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.
Peace for Palestine! and thank you Naomi Shihab Nye- a first teacher about Palestine, a poet whose words changed me at a reading in Texas in 1994.
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. “
"As we love, we grieve. As we grieve, we love. With both, we queer our heartbrokenness.” -Lama Rod Owens
“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
in shapes of epistolary love
in queering quiet intimacies
in love language of spaciousness
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.
I love the smells of the south
That slam me against color
After months in the white cold
I am this wildness too
Twenty nine years ago
My grandma Ruth died
On the twenty-eighth day.
A Swede, the opposite
Of Texas.
“What you thought was the sound of the deer drinking
at the base of the ravine was not their soft tongues
entering the water but my Love tying my bow tie.”
I’m riding trashE dissonance between grad level scholarship on settler sexualities + black&feminist existentialism, a less academic lean into relationship anarchy, and intense cravings to watch rom coms on repeat. Curious, who is queering the science around the “mere exposure effect”?
A poem about the seasonality of nature’s events, the heart’s too. As in we love for a season, or two, or three, but oh how free if we admit, not for four.
I am on top. I’ve spent the summer on top. I climb on top over and over - wet hot sweaty. I ride waves of pleasure. I ride her. We climax and come down. We defy the top-bottom binary.
SCOTUS Flavored. Generational trauma at the hands of all that’s “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (IWSCP)” infused. As always, art, community, wildness, texts (as in books) and co-learning lend spaciousness.
There are multiple parts of attending Lynx games, especially Lynx vs Mercury matches, that are passages. This night is both the same and different; beyond, a new beginning, a return to my strong and vulnerable selves.
Annotated bibliography is my middle name right now. Grad school!
So when, post speaking gig las month, students from a macro social work class asked me to blog a list of my 25 favorite books about pleasure activism, sexuality, reproductive justice, and relationships I agreed. Here you go fabulously curious co-learners.
Queer ethnopoetics, a decentered/centering poem, an attempt to hear and read the rhythms of distant others & self, Relationality to words, bodies, sexuality produced not in some kind of isolation from different language or cultures. Creativity queering the effort to reach distances and place as we bring our own spaciousness (entangled identities) into fuller consciousness.