Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Trans Genocide

They’re trying to kill us, and cis people still want to quiz me about gender theory.

Dear cisgender friends and allies: I’m glad you value our relationship enough to be honest about what’s challenging for you. I’m glad you see that I’ve changed significantly in the past four years. If gender matters to me, of course it’ll matter to you too. You’re going to relate to me differently as a gay man than as a woman. (Let’s simplify my identity for purposes of this discussion.) I like being “out,” and until recently, I haven’t minded educating you about it. In the beginning, it actually felt more awkward to avoid talking about one of the main projects in my life. What’s new, Jendi? “Oh, you know, the usual, I’ve been busy growing my leg hair and studying witchcraft.”

But there comes a time–and that time is now–when I need you to ask me different questions. Such as: How am I coping with the terrifying wave of transphobic state legislation and eliminationist rhetoric from mainstream political pundits? Am I worried about losing access to gender-affirming healthcare? Do I need emotional or material support, for myself or less privileged members of my trans community? What can YOU do to help?

Nobody’s asked me this. I don’t know, do I seem too happy? Are blue-state liberals assuming that Massachusetts and New York will remain untouched by the national-level bans that Republicans are itching to impose? We can’t afford this complacency. Look at what’s happening with abortion in the lead-up to the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade. Conservative states and cities are attempting to criminalize abortions that occur outside their geographic jurisdiction, and we can’t expect the current Supreme Court majority to care about this plainly unconstitutional restriction on the right to travel.

Abortion is a good analogy because I’ve always had a visceral and moral discomfort with it, rooted in personal trauma as much as philosophy–perhaps the same way J.K. Rowling feels about trans women! My narcissistic mother wasn’t convinced of my independent personhood after I was born. She literally said to me when I was 30 years old, “I had three abortions, I could’ve had a fourth!” because she was mad that I wanted to meet my father. So it always frightened me that pregnant people would get to decide whether their fetus was a human with rights.

But who cares how I feel? Seriously. It doesn’t matter. The issue is not whether abortion, or transition, is a good decision that someone is always making for the right reasons, with no regrets, and no better alternatives. The issue is, who is best equipped to make that decision? The person living in that body, or the state? And beyond that, do we want to live under a regime that has that much power over our intimate lives?

So, friends: Stop asking for the perfect definition of womanhood that includes you and Laverne Cox but not Elliot Page. (Who wouldn’t want top surgery after seeing that torso? DAMN.) Start asking whether this question is so important, that it justifies subjecting schoolchildren to genital inspections if anyone makes an unsubstantiated claim that the young athlete is trans. Here’s Reason Magazine–hardly a liberal rag–on this Ohio law that passed last week:

The “Save Women’s Sports Act” bans schools and colleges in Ohio from permitting “individuals of the male sex” from participating in women’s sports. It covers any school that participates in organized interscholastic athletic conferences, meaning it covers private schools that compete against state-funded schools as well.

The bill does not explain what the “male sex” or “female sex” is. It does not say “trans” or “transgender” anywhere in the bill. It doesn’t talk about birth or biological sex.

What it does instead is give people the power to dispute the sex of an individual athlete. Then it falls upon that athlete to prove their sex by going to a physician and getting a signed statement confirming the athlete’s sex based on only the following:

“The participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy;”

“The participant’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone;”

“An analysis of the participant’s genetic makeup.”

The bill does not specify who has the authority to levy such challenges, but it does authorize individuals or schools “who [are] deprived of an athletic opportunity or suffers a direct or indirect harm as a result of a violation of this section” to sue the school, school district, or conference who allowed the trans woman to play and be awarded damages.

The article notes that Idaho passed a similar law in 2020.

Stop asking me whether all these minority gender identities are splitting “the movement”. You don’t think they’re coming for you next? Bans on trans healthcare, or even abortion, aren’t the endgame. All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall of the evangelical-authoritarian state. One party in the United States has gone full fascist and you’re still acting like we can appease our abuser with the perfect argument or self-effacing compromise.

You don’t have to agree with every decision we make, or see yourself in us, to understand that we’re in the same struggle. What are you going to do about it?

New Reviews for “Made Man” and a “Two Natures” Book Talk Video

Last month I had the pleasure of co-hosting a Zoom book talk with Canadian novelist Jessica Pegis, “Divine Non-Duality and the Queer Body”. We read excerpts from my gay male coming-of-age novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016) and her new book The God Painter (Stone Table Books, 2021) and explored their common themes of exile, divine love, and spiritual and sexual integration. The God Painter is a work of Catholic-infused speculative fiction in the tradition of Mary Doria Russell and Ray Bradbury. Intersex aliens rescue humanity from our destroyed planet, but are they angels, demons, or something outside our limited categories altogether? Watch the 80-minute video on the Winning Writers YouTube channel:

Poet and critic Michael McKeown Bondhus wrote a wonderful review of my new poetry book, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022), for Full Stop Magazine this month. I have this novelty greeting card on my office shelf where one 1950s lady exclaims to another, “Sometimes I wish someone who understands me would tell me what I mean!” Michael has done just that…and saved me the labor of explaining myself to cis people quite so much. The review captures the specificity of gender transition but also its continuity with the dynamism of human life (however much we try to arrest its progress with laws and dogmas). We are not, after all, foreign objects or monsters compared to the rest of you.

As much as people claim to loathe change, it is also understood to be an elemental part of existence. The need to change one’s body, then, can be read as another manifestation of this universal impulse. Therefore, Made Man becomes an examination and celebration of change writ broadly along with all its magickal implications.

…Is Made Man’s goal, at least in part, to simultaneously muddy and clarify gender? Desire seems simple — person A wants person B — yet it is full of contradictions and taboos. Racist uncles are clearcut assholes, yet their worldviews are rooted in a version of reality they have absorbed from outside sources, including Russian bots. Gender, as Reiter and many others suggest, is both a social construction and an intimate part of the self. It can appear to be reducible to labels like trans man and genderqueer, yet those labels carry different meanings from person to person. By highlighting ambiguity and algorithms in some of their poems, Reiter finds another, less direct way to address the messiness of gender and compares it to the messiness of so many other parts of our lives.

Goodreads reviewer Transgender Bookworm rates Made Man 5 stars, saying:

Poet Jendi Reiter has written a beautiful and inventive collection of poems that explore gender and the pain of existing beyond society’s rigid binary in a new and exciting way. Tackling subjects both serious and lighthearted Reiter explores the way our absurdly gendered world informs our understanding of each other and the world at large. I found myself chuckling on one page and then gripping my seat in anger the next.

Enjoy this sample poem. Or don’t. I don’t care.

 

Prettyboy in Pink

This generation of lavender-haired pronouns only knows Molly Ringwald as hot Archie’s small-town mom on “Riverdale”. They play the torso drinking game as russet-top KJ Apa square-jaws his way from high school wrestling showers to prison cagefight to skinny-dip in the lake of girls beside the maple sugar factory. Who knew there was so much wealth in syrup? Like his nipples stretched immobile over muscle, mother Mary/Molly is contractually slated to appear in every episode, offering pants-suit credibility to his scheme to rescue the malt shop from mafiosi.

But we assigned-X’ers will forever stan Molly’s bricolage of girlhood, pretty in pink slicing and stitching the bridesmaid shells of teen tulle into a skin she could survive in. Lovestruck Duckie was too much a sister to her, with his manic pompadour and emotional hands. She required the prep-school prince’s genes for her supreme tailoring experiment. When Archie’s done running through his day’s foolish script, those maple-golden eyes go blank. It’s her body now, her finest dress.

June Links Roundup: Six Dildos, Infinite Guns

Happy June, a/k/a Queer Pride Month! Which begs the question…is there a Queer Lust Month? Queer Sloth Month? I need some rest.

Gay and Tired Sloth Greeting Cards | LookHUMAN

I have finished both seasons of the “Animaniacs” reboot on Hulu, and I am convinced that Pinky and the Brain are a T4T asexual couple.

May be an anime-style image

The Tumblr site wakkoswish delves deeper into “The queercoding of Pinky and the Brain” in this 2020 post. Among the many examples:

Pinky has always been very gender nonconforming, and loves to wear dresses, do his makeup, and make himself look pretty. For the most part, this is played pretty straight, and not as a gag, like a lot of shows tend to do! It’s just a casual fact about him that he likes to present femininely sometimes.

This does play into their taking over the world plans pretty often, where Pinky wears drag, usually either to sneak into somewhere. Like in one of their earliest appearances on Animaniacs, Noah’s Lark, where they pose as a couple to board Noah’s, and I quote, “love boat.” After boarding, Noah says to himself, “Who am I to judge?

The reboot leans even harder into this setup than the original 1990s show. I mean, they’re attending a pottery class on the advice of “their therapist”! The image above comes from an episode where Pinky has to enter a beauty contest as part of Brain’s latest world-domination scheme. His notoriously sarcastic and monomaniacal partner seems genuinely proud of him for winning.

Those of you who grew up with the Internet have no idea what it was like to think you were the only pervert in the world. Born in 1972 and raised in a three-person Victorian-era reenactment cult, I didn’t know there was such a thing as fan-fiction. Being horny for imaginary people seemed proof that I’d inherited my family’s insanity. Same for the pubescent discovery of being friends-with-benefits with a conveniently shaped toy or stuffed animal. My only point of reference was that George Romero horror story where the guy kills people and makes clay sculptures incorporating their bodies, which he keeps in his apartment as his “lovers”. I read this one in the barely-lit stacks of Columbia’s Butler Library as a college student and felt stomach-churning dread that could only partly be attributed to the light timers shutting off. Was I that kind of abomination, too?

How much better I would have felt, if 12-year-old me could have read this New York Times article from April 2022: “This Man Married a Fictional Character”. Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno report on a Japanese fandom subculture where adults have emotionally significant relationships with a computer avatar:

In almost every way, Akihiko Kondo is an ordinary Japanese man. He’s pleasant and easy to talk to. He has friends and a steady job and wears a suit and tie to work.

There’s just one exception: Mr. Kondo is married to a fictional character.

His beloved, Hatsune Miku, is a turquoise-haired, computer-synthesized pop singer who has toured with Lady Gaga and starred in video games. After a decade-long relationship, one that Mr. Kondo says pulled him out of a deep depression, he held a small, unofficial wedding ceremony in Tokyo in 2018. Miku, in the form of a plush doll, wore white, and he was in a matching tuxedo.

In Miku, Mr. Kondo has found love, inspiration and solace, he says. He and his assortment of Miku dolls eat, sleep and watch movies together. Sometimes, they sneak off on romantic getaways, posting photos on Instagram.

Mr. Kondo, 38, knows that people think it’s strange, even harmful. He knows that some — possibly those reading this article — hope he’ll grow out of it. And, yes, he knows that Miku isn’t real. But his feelings for her are, he says…

…Mr. Kondo sees himself as part of a growing movement of people who identify as “fictosexuals.” That’s partly what has motivated him to publicize his wedding and to sit for awkward interviews with news media around the globe.

He wants the world to know that people like him are out there and, with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics allowing for more profound interactions with the inanimate, that their numbers are likely to increase.

Unfortunately, the host company for Miku’s hologram discontinued support for Mr. Kondo’s software during the pandemic, but he still has his doll, and his memories. Just like I do.

Make love, not war? In Texas, only up to a point. After the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Twitter was full of outrage about the Lone Star State’s lax gun control laws, and someone shared this 2021 article from Onward Texas: “Is It Illegal to Own More Than Six Dildos in Texas? Yes, It Is.”

The Lone Star State, called by Republicans one of the States where citizens have more freedoms and civil rights because people can buy unlimited guns, has a law that makes it illegal for a person to own six or more dildos…

…The Texas Penal Code understands that an “Obscene device” means a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs. So, because the law considers dildos obscene devices, and a person who owns more than six obscene devices is committing a criminal offense, therefore, owning 6 dildos (or plastic vaginas) is illegal.

This regulation is a complete violation of the Fourteenth Amendment (engage in private intimate conduct in the home without government intrusion). Judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional in a ruling from 2008, considering that the Texas statute cannot define sexual devices themselves as obscene and prohibit their sale. However, with a GOP majority in the House and in the Senate, the law remains in the books.

This is why we’re all having intimate relationships with our action figures. Won’t you think of the children?

At Electric Lit, novelist Elif Batuman has wise advice on “the tragedy of heterosexual dating” and forgiving your younger self. This article makes me want to read her books, The Idiot and the new sequel Either/Or, about a Harvard college student named Selin who’s trying to make sense of her love life via misogynist literary classics and philosophy.

When you get to be in your 40s, you start to think about the time in your life when you were in your teens and 20s, and you see all of these mistakes that you made. I think that’s the reason I called the first book The Idiot. The temptation is to think of yourself as having been really stupid, and yourself now as knowing a lot more. But that’s actually quite an uncharitable way of thinking about our younger selves. I’m just as stupid now, I just have better information. What I wanted to do was to go back into that state, and show why everything Selin is doing seems to her like a good idea, and seems like the only correct thing to do. But I really didn’t want to make it look like she was being stupid. I wanted to make it seem like she was drawing the correct conclusion that she had from the information that she had at the time…

…As I was writing this book I was reading about the childhood experiences of people like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and they were all horribly abused. A lot of Western philosophy that we’ve inherited are the coping mechanisms of abused little boys. And we’re stuck with them now.

If you want to read an extended treatment of the latter insight, I highly recommend the first half of Cognition and Eros by feminist philosopher Robin May Schott. The Marxist second half hasn’t aged as well…or maybe I’m still too much of a pervert to think of “commodity fetishism” as a bad thing. Bring on the dildos!

The Poet Spiel: “Roots”

Here’s a thoughtful poem about endurance from friend-of-the-blog Tom W. Taylor, The Poet Spiel. The times we’re living through make me feel helpless and fatigued. I refresh myself by connecting with the trees, who experience time on a different scale from us humans, and presumably are not as afraid of death, either.

Roots

Not like the stench of that early place,
being downward bound,
insistently struggling toward a skimpy well of doubtful tomorrows,
the leaves of summer wore masks of pain
where roots grew deeper than trees grew tall,

but like that reassuring smell of yesterdays
where no matter how fearful my nightmares had been,
I knew at least that I would waken
and they would end.

The Reactionary Pull of Sacred Texts

I left Christianity because…

…the people who took its mystical, supernatural, and personal transformation aspects most seriously are the people currently turning our country into a fascist theocracy.

…the paradigm of redemptive sacrifice of the innocent was counterproductive to my healing as a child abuse survivor.

…I couldn’t keep fighting for space for my bodily autonomy and human rights in a text that wasn’t designed to include me.

The latter reason is especially salient for me because of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which would not only overturn Roe v. Wade but also threatens all the modern precedents founded on a constitutional right to privacy in sexual and family life. As Jonathan Capehart writes in the Washington Post, “Alito’s draft ruling on abortion is a warning to LGBTQ Americans”:

“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito writes. “That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’” This country has a lot of rights not deeply rooted. For instance, the nation is 245 years old, but racial integration is just 57 years old. Marriage equality is nearly seven…

…Alito rips the Roe ruling because “it held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.” And Casey, he sneers, is grounded “solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the ‘liberty’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.” Theory?

Then Alito casts aspersions on the cases the court used in its Casey ruling to justify that liberty “theory.” Among them are Loving v. Virginia (legalized interracial marriage) and Griswold v. Connecticut (guaranteed access to contraception). He also hammers away at the “theory” by taking aim at post-Casey decisions such as Lawrence v. Texas (decriminalized consensual sex between adults) and Obergefell.

Robyn (@hmntre) on Twitter puts it succinctly: “Love the argument that we can’t have rights because we have a deeply rooted history of not having rights.“

TechFreedom think tank editor @JasonKuznicki expands on the reactionary implications of tradition-based jurisprudence in this thread. “You know what’s really deeply rooted in history? The absolute rule of a father over all the members of his family… The more we privilege deep roots in history, the more weight we have to give to some terribly illiberal ideas. Rights for white people have deeper roots than rights for black people, and no amount of time can change that.”

The Religious Right’s legal theories and Biblical interpretive method are identical. Notwithstanding the anarcho-communist messages you can easily draw from Jesus’s words and actions in the gospels, the primacy of Scripture in Christianity is structurally reactionary for the same reasons that Constitution-worship produces slow, stingy, and inconsistent recognition of the civil rights of people who aren’t white Christian male citizens. In both cases, empathy and political representation are circumscribed by how much permission you can wring out of a text from an era when you weren’t considered fully human.

I’m not saying we should scrap the Constitution, but that we shouldn’t interpret it as though preserving the past is more important than flourishing in the present.

May Links Roundup: Courting Fascism

I had a whole list of links to recommend this month, and then Politico broke the story today about the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. As feminist journalist Jude Doyle lays out in chilling detail in “We Have Entered the ‘Anti-Gender’ Endgame” at Medium, the Court’s proposed radical rollback of the right to privacy would jeopardize all of the LGBTQ civil rights and reproductive healthcare protections we’ve relied upon in the past 50 years:

We are not going back to the way things were before legal abortion. We are going somewhere much worse.

After Roe is overturned, abortion will become illegal in all or most circumstances in 21 states. The “right to privacy” on which Roe hinges was established in an earlier case,Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to contraception; Alito specifically names Griswold as a faulty ruling, and it will almost certainly be overturned as well, making birth control illegal. This might not immediately inspire panic — why not just go to a safe state to get your abortion or your IUD? — but the states that pass abortion bans will also pass travel bans. If you leave home pregnant and come back otherwise, that itself will be illegal…

Griswold also formed the basis of Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to marry someone of the same gender) and Lawrence v. Texas (the right to have queer sex, ever, at all, without being criminalized). If there is no “right to privacy” and no sovereign right to control one’s healthcare decisions, then bans on HRT and gender-affirming surgery for adults are within the realm of realistic possibility; anti-trans advocates like Abigail Shrier have been obsessively framing transmasculine transitions in particular as attacks on the “fertility” of “young women,” and anti-choice legislation will likely sharpen the attacks on transition care across the board.

We need to make these connections now, because our enemies are already making them. Alito is overturning Roe, not just on the basis that the decision was faulty, but because any “unenumerated right” — that is to say, a right that can be safely assumed on the basis of the Constitution, but which is not specifically named within it — must be “grounded in U.S. history and tradition” in order to be valid. Gay marriage, gay sex, youth transition, any transition, interracial marriage, domestic partnership without marriage, abortion. contraception, or simply not being forcibly sterilized and/or detransitioned by the state — none of this is safe. None of this is “traditional.” All of it is on the line.

I don’t have any brilliant political advice except: Solidarity. Harvey Milk understood this when he built coalitions between labor unions and gay-rights activists. A lot of us have fallen into a traumatized pattern where we resent other groups’ struggles for drawing attention away from our own; this is often the root of lesbian-feminist qualms about transgender issues, for instance. We can’t allow ourselves to be split apart this way anymore.

Along those lines, Jewish Currents ran a thought-provoking essay by Eli Rubin called “The Soul of the Worker”, rediscovering a 1940s Chabad author’s fiction lamenting the cultural opposition between Jewish observance and modern socialism. Marx’s anti-religious attitude isn’t the only possible path for the Left to take. There are interesting parallels here to American Christians’ fears that secularism and liberalism go hand in hand, such that progressive policies are perceived as an attack on faith. Rubin explains:

[C]ontemporary Chabadniks are likely to associate socialism with their inherited memories of Soviet persecution. Thousands can recount stories of grandparents and great-grandparents who were shot or sent to the Gulags for practicing and perpetuating their Jewish way of life… Given this background, it is understandable that contemporary Chabadniks often respond to any invocation of socialism with suspicion, or even fear. This reflex is part of a broader matrix of factors that skews political inclinations among Hasidic Jews to the right, so that when it comes to the ballot they tend to be more aligned with political elites than with working people whose interests might appear much closer to their own.

My alma mater is making both symbolic and material changes to reckon with the exploitative sources of its wealth. Lydialyle Gibson describes a new report on “Harvard’s Slave Legacy” in our alumni magazine.

The report—deeply researched and heavily footnoted, the culmination of a years-long effort—lays out the findings and recommendations of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, formed in 2019 by President Lawrence S. Bacow, to study the University’s entanglements with slavery and its enduring consequences. (The report, recommendations, and other primary materials can be found on the project’s website, also unveiled today.) Those entanglements with slavery were in some cases very direct: the committee found records of at least 79 people who were enslaved by Harvard presidents, overseers, and faculty and staff members before the practice was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783—many more than had been previously known. (Two of their tombstones stand in the Old Burying Ground across from Harvard Yard: a woman named Jane who was enslaved by Harvard steward Andrew Bordman—who owned at least eight people—and a woman named Cicely, enslaved by University tutor, fellow, and treasurer William Brattle.) In other cases, the links were financial or intellectual; the University benefited enormously from the slave trade, for example, through investments and donations, and Harvard scholars promoted racist ideas that underpinned slavery and other racial hierarchies.

We Northerners like to think of slavery as a Southern institution, but the ugly truth is that our elite universities, businesses, and cultural treasures were also built on wealth from these atrocities:

One of the strongest connections the 130-page report draws is between the University’s early growth and prosperity and the slave trade, first in the Caribbean and later in the American South. The colonial era’s economic alliance with the sugar islands of the West Indies—trading New England food, fuel, and lumber for Caribbean tobacco, coffee, and sugar produced by enslaved Africans (or for slaves themselves)—“effectively made Boston a slave society,” according to historian Wendy Warren, quoted in the report. That description included Harvard: “For roughly a century, Harvard had operated as a lender,” the report states, “and derived a substantial portion of its income from investments that included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers. After 1830, the University shifted its investments into cotton manufacturing, before diversifying its portfolio to include real estate and railroad stocks—all industries that were, in this era, dependent on the labor of enslaved people and the expropriation of land.”

In addition to renaming buildings and so forth, Harvard says it’ll invest actual money in supporting Black and Indigenous communities that are impacted by slavery and colonialism. It’s hoped that they will also return human remains and photographs of slaves from their science and anthropology collections to the descendants of the people involved.

Do you need something positive to keep you alive despite all this bad news? You should be watching “Our Flag Means Death” on HBO, a pirate rom-com series where everyone is queer and that’s not even an issue. It’s really a show about two middle-aged men who tenderly, ridiculously, bravely start to overcome the toxic masculinity that teaches us that affection is for sissies. Check out this interview with creator David Jenkins at The Verge, and this appreciation essay from Maya Gittleman at Tor.com, “Act of Grace: Masculinity, Monstrosity, and Queer Catharsis in Our Flag Means Death“. (There are some spoilers, so watch the show first.)

Then check out Sam Herschel Wein’s funny and pointed poem at Waxwing Literary Magazine, “I’m tired of the gays, bring me a Grade A Faggot”:

…if I had a jockstrap for every jockstrap
that didn’t know how to properly love
a body. I’m giving up on the gays because
they’re too interested in just being men,
in just shoving in and bonk bonk bonk
like I’m not even there beneath them.
delight in me.

Two Poems from Suzanne Ondrus’s “Passion Seeds”

Suzanne Ondrus is a poet and literary scholar whose work explores cultural exchange and understanding, intimacy, oppression, and history. Her poetry book Passion Seeds, about love and longing long distance between an American woman and a Burkina Faso man, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Prize from Little Red Tree Publishing. Suzanne has taught writing and literary theory in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Russia, Benin, Ghana, Uganda, Italy, and Germany, and was a 2018-2020 Fulbright Scholar to Burkina Faso in West Africa.

Her new collection, Death of an Unvirtuous Woman, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in September 2022 and will be available for pre-order in May. It is a true story of female resistance to domestic violence involving an 1881 Ohio-German immigrant couple. Read three poems from this book in the feminist journal S/tick.

Suzanne kindly shares these poems from Passion Seeds.

Let’s Go Green

Dante had Beatrice blazing blond before him
guiding him from the ice of hell to heaven’s
summits.

Beatrice burned forever in his heart.
Her hands filled with air
and her smile shouldered the world.
From afar he would watch,
happy for a view of her on Sunday.
In the Duomo, his heart arched over
the bridge his eyes made to her,

silent,
unaware
he prayed.

My black angel, you are afar.
How shall I say you burn for me?
My love for you glows like coal or
you are my black angel of coal glow?
But you are not coal, licorice, chocolate,
tar, oil, rubber, sod, tires, or asphalt.
You are seed in my heart,
the green promise.
I want to be the seed of your heart;
I believe I am the seed of your heart.
Please water me with your tears
and bring your heart to the light
so our seeds can grow and glow green.

****

Bleached History

I.
White through fire circles,
mud houses, lingering handshakes
white through indigo, slit goats’ necks
and the dolo-filled calabash.

II.
A congregation so large,
piled high up to the sky
for only one step to his throne,
to finally come home.

III.
Missionaries pleaded, cajoled
for their congregation to reach that throne!
They even stole boys to enroll
and control,
promising parents future rewards.
Their heads were shaved
and their mother tongues shamed,
with the antelope skull worn at least
once by all.
Cultural carving beyond bones,
branding
Jean,
Marc,
Antoine
over Narelwindé’s
wings
to God,
on top Awa’s whisper
to the river
and Yalle’s hope risen.

IV.
The red soil with its orange puddles
held this pain,
so full from
what the whites called religious school.

They tried to stitch boys against the hum
of their ancestors in the wind,
and with white cloth, bread and wine
wind their minds for Christendom and
the French curriculum.

But whispers of songs
sung in the field,
lingering handshakes,
compounds with family
and thatched roofs commanded feet
home, through thorned brush

stealthy under the moon,
back close to Mother’s womb
from where solid like the baobab
they did first bloom.

 

Author Note: This poem was inspired by Burkinabe shaman Malidome Patrice Somé’s autobiography, Of Water and Spirit. Somé was kidnapped as a young child by missionaries and taken to missionary school; he escaped in his late teens, returning to his village. In the 1950s children were punished if they spoke their native languages at school; French was the language of instruction in Burkina Faso. Dolo is homemade grain alcohol. Calabash is a gourd. Calabash are dried and used as bowls, among other things. Wearing an antelope skull signifies shame, akin to wearing a dunce cap. Narelwindé, Awa and Yalle are Burkinabe first names. Baobab is a tree of utmost significance to West Africa, signifying strength and groundedness.

“Made Man” Makes News: BGSQD Reading Video and Solstice Lit Mag Review

The Bureau of General Services-Queer Division (BGSQD), the queer bookstore at The Center NYC, hosted a fabulous launch reading for me and poet Steven Riel (Edgemere) this past weekend, which you can watch on their YouTube channel:

Being back in person in a queer arts space was a sacred experience, enhanced by Frank Mullaney’s “Wallpaper Saints” photo exhibit, which you can view behind us. Please support this essential cultural haven by purchasing books from their website. If you don’t see Made Man or Edgemere on their site yet, email Greg Newton at contact@bgsqd.com to purchase your copy.

In other news, Solstice Lit Mag poetry editor Robbie Gamble just published a great review of Made Man in their Spring 2022 issue. Gamble says, “The reader is in for a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride… In the current season of culture wars, where state legislatures are enacting ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills, and trying to reframe gender-affirming treatments as parental abuse, Made Man stands as a testament to the humanity of trans people everywhere. It’s also chock-full of intelligent, often hilarious and sometimes biting poems that will leave you spinning and exhilarated.”

Other great stuff in this issue of Solstice includes Richard Jeffrey Newman’s sexual abuse memoir “The First Time I Told Someone” and MC Hyland’s prose-poem “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets”. Check it out and subscribe to their free e-newsletter.

Two Poems from “The Chessmaster’s Daughter” by Barbara Regenspan

Barbara Regenspan is a poet, scholar, and opinion writer who has taught leadership in social justice-focused education at Colgate University. Her books include Haunting and the Educational Imagination. Now, her debut full-length poetry collection, The Chessmaster’s Daughter, is available from Cayuga Lake Books. This collection combines lyricism and philosophical inquiry, meditating on the tensions between appreciation of the present moment and responsibility for the burdens of history. Regenspan appreciates the complexity of her Jewish immigrant legacy: its silent traumas, restless search for truth, and ancient rituals of renewal. In a familiar trajectory for progressive American Jews, she also turns to Buddhist mindfulness and nature-centric practices to counterbalance the intellectual ferment of her ancestral religion.

Barbara says, “I am a strong supporter of the local Tompkins County Workers’ Center (they are among the original national fighters for a living wage) and I have offered the book as a fundraiser.” Donate $13 or more to this upstate New York labor advocacy group, and they will send you a copy of The Chessmaster’s Daughter.

She kindly shares these poems below.

Little Animal Lessons

The day after Ruth’s fatal fall
a squirrel found its way into an
upstairs waste basket,

apparently unfazed when David
released it to the outside sill.

Then a toad preceded our steps on
the path to the market, committed to
the journey on the dry concrete,

avoiding the lush summer growth to
the right and left,

demanding from us a walking meditation
under its peculiar green leadership.

I’ve known this before:
The smaller living things, not
your usual friends, acting out,
commanding:

“Slow down, heed
the closures,
the new possibilities.”

****

Argue for Life

Try to leave your life without dying.
It’s impossible; you were always
a detective anyway and must find
the crime the suspect did not commit.
You’ll be given away by wind chimes
left on the porch,
whose commitment to a furious
system leaves a trail of resonance.
The pain you need to escape has
its own residue, because the separation of
you from everybody else that you almost
believed in is defied by the difficulty leaving.
Stay here with me in this house on the canal
where the lovers we’ve hardly seen walk
by and look in the window, or touring groups
ignore us to take in the sights—approaching the
gorge trail, the path of depth and turns.

Poetry by Helen Bar-Lev: “The Wrong Tree”

Israeli poet and painter Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York in 1942. She has held over 90 exhibitions of her landscape paintings and published eight illustrated poetry collections. She kindly permitted me to reprint the poem below, inspired by Russia’s war against Ukraine. It was first published in ESRA Magazine.

The Wrong Tree

Look at us humans
bones and blood and skin
eating fruit from the wrong tree,
sailing arks to banish the bad
but we are fools and sink with the ship

Prayers unheard clog the earth
war after war and the world whirls on
a murderer in every corner
superheros vanished or banished,
refugees like the rest of us

Atlantis has disappeared
Saints burned at the stake
Shangri La never was
think Hiroshima, my love

Mozart was recalled at thirty-five
Moses forbidden the promised land
slavery and plagues still alive
and no one to raise us from the dead

Look, Henny Penny
the ruble is falling
the wall is wailing
the pipes are calling
Danny, the boy, the soldier
tells Mama he’s frightened–
then the missile explodes

The sun shines and regrets and retreats
the crocodile cries and destroys
this is not the planet of free choice

News news everywhere
on buildings, in bunkers,
oh how the world has shrunk

We are all golems
slumped on the floor
waiting for instructions…
or our own destruction