February 2012
27 posts
3 tags
after having relationships that were secret due to not being out, relationships that were quasi-secret due to their being shitty/controlling, feeling like i shouldn’t talk about relationships due to them making people feel uncomfortable and think that i am a freak/being closeted to some members of my family and not others (&&etc) it feels really radical and scary and amazing to talk...
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nic bravo wrote this really beautiful thing... →
this is my favorite part, but you should go read the whole thing.
so happy to call nic bravo my friend. <3
stickupforyourselfson:
How do we build safe spaces without policing bodies and identities along binary terms?…
I think that the safe spaces that feel best to me are built around excluding oppressive behaviors. I want my safe space to be free of misogyny. In my community, that...
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things i liked about twilight: breaking dawn
1.it is all about body fluids
2. i like the part about the werewolf imprinting on the human/vampire baby, that seems pretty queer/donna haraway-ish, and how the werewolves and the vampires have made their own families of affinity
3. basically it is a giant allegory about why privileging heterosexual intercourse (and the legal/religious institution that is supposed to permit it) its a really...
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Maureen responds to seeing I love crushes... for...
farmhaus:
I received “I love crushes more than real things” (unthinkable creatures publishing) via Kristen Stone of queeragripoetics.tumblr.com. It was incredible. Flipping through it, seeing the words I had thumbed through my iPhone delivered thousands of miles back in analog was breathtaking. The winter nights I spent curled under comforter, on the brink of tears from loneliness and confusion...
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don't deconstruct: blonde bobs/daisy dresses →
jumpforsaberteeth:
I used to think that everyone had a foggy, dark even, recollection of their childhood. I’ve always thought of my distant past as being somewhat of a previous life.
… I hate writing about deep shit. I always end up tearing it up/throwing it away/deleting it from my computer. And even after I get rid of it I still feel super weird. I always feel dirty when I talk about my...
CR 1491, saturday, 7:55am
i passed jasmine on her way to town and stopped my car to get out and lean into her window and kiss her. she was wearing my mom’s acid washed jean jacket and blue/green earrings. i was listening to the mountain goats, she was listening to MEN. i could hear them both.
i didn’t put my seatbelt on to drive the last mile home. the feeling of openness across my chest
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hypothetical question
say you wrote a book that had people’s actual names in it? and these people are: like shitty, bad people? like homophobes and creepy teachers? would you keep these people’s real names in your book that’s getting published?
not in a moral sense but, like, is it against the law?
jasmine: yr the foam in my orange juice
kristen: yr an egg fried in butter
jasmine: i sure hope so
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love is the most important project →
[[GLITTER TONGUE: love poems by 30 queer and trans poets! live today! extra special!]]
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domestication handbook on tumblr
In the spirit of Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl tumblr earlier this year, I’m experimenting with curating a space online as I edit my manuscript— mostly it will be weird animal pictures, creepy dolls, suburban kitsch, monster-girl mashups…
follow it?
(if you want)
maybe you will like it
i hope you do
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june 26 2003 myMotherHasBeenDiscussingGAYthingsWithMeAllDay
july 20 2003 my grandfather died
july 26 2003 i bought my first ever magazine that came in a sealed plastic bag.
august 8 2003 bruises are funny to look at
sept 7 2003 dess made me a wallet out of red duct tape. my jeans ripped. the hole looks like a vagina. i’m writing a poem about it
To me, writing is about being a prude: the squeamish pleasure of writing (saying) things
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“At home, we watched each other hump pillows on the floor like we were fucking”
– Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Pulling Taffy, p 61
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“I’m just sort of in the mood to have a crush on someone where it...”
– Delia Fisher, My So Called Life ep. 19
google poetics
I.
think: how do i know if i am gay blog
type: how do i know if i am glad
II.
how much…
how much does a chapbook cost
how much does an abortion cost in florida
song for parking lot, 2/7/2012
tv’s on in the nail studio.
use the bathroom in a restaurant that looks empty. startle the hostesses, tucked in the corner, when you come out. i’m just going to look at your fish tank, okay? they look at each other and then at you. um, okay?
they are silver and gold and black and gray. you are about to tell the hostesses one is dead when you realize it’s a sucker fish....
2 tags
menstrual blogger redux
having a lot of feelings re: menstrual politics/poetics
because there’s so much essentialism around talking about periods (yr a woman because yr body does this thing) and there are girls who don’t have periods, and boys who do, and everything that’s About Periods in the world of scholarship uses the language of woman completely unthinkingly. and i don’t want to...
4 tags
nic bravo wrote this beautiful thing →
<3
stickupforyourselfson:
Unthinkable Creatures is this busy, hectic workshop filled day and night with the bodies and the work and the sounds of a bunch of intense, tough, dreamy ladies with tattoos and asymmetrical haircuts. It’s housed in an abandoned foundry: writing desks and craft tables and tattoo stations,…
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what do you wish you'd learned in gender studies
/women’s studies/women’s and gender studies?
I’m working on an essay about queer feminist praxis and am interested in the gaps people experience between what they learned in school and what skills/insight they’ve needed/wanted outside of school.
examples: recognizing, naming, and pushing back against transmisogyny; how to negociate boundaries in interpersonal...
i am so immensely excited
by all the things my friends are doing with language
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I found my livejournal
I FOUND MY LIVEJOURNAL
I FOUND MY LIVEJOURAL
I THOUGHT IT WAS GONE FOREVER
i might die.
i can’t even read it yet.
i just read C’s tho and she wrote about coming out to her dad:
“[your mom] had hopes and dreams for her little girl, this is something she may never get used to”
oh baby don’t worry we’ll get out of this town and show...
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v important question
what does the phrase “lady endings” make you think of?
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I love crushes more than real things →
what’s the best way to tell someone you like them? fucking tell them. if you need some help, though, this sweet/creepy little chapbook might be just the prompt you need.
now available, on etsy* the very first unthinkable creatures release, I love crushes more than real things.
drawings by Maureen Murtha! Collages! Mangled photos from my middle/high school years! 26 pages! some of them are...
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vertical interrogation
9. tell me what you know about dismemberment.
[warning for people especially my family there is SEX in this also generalized creepiness]
in the place before sleep there are moving images. the random firings of the neurons as they settle in. as her hand twitches three times on my shoulder, we are like the pigs after they are shot. no, we are not. we are soft and damp after fucking, we are sweet...
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vertical interrogation:
[random order]
5. What is the shape of your body?
at first i hated yoga because everyone loved it. i could feel the ants covering my body as we lay like corpses in the darkened room at the Y, on our blue mats like kindergarten nap time.
what is the shape of your body? it will not do what i want it to.
as a child, i took ballet classes for almost seven years. being small and stretchy, i was...
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: Vertical Interrogation #2 →
terriblegurl:
Second installment in solidarity with poet/friend Jessica Otto answering questions posed in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.
Question: Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
There is no other way to say this: I’ll never really know.
I imagine where history…
I have a vertical interrogation post in the works, will post tomorrow Jessica Otto and...
January 2012
21 posts
1 tag
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After Ana Božičević’s Same... →
stickupforyourselfson:
After Ana Božičević’s Same Difference in Evening Will Come.
I encountered a wolf once. I was walking home from another farm. It was dusk, and I walked down the road and the wolf followed, parallel, in the field. It felt exhilarating like I could be eaten. But the exhilaration was a…
Nic then writes:
Maybe I don’t have a good imagination, but [the thought...
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“it’s gonna smell good. or taste good.
yr gonna use it up.
you can share...”
– Jasmine, on giving gifts
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average friday at home, a list
kristen: does this outfit make me look like a caricature of myself?
nic bravo: yes, but in a good way
# conversations about feelings/boundaries: ~2
# conversations about outfits: 3-5
# conversations about food: ongoing, unbounded
# of resolutions related to chicken soup*: 1
# internet-based exchanges with the people i live with: 2
# times toad was allowed in the bed: 2
# hours of sleep: 5
#...
3 tags
EDITING
I would like you to be normal now, one little mammal thinks to the other at breakfast. Breakfast is something called Carnation Instant Breakfast, which is like baby formula for children who do not want to eat breakfast. Or it is a banana. Those are the options. The other little mammal, the smaller one, will not put on her shoes. She is crying. I hate socks, she says. They feel horrible. It is not...
5 tags
totally a thing:
Domestication Handbook* is going to be published by Sawako Nakayasu’s Rogue Factorial
!!!!!!!
Sawako is a completely brilliant and lovely poet/translator who contacted me in the fall after my photos were up on Montevidayo. Check out her Mouth: Eats Color, the inaugural RF title, published last year. (I’m reading it right now)(it’s full of the poetry feeling)
DETAILS...
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editing
social and aesthetic norms regarding shifts between first, second, third person and verb tense vis-a-vis intelligibility, myth of stable identity, literary conventions.
first, second, third. past, present, AND conditional. “inconsistent voice”
Tension Means Shifting Tenses=the grammar handbook i will never write
there’s a she and a you and an i and we’re all in the...
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“everything causes a scar. living causes a scar”
– rayann on my so called life
re: angela’s pimple and in response to sharon’s pearl-clutching (“don’t pop it, she’ll get a scar”)
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vertigo is about profound attraction. an excess of...
-bhanu kapil, schizophrene (possible misquote)
the following has sex talk in it
the other day me and nic bravo we were talking about kink which is newly one of my (our?) favorite things to talk about. i think i just want to read about it, i said, i don’t think i want to do it. (meaning BDSM). i was showing her latex vacuum cubes which i’d just read about, imagining being sealed...
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review: Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil →
My review of Bhanu’s new book. also a great review of Jill Magi’s SLOT by David Giver
[also: LIMN IS OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS. don’t you want david giver and me to read your poetry?]
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"safety is a deep wide question"*
[warning sex and bad words]
what would it look like to speak differently. to each other as our animal/girl selves. sniff each other’s faces. the way the kitten climbs on its mother’s face. the secret kitten, that climbed up from under the porch.
the notebook like the body, exposed. its soft white surfaces and tender seam. writing in public is like taking off your clothes. the first time i went...
6 tags
INVARIABLY (overshare)
every time i send an email to a writer i admire, or an editor, or someone whose zine i want to submit to or whatever, i begin by using capital letters, proper grammar, and variable sentence length/structure, but rapidly (d)evolve into using mostly i statements littered with overshare and run-ons. at the precise point where this happens i stop capitalizing i and sign my name in lowercase even...
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new rules for moving through physical space
1. decide on a destination before you begin walking.
2. once you begin moving, do not stop until you reach your destination.
3. do not remember something else, change your mind and switch directions partway through.
4. walking is like learning to hit a baseball— follow through.
5. i am probably not qualified to make baseball metaphors
6. although i played one season of under-12 girls...
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archaeology of a trunk of notebooks
“I was never so young that I didn’t hear that terrible, all-knowing voice in my head, narrating my life” — Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, 167
today i stayed home to write, work on the chapbook, and (told myself i would) go through all the stuff i brought back from my mom’s house last week.
every notebook that i wrote, starting with the fill-in-the-blank...
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secret longing
is about incubation, not obfuscation.
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“if you make it real, it’s not the same. it’s not yours anymore.”
– claire danes as angela chase on my so called life re: why she wanted to stay inside and watch through the window instead of going outside to talk to jordan
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introducing very exciting project
unthinkable creatures chapbook press!
——————————————————————-
I. ORIGIN STORY
the day after christmas i had breakfast and sat on a steep (for central florida at least) hill on a gray day with karen and we talked about technology, access, zines and riot grrl...
2011 year in review
My sister had a baby, I got my MFA and started to think of myself/feel like/actively pretend to be a real writer.
Other best things about 2011 were: making friends with writers online (Kate Zambreno and Kari Larsen to name a couple); raising pigs; new queer friends IRL (Jess of nth wave feminism and Nic Bravo among others who have less internet presence). Also new job/town/haircut (haircuts. Many...
December 2011
10 posts
6 tags
marie calloway && the confessional [WORDVOMIT]
i mostly read marie calloway’s adrien brody because it was getting a lot of negative attention, & then tao lin’s response was surprisingly, sweetly earnest, then i was working a graveyard shift on thursday night so i read adrien brody, even though (CONFESSION) i have a really hard time reading things on the internet.
then kate zambreno wrote an AMAZING essay on the whole thing,...
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"an education in electricity and green things" →
up in specter issue 4. lot of good writing there (especially love “My House: Welcome: Go Away” by Jaclyn Watterson!) give it a read!
[potentially disturbing veterinary procedure in my goat essay, FYI]