Poetry penned after listening to fabulous episode of ‘Bedroom Eyes’ podcast (an intimate analysis of agency, ethics, relationships, and identity as experienced within oppressive systems of power hosted by badAss brown, queer, non-monogamous community organizer Juno Mariah) about autonomous relating- a not so distant moon of relationship anarchy.

Jordan’s Passion points us not to romantic love or sexual fury but to the tools she uses to make her work memorable, modern, experimental: urgency, time, music, pain, white space, marked silences, hushed pauses, earned wisdom, the language of the female psyche. 

Recently I was given a button. It reads “Pray for Sex”. I’ve pinned it to my jacket and often forget I’m wearing it- until I get laughs, compliments, or questions. The button reminds me why I started this blog. Why it’s so important to be outside our city’s only abortion clinic during this time of year. Visible and proud and securing space for all folx to make decisions about their bodies.

“There’s a lot of fetching at times about how the world is built for two, and how it holds this one style or this escalator up as a high-status relationship, and everything pales next to it. It’s a highly rigid and conforming way of [experiencing intimacy] that works for many people but doesn’t work for all. “

“Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with- that can be a dimension of it- but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” - bell hooks

Calvocoressi brilliantly uses the segno symbol as a pronoun throughout the book of poems, “representing a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuating, pronounced by me with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities.” Rockets of Desire defined on the page- and queerly expanded as well.

I reached through a small square of storage that lives behind one robin-egg blue swinging door in my ballroom apartment. I groped the unlit space for a roasting pan, or wire rack? Something metal and sturdy, instead I met 130 year old wood. A splinter, at least 1.5 inches long, lodged itself into the fleshy alcove between right thumb and forefinger.