscope of 36 images across time and perspective to reflect the myriad ways these fixtures of our world change us with their changes. 

Riviere’s art shows the infancy of the tower, its wobbling coltish legs years before they stood in the center of Paris. It shows the construction workers resting in the crosshatched iron of its adolescent belly. The work makes me see what was a garish tourist trap as something deeper. As the end result of a collaborative and demanding journey of work. It shows the context. It shows the respect Riviere not only had for the Eiffel tower itself, but also the work of his art’s inspiration. To see all the pieces of the puzzle together resulted in pure awe as I stood in the room.

This is my favorite thing about art and my largest gripe with most art museums: the white walls. I hate the vacuum of museums. Stripping pieces of their context save for a plain text plaque. Personally, I love to be choked with context. I like to be surrounded and steeped in background. To see Riviere amongst his influences, to see a full picture distilled into something so small and simple as a paperback book of prints. Art lives in its moment, over and over again to inform how we see it now. I like eating the whole meal, to better burn what I can into something beautiful and transformative. 

One of Henri Riviere’s 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower

Inspired, I sat down in one of the museum's chairs and wrote a poem about my breasts. That one poem has since evolved into my latest exploration. Hokusai honored the landscape of Japan by treating it like a system of stars and planets swirling around the mist-capped mountain. Riviere honored France's history and breadth by showing an Eiffel Tower under construction and framed in the distance. I decided to honor my transitioning body by writing about my tits. 

To me, tits are a fascinating concept. All my life I ran terrified from the concept of "man boobs"and the distinctly toxically masculine way fat is treated on the body of men. Tits are something the human body is set against in relief. Their absence, their presence, their connotations. Tits are for mothers. They’re for infants. They’re for feeding and eating. As I fitfully work to grow my own breasts into the shape of my dreams, I meet a woman who feels most at home without them. 

Her megawatt confidence at her smooth, nipple-less chest fits perfectly with the bursting joy of my budding one. We fit, inspirations to each other. Again, even by their defining absence, tits have some strange and almost supernatural capacity to evoke strong emotion one way or the other.  

To distill my personal journey, once again I turn to the writer Dodie Bellamy (who I should really send an edible arrangement or something at this point considering the impact she's had on me) and her book The Mina Harker Letters like I always do:

"my breasts are no longer breasts but titties just the thought of keyboarding the word titties excites me." 

They do excite me. In selfies, in the mouths of lovers, in my hands, in their aching weight on my chest. I can’t seem to shut up about them. So, if I can produce 36 poems of a satisfactory quality about my tits, then I'll have, if you'll pardon the pun, a body of work. Maybe a chapbook. Maybe something longer. Who knows?

The cover of the Sexiotext edition of The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy (with a pair of tits on the cover)

On the subject of my body, another development is that I've been exercising. The same visit I met Hokusai and Riviere, my brother-in-law gave me his old VR headset. Since then I've been doing rhythm and boxing workouts at least three times a week. I won't allow this to become a praise song for good ol' fashioned Sweat and #Grindset propaganda but the central truth is I'm happy. It's about discovering the body, the same work that I do with my writing. Being trans means acknowledging the will of the flesh, the pull towards change. The body I want has tits, works out, and loves women. That's all I've been able to work out lately but that's been enough for me. 

It’s another country in this shifting continent of my flesh. I notice new changes every day, just like with my hormones. I suddenly crave movement. I suddenly experience joy with sweat and strength. I even drink fucking water. I had a smoothie for lunch. Just like with my tits, there’s a past version of myself who would bet a bullet on never turning into something that has a smoothie for lunch.

It’s me…having a smoothie for lunch

Another year of change seems to be rumbling in the clouds at the horizon.

Last year I rekindled my love of poetry, started writing and performing regularly again, and found success, but, more importantly, found happiness. This year promises to be no different and I feel nothing but excitement.

Here's to more writing. More working out. More discovery of what this body wants.

What it can let go of.

What it can hold.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

11/29/2023

At the End of the Tunnel is More Tunnel: Week 3 of the November Writing Challenge

I was spending Thanksgiving last week with my family, and, for our last meal together, we went out to a Scandinavian restaurant. For immersive ambience, the TVs in the place played footage of trains going through the Icelandic countryside. For a significant portion of the meal the train was making its way through the inside of a mountain, rolling the frightening dark of a tunnel, lit by intermittent overhead track lights. When it finally cleared the tunnel, my mom and sister and I celebrated a return of the sky. Then, my mother gestured with her beer. “Oh look another tunnel.”

That’s what it’s felt like lately. I had a whole other blog post planned, but here we are. I won’t mince words with you all. I'm making an effort here to write with no filter, with no plan beyond a simple topic: Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking my ass. I shouldn't be surprised, since it's managed to do this every year since I was a child, but here I am. Defenseless. Worse still is that the dark seems to know it. With each passing year the winters feel longer and meaner, their ribbons of ink-black shadows forming into teeth. I'm losing energy as the black bat of Winter bites through my neck and bleeds me out. Poems are coming slower, I'm behind on this putting this blog post up, and all my efforts have the distinct musical quality of mining from a tapped vein. This blog post is a full six days late due to Thanksgiving and travel stress, and the poems are actively clotting.

This is most often where I stumble during a writing challenge like this. It's the home stretch where everything kind of slows down, like I burned too much fuel on liftoff and, without the necessary momentum when I break orbit, I just drift off completely. I can feel myself drifting. But more than that, more than the work, I can feel my body retreating into itself, conserving itself, pulling away from socializing and other activities that restore me.

But we go on, don't we? We weather this for what it is: weather. It comes and bellows and roars and blows like the lowest moment of King Lear. It singes my white head, it drenches my steeples and drowns my cocks and all its germains spill at once. But I have my small shelter. I have my small fool. I have my Tom O' Bedlam. Let me introduce them.

One thing I've been doing with my dwindling energy is reading. When the writing won't come, there is always the looming stack of books I've yet to read. Currently, I'm chipping away at Robert Doran's translation of The Lives of Simeon Stylites a collection of three different accounts of the the early Christian mystic's life and ministry. The man lived most of his life, if the accounts are to be believed, atop a sixty foot tall pillar with no shelter or support. It comforts me the way faith and frenzy twirl around each other like a binary star. With distance they appear to be the same light winking in and out. For someone who loves body horror and the flesh and Christian aesthetics, why I had never thought to look into the saints is a cosmic oversight. It took my girlfriend (who has a fucking tattoo of Simeon) telling me about him for me to chase down the accounts. It's been soothing. Atop his pillar, performing his self-imposed penance for the sin of his existence, Simeon gave counsel, offered sermons, blessed crops and warded off savage animals with the help of his god. As I trudge through this last gasp of my self-imposed writing challenge, I can only hope to capture that same grace.

Too offset this onslaught of occasionally dry religious text, I've got a healthy arsenal of poetry to catch up on, beginning with Sean Patrick Mulroy's fearless collection Hated for the Gods. Equal parts a queer oral history and an intimate crawling tour of intimacy. Mulroy's work is a constant subversion of expectation. In deftly switching from the current to the primordial to more recent history, the book seems to assert that queerness and the rage that ripples off the page like heat waves are eternal. We have always been here. While still figuring out my gender and for my adolescence, I identified as a bisexual man, but quietly. While the mainstream perception of queer media is loud, brazen, and unapologetic, Mulroy's work leaves room for quieter moments and voices too. It's a fascinating book that demonstrates the depth and scope of a topic that a lot of culture tries to reduce to one note.

And, because I simply cannot be stopped, I'm reading Natalie Tatou's new collection S.M.D.H. Tatou writes like the the orderlies are on their way. Every story in the collection scrambles and scrapes together its contraband and crams them onto the page. Incest, violence, sexual taboos, and more all come to abject life in Tatou's writing, their radioactivity tempered by an attentive hunger to be understood. The book howls for connection and understanding, clawing at the my eyes so that I may better see its truths. I'm not very far into the book, weighed as it is against my mystic and Mulroy's poetry, but I can't help but feel grateful that such an electrifying book won't be over too quickly.

I'm still keeping more or less apace with my work, maybe a day or two behind at the time of writing, and I can feel the ugly dark behind me like a narcotic tentacle, but I'll do my best to finish what I've begun.

Until then, I'm reading. Until then, I'm writing. Until then, I am always doing my exhausted and darkening best. I can see the end of the tunnel…I can look forward to seeing the sky, at least until the next one.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B

11/16/2023

Take This All of You and Eat It: Week 2 of November Writing Challenge

I am thirteen. I am in a church with stained glass windows that are older, bigger, and more beautiful than I will ever be, despite how much I yearn to be older, to be bigger, to be beautiful. The room is large and hot and quiet save for the shuffling wood of the pews, the dull hum of the unused organ, and the priest some fifteen feet away. The priest holds up a wafer and promises to make it into the flesh of a man. To make it real. I ring my little bells when it’s time and try not to fidget in my massive altar server’s robes. The priest, the man, is wearing long silk vestments in bright green. He looks like a stained glass window. Striking. I break the commandment about coveting my neighbor’s goods. I see this priest, his color and his silks. I covet. “This is my body.”

Growing up Catholic taught me a lot. The mysticism, the iconography, and the rituals all gave me the intoxicating feeling of being dropped like a single daub of paint into a millennia long portrait of blood and art and tears and prayers. I felt like I was part of something rich and gorgeous. Until, of course, I didn’t. Until, of course, it meant Catholic school and uniforms and confession and shame and sin and perdition. Until, of course, it meant looking up at the half-naked painted Savior and looking away, tasting his body on my tongue and struggling to swallow. I couldn’t dress like a girl except in the shadows and the trouble with shadows is that, without the light to see, everything looks like a sin. 

Reading over my poetry throughout the month I've begun to notice a sneaky new theme slowly emerging throughout a good many of them. My Catholic upbringing rears its perpetually bowed head in, at this point, the majority of the month's labor. I reference rosaries and prayer and saints and transformation. So much of my journey into my flesh, my true flesh, has felt like making a Eucharist of myself, transubstantiating my boy into woman. I can take comfort, at least, in knowing I’m not alone in this. Writer Eve Tushnet, in her essay “Velvet and Pus: A Catholic Queer imagination,” writes:

“Even before I became Catholic I noticed this insistence on the meaning of the body—“meaning” in the sense that the body could be interpreted, that you could not only feel it but understand it (or misunderstand it). But also “meaning” in the sense of importance: the body means a lot.”

The saints explore their body’s relationship with Divinity constantly, a phenomenon explored brilliantly in visual artist Lizz Hamilton’s seminal podcast All Miracles Are Strange. In each episode Hamilton explores how men and women are venerated by disease, by wounds, by indignity. 

As a trans woman I know a lot about indignity. My breasts ache. My stubble bickers with me. My newly long hair seems allergic to any kind of containment. My body rarely cooperates with me during sex. So much of me has changed. And yet, with each dose of hormones I feel closer to God. I feel a greater empathy for those like me. I feel the stones of my soft pink tomb rolled away. She is risen. 

My transfiguration, pun intended, brings me more closely attuned with the religion of my childhood. Suddenly I am reading the Bible. I am praying the rosary. I am taking comfort in the idea of The Mysteries being the propulsive core of the faith. Too often we search for answers when we should be falling in love with the questions themselves, listening for the all-too-sweet whispers of answers within us. I want suddenly to drink wine with my girlfriends. I want to thank God for my body. I want to pray with every poem I write, and so I do.

Even when my body breaks itself slowly, softening itself and reducing its muscle mass, I am reminded of the holiness of transformative suffering. Psalm 2 verse 9 tells us “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.” I feel myself breaking. I feel myself dashing to pieces according to a will within myself. I feel the intangible truth of my body. With my first month on hormones I asked my trans friends when I should expect changes. So many of them told me the same thing. I should see results soon. I should let the body and the medicine do their works. 

I should have faith.

My work lately has been full of faith. Has been full of gratitude. Has been full of prayer. I have been unchained from the shame and secrecy of wearing women’s clothes after my house has fallen asleep. I don’t need to pray for miracles when I can unscrew the caps on bottles full of them every morning and take them according to His will. Catholicism taught me to love the flesh, to see beauty in the corpse of a man who gave everything for us. Whether you believe in it or not, there’s power in a story of that much sacrifice. I know trans people who sacrifice themselves, who give their all to be saviors and safety for those that need them. 

And, like the Saints, we’re not all that popular for our devotion in our time. Our pursuit of our holiest selves, our truest and purest selves, gets us a lot of attention and a lot of distance from those that don’t understand. Radical members of the faith have suffered the same faith. Ascetics, mystics, monks, nuns. We retreat into our little ministries online and in person, we change our bodies. We accept the judgment that comes with it. As Aphrahat says in The Sixth Demonstration of Patrologia Syriaca, “Whosoever adopts the likeness of angels, let him be a stranger to humans.”

I know women who howl like dogs at the moon and feel more joy in the howling than I ever have in my life. I know women who cover themselves in tattoos to feel closer to God. I know women who worked with surgeons to scar their bodies into their best selves. These are holy women. These are angels. They are strangers to humans. They are no strangers to God.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

11/09/2023

Bedrooms and the Best of Intentions: Week 1 of November Writing Challenge

I love November. There's something alluring about the month before the end. It commands in equal measure the pitched mandate of disaster preparedness and a decadent sort of Masque of the Red Death need to party before the end. Few things in life delight me like cognitive dissonance. The air changes, the night gets thick with darkness as early as 5:30pm, and something in me wants to get all my shit together and ride the missile into the end of the year like the end of Dr. Strangelove.

How fitting then, that all my friends are cracking their knuckles and getting busy with the reason for the season: National Novel Writing Month. Thirty days of committed work and thirty days of my group chat blowing off steam and complaining about their word counts. I'd laugh and sip my lemonade from the Porch of the Unbothered but, here's the thing: I love a challenge. I love writing to a brief. Give me an assignment, a deadline, and a small chance of success and I'm sold. I see my friends mounting up like the Regulators and I long for a horse. But how do I ride beside them?

I've attempted to write long form before with minimal success. This is what I can best manage: thirty poems, thirty days. A poem a day. This keeps me apace with my peers and gives my November that essential doomsday feeling I need to feel alive.

So that's what I've been up to all week. So far, the process has been rewarding. Funneling my work into the bottleneck of a messy procession of days, forcing first drafts that must be edited later, I can feel these habits barnacle-ing onto my craft. It feels good to look at the past week and see seven little sprouting plants poking out and leaning towards the gray sun. It feels like accomplishment. Like progress.

Of course, the most daunting part of wrangling poems at this pace is that age-old writer cliche: Where to get ideas. Some of my poetry peers can swan dive into the month wihout a plan and trust the universe to give them 30 things to write about in as many days. I love these people. I envy these people. I am not one of them. I need structure. I need buckets. I need a project. I need to iterate. That means forms. It means scaffolding. I love scaffolding.

When pulling inspiration for series poems, the two main roads I've had any success with are variations on form and variations on theme.

I write mostly free-verse, but occasionally feel the call of a sestina or villanelle or pantoum. Perhaps it's the lapsed Catholic in me, still clutching her rosary with frail hands, but I find immense power in repetition. Repeating lines, repeating words, they build momentum and magnify intention like spells or prayers or music. Each repeated line takes new weight from its predecessor, forcing the reader to see the same thing but suddenly different.

Thematic writing or motifs help to tackle larger concepts a moment at a time. I think of the way my transition has changed me, so I start with the media I grew up loving that changes with me as I look back. I'm obsessed with the idea of home and the ways we build it, so I start with people's bedrooms.

These works can feel like the parable of the blind men and the Elephant, grasping at the too-big whole of a thing and coming away with pieces. Bedrooms have such significance. They're solitary spaces that we define by our living in them, but the mere mention of them conjures intimacy, sex, and connection. In her book, The Letters of Mina Harker, Dodie Bellamy writes that "1,000 bedrooms couldn't solve my problems." The line immediately made me think of all the bedrooms I'd been in, and the legend of a thousand paper cranes.

Maybe they would solve everything. Maybe there's value in the work itself. It suddenly became meaningful to attempt it. And so a healthy portion of the month's poems are going to a series about Bedrooms.

The first week has gone by with minimal incident. A couple of skipped days here and there but I'm on track. I'm happy with the poems and excited to write more.

I'll be putting up posts like this one weekly to reflect on my process thus far. A week of poems in. I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm working towards something significant, even if it's just the sense of accomplishment I feel looking at all the sprouting plants poking up from the garden so far. I put in the work, for no other reason than the work itself. I'm eager to see where the rest of the week takes me.

The world may be ending. The year may be shuffling towards a terrible, cold end, but I will work the winter until its soil freezes into bitter stone. I will tend to my hardy crops as the sun dips low and blue as metal. I will work.

And then, as the blue goes black and the last day has nothing left to say but "I'm sorry" and silence, I will look down at my table, my bounty of growth and smile. Piled on my table will be all my efforts, steaming and lovingly transformed from hard work to art.

And then, in the dark hall of December's shadow, proud as a parent, I will pull all my poems toward me with a satisfied sigh and I will do what December was made for.

I will feast as the world screams its last breath all around me. I will bite down on all my heard work and taste its blood in my red mouth.

I will smile.

I will feast.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B

10/29/2023

I have no flowers, only tattoos

Emily Dickinson, in one of her letters to a friend, writes "I have no flowers before me as you had to inspire you. But then you know I can imagine myself inspired by them, and perhaps that will do as well." 

Reading these words, written by the poet when she was fifteen years old, cracked my brain open like the first pistachio in the bag. Suddenly I was swarming with thoughts. About Flowers. About their transience. About the temporary nature of some kinds of gifts. We use flowers to mark an occasion, to communicate a feeling, but the occasions and feelings are as impermanent as the slowly withering beauties in their vases. 

Flowers, at their core, are the promise of their own memory. They are a beautiful invitation to build a new house in the town of your mind. As they wither, the memory grows. They are beautiful, but they are temporary in their beauty. All that remains is the time someone gave you flowers, and the meaning behind them.

In Victorian England, flowers had a complicated web of meanings, enough that an entire cottage industry. These dictionaries, however, saw more use as parlor games and theoreticals than as actual bouquets to decode. In her introduction to Mandy Kirkby’s A Victorian Flower Dictionary, novelist Vanessa Diffenbaugh explains: 

“There is little evidence that the Victorians actually used the language of flowers in a practical way; they didn’t send continuous streams of bouquets to each other, but rather the books were meant for the centre table and were to be studied, indulged in, and played as a game; every young lady wanted to be well-versed in the meanings of flowers.” 

The meanings became more important than the flowers themselves. Symbols. The meanings and moments become more than their symbols. Flowers wilt and disappear, meanings stay with us.

On my left forearm is a tattoo so badly done and poorly cared for that it feels like its own anti-aesthetic. It's a monogram I drew in high school, which should already be a red flag as I learned nothing of value in high school, least of all how to draw. It is a symbol dedicated to Vincent Price, a man and actor who will surely have his own blog post later on (the man looms large as a harvest moon in the night sky of my life). While my love for the man hasn't wavered at all - he is still a picture in my wallet, outliving both my ex-wife’s picture and the deadname on my driver’s license - the tattoo, with its jagged edges and broken lines, its haphazard splashes of color and mottled blackwork, has gone through a journey of self-acceptance like everything else. 

The craft of the tattoo matters, sure, but not as much as the experience of getting it or the rush of looking down at my forearm and remembering the naive teenager who sat in an Ohio tattoo parlor and learned something about pain and something about forever in the same poorly thought-through hour and a half.

I was eighteen when I got the tattoo, fresh out of high school and still utterly confused about who I was, what I wanted to be, and whether or not I was a boy. But, I liked Vincent Price enough to say I probably would forever. There's something comforting in that. The tattoo, for all its flaws, has become a reminder that even as I change and grow and metamorphose into something as distant from the old me as the cold moon over Ohio, I am still certain about somethings, or at least have the chance to be.

Flowers disappear until all you are left with is the memory of their perfect beauty. Tattoos stay with you as reminders of your imperfection. I believe Dickinson is exactly the kind of sentimental dyke who would get a tattoo for every girlfriend, a forever bouquet of women who have held her arm on her arm.

Being trans is a storm of photographs the first few years. It is a desperate clawing at memories that go by in a flurry of firsts: first month on hormones, first date as a girl, first wig, first haircut as a girl, first time someone ma'ams you at the supermarket or the Chipotle. All of these are so numerous, miraculous, and intangible that it's impossible to carry them with you without some of them simply fading.

I have written more words in the past year or so than I likely ever have. Some of these poems and stories and letters are unspeakably bad, some of them are, by my estimation, very good, but all of them are suddenly very important to me.

I read back over my own work, I watch my readings at open mics,and I even go so far as to scroll back through text exchanges where I've felt particularly on.

I have never felt the impulse to do this before. Never felt the pull of archiving my own experience and then poring over them like a monk in servitude to my own God. But now I am my own God. I am transfigured, if you'll forgive the pun. Every moment is a gospel and I am my own apostles, writing it all down before they wither away.

I want the flowers of my transness to last forever. The memories are perfect but fleeting. To accomplish this, I must lean into my craft. I must tattoo them to the page. Some of them will have the rushed inexperience of that day in Ohio, and the certainty.

I was asked recently if I ever planned to publish my work. The short answer was no, but the long answer was convoluted and frantic enough to warrant a second draft, which is this essay.

I might, if there's an audience and I believe the work I'm doing would benefit from it, but I am writing first and foremost, to press my flowers. I am writing because, like Dickinson, I have no flowers. At least, not forever.

What I have are the memories of flowers, what I have is the blemished page, what I have is a body of work I will ink over with so many shitty tattoos. My craft cannot possibly keep up the pace but my left forearm tells me that's okay.

I will write my poems, my blogs, my stories. I will press my flowers.

But then you know I can imagine myself inspired by them, and perhaps that will do as well.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

10/15/2023

Air and Performance

The Winter my girlfriend couldn't sleep, when the miles between us calcified into jagged teeth, I read to zier before bed. 

It started with children's books, Avi's Dimwood Forest series and Brian Jacques' Redwall books, but soon gave way to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Billy Martin’s Exquisite Corpse. As I read and ze snored, I found myself rediscovering the way reading aloud brought language to life. 

Books I had loved for years, since childhood, found new life in my mouth and against my ears. My audible account, thick and choked with cobwebs of neglect, breathed a sigh of relief. I started reading with my ears again letting professionals and performers turn old favorites into new loves.

The next Spring, after I lost my job and wandered the wastelands of the internet for any distraction, I wound up in a discord server and, on a whim, checked out one of the VCs. Amid the dozen or so effortful attempts at socializing, I heard a voice like a deep copper singing bowl. A woman’s voice reciting something. The words were familiar, but again, galvanized by contact with the empty air, rudely birthed from symbols to noise:

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting..."

I had read Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" dozens of times scattered across Tumblr and Facebook posts and quoted across Etsy cross-stitches, but here it was again. I heard the poem again, in every sense of the word.

The voice in the VC, I’d learn, belonged to a woman named Raina. After a few fumbling DMs, I realized I had found someone who would become my close friend with supernatural speed. 

Profound experiences have never been in predictable places for me. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa, or gazing up through the oculus of the Pantheon, I felt nothing but the weight of expectation. 

Here, though, in an esoteric little corner of the internet, under the giggling tutelage of a self-proclaimed internet troll, I learned to breathe again.

I began to swallow poems by the fistful, reading them aloud in the dark of my bedroom like summoning spells and then devouring whatever apparition was given life by my air. Raina's antics drew me in, turning me from appreciator to accomplice. As the VC streamed videos and chatted, we giggled and chanted through Sara Teasdale and Emily Dickinson, roared through Charles Bukowski and Ted Hughes. Eventually, like all pranksters and vandals, we started making our own art, writing our own poems. My poems were given life again, alongside hers. I remembered the way performing felt. I started looking for open mics. If I had fun playing my little pranks with Raina, I reasoned, perhaps I'd enjoy getting back out there. 

Poems are living things, and they need air to breathe. Raina taught me that in the fading hours of morning with an impish lilt in her voice. Reading aloud taught me the beauty of sound, each fricative and loping vowel was a brush stroke. 

However, if Raina’s voice taught me to love poetry again, poetry taught me to love my own.

Training the trans woman’s voice, I’d learned, was an inelegant process. Exercises offered up the same rude parade of honks and squeaks and kludgy bundle of phrases. Paragraphs about rainbows, maxims about heat and fire, and endless recitation of vowel sounds baked into every lesson were threatening to drive me insane. Raina, in her own wry way, gave me permission to seek another way: an old language made new again. Ted Hughes, Maggie Nelson, Julie Carr, and others offered a roiling new curriculum to pour my molten throat into. 

Poetry, again, after all these years, taught me so much about myself.

Watching recent videos of myself, I could see my progress, see the metal of my French horn bending and hammering into a piccolo. 

I owe this to Raina. To poetry. If you find yourself reading this, my faraway friend, I hope you know, to me, those two things are one.

Recently I was given the enormous honor of performing in a Trans reading series alongside the poet and writer Emerson Whitney. My friends all told me how good my voice sounded. I smiled and thought back to the VC and the server and the mischief that built my new noise.

As if learning how to talk again were not enough, I recently started learning Italian with Duolingo. Another new language. Another new genre of music. Another furnace. Unfortunately, I have to settle for a cartoon owl instead of my dear, devilish friend, but there's nevertheless that familiar rush of a new vocabulary. 

I would read the words for coffee and milk and church. I would speak them aloud for the exercises.

Like my voice, like my poems, like my friendship, like the shuffling world around me, I watched them come alive.

I watched them breathe.

Yours with an open mouth

-B.

9/15/2023

Its Own Kind of Ambition

There’s a concept in advertising that tik-tak’d its little chitinous legs all the way up my spine and wrapped itself around my brain like the monster in the Vincent Price movie The Tingler. It’s called “extension” or “blow out” meaning any good idea needs to be blown out into an omnichannel message that has bespoke activations across its various platforms. What does this idea look like in social? What about on the website? This has so rewired my brain that I see everything big picture now.

There’s an anecdote I heard about the novelist David Morrell negotiating the movie rights to First Blood: Completely clueless about the process, Morrell got an entertainment lawyer on referral from a friend. Immediately, this lawyer includes sequel rights and merchandizing rights into Morrell’s contract. Morrell calls this lawyer and complains. “Sequels? He dies at the end. And he’s a murderous Vietnam vet, who’s buying lunchboxes of that?”

“You never know,” said the lawyer and, sure enough…

It’s fucking Rambo. You know the punchline.

This is a story meant to make the audience chuckle knowingly. To wipe their brows and phew for Mr. Morrell who almost missed the gravy train. I hear the story and get nostalgic for Morrell’s mindset. I miss when ideas were ideas and stories were stories. My brain too easily plays the lawyer, slickly looking at every idea and seeing lunchboxes, sequels, series, action figures.

I tell people that I started taking poetry “seriously” when I was a teenager. That’s when my normal weekend habit of going to my local coffeehouse open mic opened its trapdoor and dropped me into the competitive slam scene. At that age, the challenge of competition pushed me to write more creatively, more boldly, and more honestly. I wrote pieces with complex choreography about my parents’ divorce. I wrote poems about my very complicated relationship with masculinity (hold for laughs) and, for the most part, was rewarded for it. 

Poets at every bout had books and CDs. I wrote enough poems to fill an album, a book, a “feature” at a coffeeshop or venue. I didn’t feel any internal charge for these parts of the process, I just noticed other poets doing it and, like smoking cigarettes and writing dirty haiku, I figured it was something I ought to be doing. Poets started talking about “publishing” and “submitting” to literary magazines and websites and prizes. I did that, too. Poets started slamming, competing with performances of their poems for randomized panels of judges for scores from 1 to 10. I did that, too. Ironically, this hobby rooted in authentic self-expression was pushing me to express myself in ways I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. This all eventually culminated in me writing myself into a burnout and a seven-year hiatus from writing poems. 

I couldn’t sit down and write without, if you’ll pardon me for torturing the metaphor, thinking about the price of lunch boxes. How does this fit in a book? How does it sound live? What kind of scores would it get in Minneapolis? I was advertising years before I ever went to ad school. Since going to ad school, as explained above, only made those instincts sharper. Nowadays, whenever I flex my creative muscles, I risk cutting them on those instincts.

It’s only recently that I’ve been making a more concerted effort to break that habit. Writing for fun, writing only when I feel compelled to write, and writing without a long-term plan. It takes more effort than I’d like to admit, but I enjoy the process more. I have friends who I share things with. I have a community I write for. I no longer feel quite as hungry for recognition outside of myself. 

I’m sure a lot of this new push has to be laid, like everything lately, at the altar of my transition. The hollow of my heart no longer seemed to plummet quite so deep once I figured out the fundamental wrong of my body. The hole used to rumble for things like recognition, validation, acknowledgment, striving for fulfillment. Now I realize all it needed was the truth, and the understanding that I was a woman.

The craft still matters. Every piece and thing I write still has to be good by my own metric. I am simply more gentle with myself. I submit to journals when I feel like it. I perform when I can. I no longer eat until my teeth break. I know longer write with ambition.

Save, of course, for the ambition to simply be happy.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

8/31/2023

Long Distance Lovers

Life is incredibly adept at keeping me and any kind of regular writing practice at an almost romantic distance. We are not sweaty and smiling in the same bed night after night. Writing is busy. She wanders the dark spots at the edges of my eyes and won’t talk to me with any consistent frequency. This would be agony, this distance, but for a small needful fact:

I like it. 

I have always been drawn to the beauty of the distant love. Letters, long looks out of windows, giggling over the phone cocooned in the curled wires of nostalgic land lines. I am happy to pine for my poems, to hope with clasped hands for my next paragraph. I am a trans lesbian who spends a significant amount of time online, my heart is used to this digital punishment of Tantalus, reaching out for things beyond my hands. There are women across state lines who keep my sweet nothings tucked in their cheeks like shrinking hard candies.

I am used to reaching out, without reaching.

I have learned to enjoy the ache in my arms, as well as my heart. 

The writing will come, a migratory bird, a husband at war. If I hold my breath by the seaside of my mind, I will see it crowd the horizon soon enough. I’ve learned by now not to rush it. 
One benefit of this new iteration of my creative journey is that I’m writing with a different fuel than I used to. I’m not competing in slams or chasing publication. I am writing for the sheer clean joy of creating things. I occasionally submit when imposter syndrome sinks its greedy, green teeth into my neck, but that is a rare agony these days, thankfully.

I can be patient for writing’s return, because I do not need it. I am able to entertain its return at all for that same reason. I still remember the sweaty, red excavations of trying to write my truths and traumas at a breakneck pace just to have something new next week. I’m comfortable now. I will be writing when I have time and space. 

I have time and space enough now. I have a hunger now.

Writing will return, and we’ll feast together.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

8/18/2023

The Same But Different

If I had an elegant way to begin something, life would be simpler. I am way too used to thundering and crashing into things and that’s served me pretty well thus far. Listen close. This is the thunder.

A lot about my life has changed since the last time I gave any serious thought to writing poetry. I was in my early twenties, married, living in New York, and thoroughly convinced I was a man…albeit a man with some issues.

I am now in my early thirties, divorced, living back in my hometown of Atlanta, and a woman. I thought poetry was going to be something I did once. I thought I had put it on the same shelf as trips to Europe or the summer I spent listening exclusively to the Insane Clown Posse: fun to talk about but over with. Writing and performing poetry didn’t seem like something I could do anymore.

But I’ve been writing again. And performing again. And enough people have come up to me afterwards asking about my “socials” or a place to read my work that I kinda just want to have an answer for them.

That’s what this is. Life since I’ve transitioned has been an endless parade of questions.

The next time someone asks “where can I read your stuff?”

It’ll be nice to have an answer.

As for this blog and what I hope to do with it beyond share my work, I truly don’t know. A journal? A review corner? Nothing? Who knows?

That’s the question.

Let’s figure out the answer together.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B