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?

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