Cruel April

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and then got too busy to post it, but the sentiment still applies.

April, you're fucking terrifying.
Last week it was snowing.
How can I trust my bare skin to this air?
Do you even remember February?
How this landscape was a frozen cemetery?
How these trees were tombstones?
Now crocuses erupt from open graves
Past clumps of rotting leaves.
Too soon, April, and yet too late!

My mom bought a house when I was grown.
After years of apartments, trailers, basements,
Moving, always moving, she has settled down.
April, I walk through you like that house.
Nature has no memory,
Or these buds wouldn't be so bold, so tender.
When God sent a flood to cover the Earth
And destroy every living thing,
When the waters finally rolled back
And the land appeared, God sent a rainbow
As a promise.
No one thought to hold Him to this.

Once I went away all summer
And when I came home, my baby sister
Took one look at me and burst into tears.
I dropped onto one knee and held her
As she sobbed wordlessly in my arms,
Like, April, you hold me now.

What to do if you fall through

I don't actually like laws, since they are applied inconsistently, usually in order to control and disenfranchise communities of color and poor people and queers. But if I thought laws were more useful than violent, I would be tempted to say things like, "Can we outlaw February already?"

Seriously, why do I live in New England right now? I feel overwhelmed by my everyday responsibilities, I'm questioning all my life choices, I can't handle being around people. All because the world is buried in snow and I forgot what green looks like.

17 Words About Crossing a (Metaphorical) Frozen Pond

listening for the moment the ice starts to crack
send word of what's on the other side

This video is the very literal response when I tell a friend of the metaphorical frozen pond. Except, to my delight, it beautifully extends my metaphor:

1. Get your breath back. Seriously, just breathe for a couple of minutes.
2. Go back out the way you came in. The last ice you stood on can hold you.
3. Kick like hell and pull yourself out.
4. Roll away from the hole, then crawl. Stand only when you're sure it's solid.
5. If you see someone else fall through, stay back. Talk them through it. Throw them something to grab onto.

WWJD?

A week and a half or so ago, I read about Leelah Alcorn (warning: link contains her birth name for no good reason), a teenage trans girl from Ohio who had just committed suicide. Just before she did so, she had posted a Tumblr note (which has since been deleted??!!) in which she explained that her parents' systematic denial of support in the name of Christianity had led her to conclude she would never be able to transition successfully or be happy. They told her "God doesn't make mistakes" and brought her to "conversion" therapy. They took away her access to technology and outside support. She was made to feel so isolated and alone that she could see no future for herself, no way out.

I only started coming out as trans to my family in the last couple of years, and I'm a grown adult with strong community supports and a number of tools for taking care of myself. Plenty of family members have been great, and some are vocal about their acceptance of and even pride in me. But I've also heard things similar to what Leelah described before taking her own life: that I am delusional, wrong, and couldn't possibly know who I am or what to do about it. This from those who claim to know what Jesus would do.

There are plenty of statistics out there showing that trans and gender-nonconforming people attempt suicide at alarming rates. Studies attribute these attempts to experiencing greater physical and sexual violence—including institutional violence and healthcare discrimination—and homelessness. This study also cites family rejection as a "minority stressor" (57% who reported family rejection had attempted suicide).

Whatever excuses we are using as a culture to not care for trans people, to treat them as less than human, we need to stop. Whether it's religion, medicine, psychology, politics—whatever we're hiding behind, it's killing people. In her final blog post, Leelah pleaded with us to "fix society," or she will not be able to rest in peace. So get your shit together, people, or Leelah Alcorn's ghost will be at your fucking door!

Poem to Fix Society

If I were to pray,
I would pray for plowshares
To spring up where you brandish swords.

I would pray for my siblings everywhere,
Told that they're sick and broken
Until they break themselves open.

I would pray for no more
Prayers as weapons.

I would pray for no more
Scapegoats, no more
Sacrificial lambs.

But I don't pray anymore.
The rebel cast out cannot commune.

"Jesus was a rebel," you used to say.
Who would Jesus damn?

Heartbreaking Jerks and Staggering Genius, Part 2

That's right, you knew this was coming. Something about the "Part 1" in the title of the last post. It was just getting so long for a post on a blog that is ostensibly structured around a 17-syllable poem, but I still had more to say.

It's just that seeing Sybil Lamb read and hearing about her various antics reminded me just a little of my first girlfriend, who was also a terrifying genius, who I was afraid to be around because she bullied me and drove drunk, blowing through red lights in lower Manhattan, and started fights with huge cis dudes on the street and wanted to kill the president and wanted to know where I was every minute of the day, but who I hung around for six breathless months because she published slash fiction about PJ Harvey that freaked out a whole web forum and recorded an entire electronic music album on her computer about Super Mario and wrote semi-erotic poetry about her dog and took photographs of road signs and the moon. And who was almost six feet tall although not an actual Tall Girl.

It was a weird time in my life. I was a graduate student of creative writing at a conservative, Catholic football school in the Midwest (why???) and was living with my ex (because we were too co-dependent to do anything different), and she pushed all my boundaries and questioned many of my long-held beliefs. For example, beliefs that I wasn't all that interested in illegal substances. Which turned out to be true, but there's something to be said for testing our own theories now and then.

Anyway, J, if you're out there, I'm glad I knew you and I'm glad I don't know you anymore, and I hope you're still fucking shit up and making someone rethink everything they thought they knew.

Poem for a Mean Love

While on date with me,
Makes out with strange dude in bar.
"See? I ain't no dyke."

Cold-Cocked by the Galaxy

I've had a shitty week. Car broke down, laptop broke down, I dropped my phone and shattered the screen, on-and-off migraines, and some super-stressful work situations.

I like when I can identify some external cause for my woes, especially when it's something over which I have no control. It allows  me to shake my tiny fist and just ride it out. Enter astrology.

So I started asking around, hoping to confirm my suspicions that the sky was to blame for my difficulties. Reports started coming in that I'm not the only one who's had a week from hell. And someone showed me this: the Grand Cross.

Basically, four planets are forming 90-degree angles in four cardinal zodiac signs, and the result is a cosmic shit-show. This has been going on since January and will continue into June, and we're coming up on the peak, where the cross is its squarest.

Oh, also a little thing called a blood moon eclipse. Apocalypse, anyone?

Haiku for the Solar System Being a Dick

Why is life a mess?
Stars and planets all aligned
Flipping me the bird

This is how planets say "Fuck you."

Gratitude-Free Zone

I don't celebrate Thanksgiving, just like I don't celebrate Columbus Day. The story of the first Thanksgiving I was taught in school is a lie, the kind of lie that my Jewish friends were taught in Hebrew school as kids. A lie that is told to cover up genocide and land theft and erase the histories of entire peoples.

I am not thankful for this:

Or this:

I'm real happy that a lot of you have decided to take this day (or even this entire month) to remember to practice gratitude, and I like gratitude and think it's important.

But I just felt the need to carve out a little corner of the internet today in which to say, "No, thank you." Today is a day of mourning all those murders, rapes, mutilations, all that enslavement and lying and theft that happened and continues to happen in North America and Palestine and all over the world.

Also gonna mourn my grandma, who left this life on Thanksgiving a few years ago. She had a big mouth and an attitude and was one of my favorite people ever. Love you, Gram.

"We" "win" !! (??)

Sometimes there's so much to say that I spend days writing and rewriting. In the end, it comes down to the wise words of a friend (also a blogger) and 17 syllables.

Haiku for Equality

Acceptable queers 
were invisible or dead.
Great! Now add "married."

Phuck the pharmacia

I'm detoxing from antidepressants right now. It's pretty rough.

Baby, you were born this--SHUT UP!

Phuck Pharmacology

Yesterday I drank no coffee. Ordinarily I drink about two cups a day. Last night I had one of the worst headaches I've experienced.

Using pharmaceutical industry logic, I can deduce that coffee prevents migraine, it should be available only by prescription, and I should plan to drink it for the rest of my life, even if I develop a stomach ulcer.

With a rebel yell

My ailing love for humankind got a shot in the arm last night at the bowling alley in a neighboring town. Once in a while there is a karaoke crowd that is so fearless, so heartfelt, and so tipsy that their cracking voices crack my cold, hard heart.

The magic is gone

This is what I wrote last night.

I don't want to talk about it.

Haiku for March 20, 2013

Sorry, too pissed off
Don't feel like writing haiku
Good night, you assholes