"let me get in there"

the inside of my mouth tastes like metal.
i know i smell like you do

when you're fearing.
i turn up a wolf's nose
at your pale frown
and shaky staining palms, but the grief

pooling under your face
bones is the loneliness that i ultimately run to
and then return from
     knowing
we can devour each other
with a kindness foreign to animals.

so that my body is also a lumpen thing full of buried treasure

In Logan Square I found the moon on the sidewalk,
yellow from being tossed about the street
y the wind.
The light
struck me. I cut a lintel. Fixed it over my chest.

I find a kinship in our muteness. I can't discuss
the unspeakable. Many of my precious objects
are cuts to the cord coiled inside,
and I soak my strings in blood
to wrap up tighter in my crust.

A while back hope crept through
beak unweaving
to sleep like a dove in the twine-dulled
razorwire of my guts.

The thing stopped singing, never woke

(until) the power of windowing the cocoon took over,
and in extremity
the moon's open eye was song






                                For Judith Scott

This body is considered an item to be believed in
only once it's proven a site or source of harm.

No one knows why this is
precisely because we can all explain it.

There can't be a human similarity
running through everyone
but I know there has to be something.

Humanism is baloney
but most of us do have two eyes.

Maybe this matters more than we thought.

Mother Testing Exercises

What happens when I catch myself
there on the boat after dark?
I will be halfway to
the golfcourse where I will not
sleep with anyone.

My friends will one day wake up
with grass in their shorts and the rings
of trees branded on their tongues,

but I'll come pick myself up and drive me home
down the Belt Parkway.

My hair will be caught around a candybar cellphone after midnight
on the Staten Island ferry.

An aquarium of bones sits waiting,

but I'll never see it; just cover the receiver of the landline
and try to keep from laughing
because

I'm the voice on the loudspeaker telling everyone
we're about to dock.

My mother won't know why I'm not talking
she won't see me at all.

sensitive dependency on initial conditions

I just gave a butterfly a funeral:
assayed it to lake Michigan
with its wing-powder and parasites.

the ferris wheel next to the water
was blinking in time with Shoreline,
slowly drawing in breaths.

They arranged 22 sour apples
in the shape of an arrow
and pointed it at the rising moon.

All the boats surveyed,
rocking like old birds
in the benevolent wind.

of hating and submitting and the balance

what happens when i stop holding the shattered word
that would name me?

it used to slip
out my lips like a blue newborn
this woman-word.

return it to me and I'm doomed
like a rabbit. this animal?
she only ovulates when penetrated.

regard me like prey
at your own expense -- i was only a woman
when you all decided to violate me,
gender blooming under my skin like spreading broken yolk.

wounds and warrens and war have left their marks on me.
i won't face out towards your ring of spears
tied in my own skin and bound for it.

i no longer identify with the power of rising above.

i'd rather slip between your ankles and forget
the whole mess of still wanting desire.

like i said, i'll be prey when it's your funeral.
until then, bite me and i'll walk.
i am not a woman.
i don't want to remember anymore.

untitled (work in progress)

Once upon a time there was a human person that loved rabbits.

They vacillated between the preference
for linguistic transparency and ossification.

This character, when represented
in text, seems invisible without a gender.

Circumscribing their identity seems a great deal harder without the use of pronouns.

But this person resists the history their genitalia tells.

Themes weave through their life in high, flat clouds.

They can't be held to the earth

in rivulets, the carved channels of stream beds.

Perhaps it is the extent to which their body has been regarded as permeable

that they embrace a transitoriness in their relationship with identity.

Perhaps their life is an exercise in being named.

Nyx is their pronoun as often as possible.

Night and a sheath like the skinny clouds

that glide across the face of the moon.

Nyx is wreathed in 

Nyxselves, and they are 

always leaving.

__

The moon is a sleeping rabbit.

Nyx stares out at its heaviness. 

The moon is a different thing each night, like a heart.

Nyx remembers when it was a red-gutted slash

over the black hills of central California.

It was so visceral and terribly 

       open. It

       was the body of the bleeding 

            rabbit exposed

       and Nyx wanted nothing but

   to penetrate it.

With this desire a pull opened from within them

The vomited heavily onto the dark floor 

  as their moving train car traveled north.

__

No one had fucked them in a short while

and the desire was a shock

to be inside the moon

to hold its slippery guts

to move silently and slowly back and forth

lacking nothing.

there had been a spark

of anger at knowing 

S____ a few nights before.

They had decided to sleep in the Jesuits mission

after that

after that audacity after they had put their damp nose

to Nyx's cold dry nose

after they had dared to fall asleep like that

after they had dared to hold Nyx in their arms 

after

a lot of nights of ignoring them

and their slippery guts

and their ankles

and their ability to lock tight

lock tight around a neck

__

This is an exercise in feeling the other side

of safety

of returning to where it hurt

where it started to rot

where it became gangrenous

where it fell off

__

a return to when Nyx's doctor said

dismissive that the skin was necrotic

that the body was killing itself

 from Nyx's genitals

"it looks herpectic"

and three years later Nyx dreamed of a white rabbit

covered in scars and horrible wounds

a white rabbit that they drowned

in an industrial sink 

their arms spasmodic,

a tension in the muscles.

who i am right now (9/21/12)

i am a queer white person

i am a person

i am a person who was a straight girl

i am a person who feels like those categories are obsolete now

i am a person who feels with their stomach and their heart

really deep, feelings resonating in guts 

who feels energy and amplitude coming out in a hot torrent

who wants to know if everyone feels that way

who couldn't be prescriptive about what's in a body

who desperately wishes unity was 

who eases into heterogeneity

slowly, throbbing like a cut foot in the warm bath

seeing difference like your own hands

blurry under water

slowly, at first because opening

your eyes stings

CeCe Presentation

“Is it ok if I used it to nudge several people towards Death Valley with it?”

epistle to tommy (november 2010)

Our family makes change
which we run from and then hate,
but cousin,
I know I at least do it compulsively.

Just like you ran,
hid, stole and concealed your stealing
(for drug money,
for freedom)
so do I shy away from responsibility
to anyone but myself
and my shaky clay heart.

I hide my mistakes too—just like you
couldn’t ask my aunt for the thousand dollars,
for a loan,
because you knew it was money you’d spend
on selfishness,
and didn’t want to disappoint—

as a child, I’d never ask my mother for anything.
Not even to define a word,
because I was afraid it was dirty,
to let me watch television,
or to follow me in the street.
In my eyes she was not even kin,
but a safe place I had denied myself
in order to succeed alone.

To succeed alone,
so as to never disappoint
no one.

written in san francisco, late january

I'm watching an old chinese man hang
his laundry from the fire escape
across the street from city lights.

I'm sitting in the third-floor window,

and thinking
cities
make me ill.

i'm starting to deeply resent the past
as it's resuscitated here
and rebranded to serve the unseen
purpose of money-making.

Right now, the new Kerouacs
and Ginsburgs of California
are asleep in oakland,
worn out be the violence of the East Bay Police force,
asleep
in a city that serves treachery to those I love every day
like all cities.

It only stops when the cops call it
clear that the spirit has died
and only the body remains.

..

Debord is right --

the society of the spectacle desires no connection
with the flesh and heart of what's happening.
The sad husks I see wandering around the streets of San Francisco
would rather buy the images of corpses
with long-dead brains rotted below the topsoil who knows where
than love the sparking
wildness that has grown up in the shadow of their excising.

Where are the tourists in East Oakland?
Where the the microphones recording the argument
I woke up to through the floor on E 62nd street,
the angry slamming of words
over money and desire
that some how tumbled me and Adrian groggily into a conversation
about the lived realities of gender performance
and our engagements with attempts at embodying masculinity?



I'm not kidding. This really happened, but
Capitalism has been too quick to snatch us up
for our vests and haircuts.

It couldn't give a fuck about our words
our struggles
our solidarity and love.

..

Fuck everyone

everyone who thinks that money is enough,
who contents on fake flowers
who can't be bothered to sew one button
onto the lapel of a silk jacket.

Fuck waste, and fuck want.
Fuck deep need that is chronically unmet.
The market, the spectacle --

let's burn it.

4/2

so much of my writing has been about the shapes of you
arched back, trail hollow leading
down to marble hips

triangle between nose and winking
left eye, curved lips rosy
smile round like the bottoms of yr glasses.

ringlets and hidden muscles
freckles i still smirk about sometimes
the growing collection of holes and marks
that contain you, whatever
you are or is or were

clothing that fit too tight

i miss a person who grew up
and i admire the person who i see now
still here
i am still here
my heart still
grown up but oh my god
i am still here

please stop
running away please
stop
running

untitled, two

today i cried while fucking because i missed you so much
except i don't know who you are and i don't know
where home is anymore.

all i can think about when i remember you
is the way your nose slanted
down from your eyes in some kind of weirdly perfect geometry
literally every memory i have of you involves
the strange triangle between
eyelid, browbone, bridge and nostril.

i loved you so much
more than i ever loved my own home
more than home as a word because home
as a word doesn't mean much on its own.

it is national poetry month.

response to Patriarchy in the Movement

tw: sexual assault

i used to be really freaked out by riot porn and super not into what i conceived to be politically "violent" tactics (mostly property destruction, oddly most acts of interpersonal violence from positions of subjugation that i heard about made sense to me even if this didn't). i was even unsettled by militant feminism. looking back, this was definitely because i still wasn't ready or able to accept the amount of violence that i've been exposed to in my own life. at the period in my healing process that i was starting to encounter a lot of new political tactics (about a year and a half ago, when Occupy started up), i was definitely still living in a much more sensitive and emotionally evasive place than i am now. 

i felt, at that time, like exposing myself to more "violence" would cause me to become further traumatized and scar me more.

the interesting thing is that the more nuanced my understanding of power became--and thus, the more i was exposed to political content that i previously would have deemed "violent"--the less easily triggered i became. the more i came to terms with the fact that others in the world had been hurt and responded by lashing out, the more enabled i was to come alive emotionally. for so long i was frozen by the fear of violence and cloistered by my determination to avoid it. i truly never expected that this would happen--i literally never thought that accepting that i'd been harmed would allow me to overcome being further hurt by it. as such, being reminded of the trauma i carry actually did cause those references to be further traumatizing. it was only once i started allowing myself to feel the deep fear and sadness i carried as a result of being assaulted and privy to emotional abuse that i was able to move out of the paralysis that had held me for so long.

i thought about this most recently after the panel about Patriarchy in the Movement that was held at the Red & Black. after a surprise callout and an offensive attempt to shut it down, things got really heated. at one point an amazing woman named María was shouting angrily about the way that rape culture has formed the very basis of her existence. she was literally yelling about the fact that her ancestry--she's mixed Latina--is a product of rape. 

a year ago, i would have likely felt like María's anger was violent in a way that i wouldn't have been able to tolerate. It would have terrified me, because i would have identified with it. it would have shaken me deeply because it was so different from how i was relating to trauma then.

after the panel, i went up to María and thanked her for her anger. calmer, she was shy about it. "no," i said. "thank you so much. i'm sure you can understand--as a survivor, there is nothing more empowering and uplifting for me to see another survivor angry and fighting for their life instead of hopeless and sad." and it's true. instead of scaring me, María's open display of "violence" made me feel empowered in a way that i never have before.

it really never ceases to amaze me that tactics and opinions that i once thought of as destructive and violent became the vehicles of my liberation.

agile, curious, hungry

i fell asleep on yr couch after watching
you slide out the door at 3 am
on a housecall
or maybe just like a housecat
finally
wriggling out of capitvity

who knows

you didn't come back
home but i found you in the morning.

i've held you
a couple times now
or maybe more, enough
to feel like possibly
it was a thing, like
i might hope to find you somewhere,
when i needed
a nose to rub mine into
if only you came when i called

if you came to hold me instead
of all over my raw knuckles and the skin
of my teeth in the darkness

of your seemingly endless room.

for better or worse, i see you
on nights when you decide to rub
up against me, purring a little
and in the mornings when i wake up
to find you unconscious and sloppy
your need a quiet cat
the curls over both of us
insistent and evasive at the same time.

progress (cormorant)

i biked across the hawthorne bridge today and
there was a cormorant sitting in the water
with a halo larger than a shipping container

i'd never seen a bird radiate before
the water keeping its distance
rippling like an uneasy crowd

the bird made me think of myself

and all the poems i didn't write this year

but calmer

and graceful in her loneliness

"evading desire is a form of slow suicide"

i saw the crescent caught
cut moon watermarking
a reminder in the sky of my whole life
written on an orouboric ream of paper
a hungry torus
snaking around the neck
and shoulders of my facedown self as i flicker
back and forth between 2007 and 2012
five years moving like a deck of cards
between the hands of someone older than i am
with loose fingers and a trick
of the light to make a circle
out of a thousand spinning shards.

My high school bedroom is a tomb
and i elbow the door shut
to stop the draft

it was only once i called my mom in
to clear out the ghosts
that i stopped dying in here.

Every object in this house is a fossil
of who i was
at terrible war with who i'm becoming
and the question of Becoming
is the question of desire

isn't it always?

ten swords

Yes, what I said was:

"years of self-denial at the imagined behest
of what i thought was a higher power"

years of ten swords plunged into my back
and the chronic avoidance of coping mechanisms
favoring learning processes instead
and real decisions made
with so much agency
that they render my body a yawning
tesseract,
the future an expanse filled with stars
warping to the powers of 10
like an Eames film
and my chest is full of the geometry of blades

i am a matrix of wounds
and sinewy lazers.

blood moon from the train

the last thing i remember watching
is the fishgut red of the moon
descending into the earth

so heavy and opulent
bleeding and langorous she felt
sinister and inviting i'd never thought
what it might be like to penetrate something before
truly with a part of me
instead of my hands

Untitled l

I've never felt my body go numb before,
but between the migraine and my mother
coming in with tea and a back massage
to pull the splinters of time out of me
and align the frail nerve-maps of my spine

i felt a new kind of nothing.

A present-and-i'm-here nothing
like a you-didn't-get-me nothing
because i will be happy again
and dammit we have all the same friends.

A locked-in-place nothing
like the rest of the network
took over for a second

A nothing that gently filled me after you left
my lungs, poured out of me
like liquid smoke
or boltbus exhaust
like the tar of every cigarette i inhaled
and every boy i fucked because
you did.

And after our life flashed before my eyes,
I thanked the world
for showing me something greater than you:

Untitled 1

this is a poem about how nobody loves me
and how nobody cares enough about me to come over
to my house where i'm reduced
to puppy whining in the back
of my throat
and reading other people's work
with absolutely no confidence
that i'll ever produce my own again

with this idea of a poem as a thing
a thing that i can't do anymore
because i am addicted to problem-solving
because i want every emotion
to be useful
to alleviate pain
to notify everyone about the stakes of suffering

because i want to be whole
because i want to feel
like i was never abandoned
that my parents love me
that my brother isn't sick
that i'm not sick
that i

that i am.

i can't control what i am
i can't control the universe
the spinning moon

i can't control the way an allusion
to a cow in a poem makes my heart expand
softly as i recall everything beautiful about the day
i spent with adrian listening
to moos in marin county
calmly waiting for nothing
but more happiness.

untitled, a year old

i have been running away from these feelings for months

learning the skill of bottling-up

and now i'm here

can't leave the house

because i know if i do i'll start sobbing

can't be around people

because today i am too sad for them

and i need too much

and i don't want to hurt them

with my love