Monthly Archives: January 2024

Two Poems by Perry Brass

Prolific gay novelist Perry Brass’s books include Trial by Night, King of Angels, and the self-help volume The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love. This spring, he will be collaborating with my friend John Ollom on a poetry and dance performance entitled “Threads” at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. (Stay tuned for ticketing info.) Perry has kindly allowed me to reprint two of his new poems below.

I Will Ask Mike Pence to Kiss Me

I know it. I know it. That face
blank as the moon excites me,
makes me feel all hard
inside. He is such an Eagle Scout,
such a serious contender for
the face of crime control.
He looks so grave, so sober,
like Daddy as an undertaker
that somebody needs to juice him up,
lighten his loafers, make him glow,
make him show a little pulse,
make him show he’s got jism
at his fingertips. So,
I will volunteer my time,
just to get Mike off his pedestal,
that one eons lower than his
former boss’s,
the one whitewashed in Indiana, the
one presented to him by the American
Legion, the Kiwanis Club, the Rotarians,
and the K. of C. The one
he’s glued to by Alien tape. OK,
I will unglue him. Undo him
perhaps. Just you wait, Mike.
Just you wait. Kiss me!

****

O’Shae

You were killed barechested at
at a gas station
in Brooklyn by a kid who didn’t
like tall black men dancing
at night, with the light stark

and cutting around them, making
deadly halos out of the silence
surrounding Beyoncé’s songs, that
blasted through time that stopped,
and confronted
an anger that had nothing to do
with your dance.

But with you, tall
and beautiful, articulate of body,
wise of eye, soft of mouth, long
fingers, wide shoulders, black chest,
and there you were
with the kid shooting you on his phone,
and you stepped up
into that void of hot summertime
while others watched until you
fell—
stuck, bleeding—and your friend
Otis held you and pressed the blood
with his hand until the ambulance
arrived—and we were all crying,
all of us there, all of us seeing,
your friends and ten siblings
and family and rows and rows
of marching people crying.

Only knowing when you died
at Maimonides Hospital that
a real part of us had known
death too, had felt it deep
in the rolling rivers
of your life
with strong hands carrying your body.

For O’Shae Sibley, murdered the night of July 29, 2023. His friend Otis Pena tried to stop the bleeding with his hand. 

Nature Poetry by Duane L. Herrmann and Samantha Terrell

Two of our prolific Winning Writers newsletter subscribers recently sent me great poems that I wanted to share with you. Duane L. Herrmann is a Kansas poet, farmer, and essayist about the Bahá’í faith. We often compare notes about the weather when he sends me his publications news for the newsletter. In this new poem, he describes cutting down an unusual dead tree before snowstorm season.

SAVING THE FENCE

Tree with seven trunks,
all dead,
like spread fingers,
or an open fan,
against the sky,
but some falling.
More will fall
across the fence
with destruction
unless…
until…
brought down
with purpose
which was, eventually,
done.
Now, vacant space
opens the sky
with stubs remaining.

****

Samantha Terrell‘s newest poetry collection is Dismantling Mountains (Vellum Publishing). From the book blurb: “Terrell uses innovative and traditional poetic forms to shine a light on social and ecological issues, allowing the reader to become part of conscious change. An internationally published poet with a global perspective, Terrell moves naturally between themes, from writing her own creation myth, to motherhood, nature, war, and poverty and abundance.” Samantha promotes her fellow poets on her blog Shine, which features a new author every 2-4 weeks. I loved the unique marriage of hot and cold imagery in the poem that she’s allowed me to reprint below.

LUMIERE

Snowball sun
requests an audience
with our eyes.

Insistently, she presses her glassy
winter white bosom
against the backs of

soldier spruce and
mighty maple’s
bare branches–

forcing great flashes of
her soul through gaps, to
glimpse us.

January Bonus Links: Israel-Palestine

I have nothing to say about President Claudine Gay’s resignation except that Harvard is a terrible place and I feel sorry for anyone who works there.

Writer, AIDS activist, and historian Sarah Schulman was interviewed last month by Sally Tamarkin in the queer magazine THEM. Among other points, Schulman discussed what supporters of Palestinian human rights can learn from ACT UP about allowing differences of opinion in liberation movements. Schulman’s books include Israel/Palestine and the Queer International and Conflict Is Not Abuse.

In Israel/Palestine you talk about the “absurdities and promise” of politics of solidarity. What are your observations about solidarity politics today, in the 10-plus years since you wrote the book?

I think there’s a fake fantasy of solidarity that is like the rainbow: one of you, and one of you, and we’re all happy and we all look alike and we’re all together, and that’s really not what it is. It’s a fraught and constantly shifting series of relationships. And as much as it is a fantasy, it is also an absolute necessity because at least in the United States, change only comes from coalition, and if you’re out there on your own, you cannot transform the society…

I’m wondering if you think about this balance between being able to have plurality and connect around where we differ, but also making sure that we’re not sliding back into, “well, just some reforms would be okay,” if what we really want is liberation.

ACT UP had a radical democracy structure in which people were allowed to disagree and they could function in separate spheres as long as they adhered to the one-sentence statement of unity, which was “direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” If you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, really you could do anything. And the key to ACT UP was that they did not try to force homogeneity of analysis or strategy. Instead, there was simultaneity. So it’s not about compromise, it’s about coexistence — or as the Palestinians call it, co-resistance.

Right now, there are people who want a ceasefire, and then there are people who want to end U.S. funding, and then there are people who want a one-state [solution], and then there are people who want a return to the Palestinian state. There are a lot of different wants, and you have to figure out where you are in this moment and go with what makes sense to you. It’s not about telling people who want to ceasefire that they’re wrong; that is not helpful because we do need to ceasefire. Nothing can happen as long as people continue to be murdered.

There are those of us who want to end the occupation and siege, and we do everything we can toward that goal. But it’s not about trying to take down the other positions that are on your spectrum. This is the great error of the left. And this is where a lot of people make a mistake about what they think activism is; they think that activism is about taking people down if you don’t have full agreement, and that is wrong. Activism is about opening a door that makes it possible for people to be effective where they’re at.

Lesbian-feminist playwright Carolyn Gage’s blog post “A Note To My Friends Who Are Frustrated With My Political Process” applies her expertise in trauma recovery to the heated debate about Gaza and the feelings of powerlessness it inspires. Everyone, from the richest university in America to the most obscure poetry journal, faces political pressure to make a public statement immediately, which is hardly conducive to what Buddhists call right speech–true, timely, compassionate, and beneficial.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:

“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]

I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza…

…the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.

It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is a social justice organizer and a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teaches anthropology, urban education, and Middle Eastern studies. He has a very engaging YouTube channel where he gives pithy analysis of the Palestinian situation, as well as videos on current events and Black popular culture. I learned a lot from this 11-minute video on “5 Myths About Israel and Palestine”.

Karim Kattan, a Jerusalem-born French novelist, wrote about the silencing of Palestinian voices in an October 2023 essay in The Baffler, “At the Threshold of Humanity”.

Three weeks ago, in a world that was significantly different from today, I was preparing a keynote speech. I had been invited to talk about my work in Innsbruck, in Austria, at a conference on the French language across borders. Following the Hamas attack on October 7, I received a message from the organizers demanding that I share the title of my speech and that I “refrain from mentioning the current situation and leave the political dimension out of [my] talk to avoid any eruption.” I responded that I could not participate under these conditions, my whole practice and life being at stake in what is unfolding in my country. The organizer insisted on calling me so that she could explain that “the current situation”—a euphemism—seemed very confusing and complicated to her, possibly a minefield, and therefore they just wanted to make sure that what I said was appropriate. “I realize,” she added, “that you wouldn’t say anything horrific. I just want to make sure.”

I have been thinking about this conversation in the weeks since, about what it says of the way we Palestinians are considered as living, breathing, writing, political beings. That I did not go to a literary event is a minor, ridiculous consequence of what is happening. But it may suggest a frame, a shape, for that which I still struggle to name for fear it will come true—which is happening now in Gaza and in the West Bank.

“Let us,” the organizer suggested over the phone, “find a positive solution.” Yet the quandary she created was unsolvable. All possible solutions entailed my silence. The only positive solution available was for me not to exist as I am; to go to Innsbruck and pretend that my country was not being bombed, starved, and devastated. To go and pretend that my life is not defined, as it always has been, by apartheid and colonization. Even if I had wanted to comply with what she demanded, I had no idea how to do it: not only because I am personally affected, as is the very existence of my family and nation, but also because the novel I was to discuss takes place in Palestine…

…The organizer didn’t exactly reject my humanity. It was simply a very inconvenient fact for her that I was a human; she had to contend with it and was very uncomfortable. She suggested that we could talk about things such as “exile, memory, transmission, borders,” but, please, without mentioning Palestine. I wondered how I could talk about exile without mentioning the material cause of this exile, which is a history of occupation. I wondered what “memory” consisted of in this context, if not survival in spite of a concerted, century-long campaign to erase all our histories. I wondered, also, if she imagined that it was great fun for me to talk about depressing subjects. Believe me, I would rather talk about anything else if I could. But I cannot.

What she was requiring of me was to render every single complication of my political and intimate being palatable and harmless, to stop being a liability to her. These are the contradictions that we are expected, as Palestinians, to solve within ourselves: to exist without talking about why we exist. In a way, she wished, very politely, that I could, very politely, cease to exist. What was I supposed to utter, then, at Innsbruck, if not the consent of my own vanishing?

So what is happening in Gaza? According to Business Insider, summarizing a New York Times investigation, “AI discovered satellite images of craters in Gaza, evidence that Israel is bombing civilian areas it said would be safe” (Dec. 22): “The investigation found evidence that Israel bombed the area it said would be safe for civilians with devastating 2,000-pound bombs at least 200 times.”

Human Rights Watch says, “Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza; Evidence Indicates Civilians Deliberately Denied Access to Food, Water”.

The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel – statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces. Other Israeli officials have publicly stated that humanitarian aid to Gaza would be conditioned either on the release of hostages unlawfully held by Hamas or Hamas’ destruction…

Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, as well as the registry of the population. This leaves Gaza’s population, which Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.

What are the Palestinians supposed to do?

January Links Roundup: Animal Lovers

Welcome to 2024! I’ve been storing up a lot of Palestine links, but let’s start the year off with something enjoyable. Stay tuned for cancellable political takes in a future post.

The Winter 2023 issue of Orion, the environmentalist literary journal, profiled illustrator John Megahan’s contributions to biologist Bruce Bagemihl’s groundbreaking study of same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Journalist Lulu Miller was both charmed by the sensitive drawings and angered that these many examples had never before been compiled or discussed in mainstream biology teaching.

Thumbing through the book’s pages, it’s hard not to giggle. This is the Noah’s ark you never heard about. There are male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.

But awe creeps in too. Somewhere around page 453 maybe, with the kangaroos, or page 476 with the bats, or nearing page 700 after the umpteenth species of warbler. How were we not told?

The deeper I’ve fallen down this rainbow-colored rabbit hole, the more I’ve come to understand that my shock at the breadth of queerness in nature is a symptom of a horrible miseducation, of centuries of science bullying the abundance of queerness off the record, of an internalized homophobia that sometimes still whispers in my ear that I, a queer woman, do not belong on the tree of life. Bruce Bagemihl’s book with Megahan’s illustrations accomplished a kind of feat of alchemy. They took two millennia worth of outliers, scooped them all together, and in so doing revealed that which had been labeled as “unnatural” to be natural. This book helped to shift a scientific paradigm; its width is humbling, its bibliography, muscular. It taught me how the seemingly humble act of compilation can be a kind of activism.

I’m not alone in seeing the book this way. When Biological Exuberance was published in 1999, reviewers called it “revolutionary,” “monumental,” and “a landmark in the literature of science.” It was listed as a Best Book of 1999 by Publishers Weekly and the New York Public Library. It would even go on to be cited in a brief for the Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) as a scientifically rigorous refutation to the belief that homosexuality was a “crime against nature.”

Every generation thinks they’re ahead of their sexually stodgy ancestors. Well, Harry Roy and His Orchestra were singing about “My Girl’s Pussy” in 1931. Yes, it’s exactly what you think.

1984 Carnation Fancy Feast Cat Food Ad - Darlings | eBay

If pussies are too tame for you, consider xenogenders. In their June 2023 post “What it Means to be Slime,” Substack author NubileConcubine reflects on identification with imaginary and nonhuman creatures, and how this can express the mysterious and idiosyncratic aspects of gendered embodiment. They discuss the debate within the queer community about whether custom genders are “cringy, immature, and unreal.” This plays into the fraught relationship among transness, neurodivergence, and disability, a topic discussed at length in my current trans book group read, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). Hat tip to poet [sarah] Cavar for the link.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze | Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights

This headline from The Guardian (UK) can’t be beat: “Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school”. Those wags at The Satanic Temple are at it again, spotlighting violations of church-state separation by demanding equal access for non-Christian religions. Or, as journalist Erum Salam’s sub-header (rather disappointingly) clarifies, “Satanic clubs, whose members do not worship the devil, usually formed in response to presence of religious groups in schools.”

The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.

The ASSC is a federally recognized non-profit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.

The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.

Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.

I’m all for anti-authoritarianism, etc., but if we don’t get to wear funny costumes and light candles, count me out.

When Satan Club went to school: What's behind the group that created controversy in Chesapeake – The Virginian-Pilot

Apropos of nothing, I just really liked this poem by recent Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss on the Green Linden Press website, “Little Fugue with Jean Seberg and Tupperware”. Older woman with zero fucks to give–not exactly bitter but definitely tired of being sweet.

…Love, that little wood tick. That tick-in-the-ass.
Say the word enough times inside your head,
it will fall out of its meaning
like a stillborn, plop, into the toilet.

In the January 2024 issue of the Catholic magazine America, Eve Tushnet profiles Awake, a laypeople’s organization that helps survivors of clergy sexual abuse. This grassroots movement is stepping in where the institutional church has failed.

The word awake signifies a change, a new awareness of one’s surroundings. Sara Larson’s awakening came in 2018, following the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the revelations of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of abuse. She says the news left her and other Catholics she knew in the Milwaukee area “concerned and hurt and frustrated, and wondering what we could do to help.” In March 2019, a group of people began meeting in Ms. Larson’s living room to discuss ways to respond. They called the group Awake, and it didn’t take them long to settle on an answer.

That August, Awake made its first, formal, public act: an apology in the form of an open letter to survivors of abuse. Ms. Larson says that the group decided to issue the letter because “many apologies that have been given by church leaders feel inadequate.” Awake, she says, “realize[d] that we as members of this church, as the body of Christ, could apologize as well, and make a public commitment to stand in solidarity with survivors and to work for transformation and healing in our church.”

Four years later, Awake has grown into a nonprofit organization, and its response to the abuse crisis has grown, too. The group’s mission is “to awaken our community to the full reality of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, work for transformation, and foster healing for all who have been wounded.” The group now does advocacy work and offers many programs that address the needs of abuse survivors…

Awake was born out of a conviction that survivors are members of the body of Christ: that Catholic prayer, the sacraments and all that the church can offer still belong to survivors, and that they deserve to experience the church in a way that restores, nourishes and heals. Awake also recognizes that, ultimately, survivors follow many paths of healing and discovery.

Awake welcomes members from a variety of faith backgrounds, and with various relationships to the Catholic Church. Some of Awake’s members have always been practicing Catholics. Others no longer have an interest in Catholic practices. But many have an ambivalent relationship to Catholic prayer, sacraments and worship settings. Awake strives to respect each of these perspectives because, for people against whom Catholic spiritual practices were weaponized for grooming and abuse, it can feel as though only a thin veil separates one’s present safety and healing from the trauma of the past.

Eve’s novel Punishment: A Love Story is a triumph of Wildean wit. Go get it–for the love of God, Montessori!

In the Massachusetts Review, Koa Beck’s essay “Nanny of the State” describes how becoming an authorized foster parent forced her into uneasy complicity with a carceral system.

Parents are presented with a highly individualized plan by the court to help establish a “safe” home to which their children can return without state intervention. The tonality of the courts underscores this approach: if they can get and stay sober, if they can establish a clean, secure place to live, if they can maintain a job, if they attend therapy, they can reclaim custody of their children. Everything is on them.

his isolated framework to dissect why parent and child should be separated is further reflected in the infrastructure of the courtroom: parenthood is literally evaluated on a case-by-case basis, like there are no deeply rooted, long-standing factors as to why this has happened. The siloing presents the story as if it’s isolated to this parent and this child. No two cases are identical, but many grow from identical circumstances. Homelessness overlaps with substance abuse in a poverty spiral where little to no access to mental health resources or food security or affordable housing inevitably means ricocheting into addiction or violence or both.

Blame is singular where it should be structural: Why are these parents struggling with basic needs? What about their life and their challenges render them incapable of parenting on a fundamental level? What about their inability to secure mental health services or economic security at critical stages has yielded this reality?