Excerpt from Hope Springs

I have yet to write about the Hope Springs Women's Performance and Poetry Retreat that I attended this July, but it seems that an excerpt of the writing I did there is a fitting prologue to whatever I write about the retreat in the future...

The assignment, (as facilitated by Rosemary Daniell), was to "write your story," but using the second person instead of the first. "Your story," was a concept up for your own interpretation... I have always written in the second person when I was most struggling so this exercise satisfied:

You are a little drag queen dressed in giant yellow and fucia prints at a dirty street fair on Delancey street, and once the ferris wheel stops and all the goldfish in plastic bags have cursed another day without being won, you go home and climb under the sheets between your godfather and his new boyfriend Angelo. You are taken with the lightbulb plugged into a cheap Flamnco dancer doll in a red dress and the clock in the kitchen with a hologram of the last supper on its face.
You make little worlds in empty liquor boxes in the basement of the restaurent where your dad cooks. You sleep in lots of beds between lots of men and you don't ever really consider the concept of a straight man until older boys start directing your hands. You dance with trannys ans queens at AIDS walk, refusing to take advantage of the stroller- four year old feet walking eight miles unphased. People die fast and all at once and the only men left want things from you and throw furniture at your mother.
You buy Bette Midler albums and dress as Marilyn Monroe and Lypsinka for the PS3 halloween parades. You get kicked out of your cousins suburban slumber party after a Michael Jackson fan tape featuring that little blonde boy prompts you to tell the other six year olds the four ways to contract HIV.
You kiss girls. Often. You were Doc Martens on the first day of middle school and assume that some day you'll really understand why both Bessie Smith and Abba can keep you from burning deep holes in your wrists. Your dad comes around sometimes and tells you, you only think you're a dyke because you're too fat and ugly for men to want. You empty the liquor boxes into your own mouth before making worlds inside them.
Mostly now you make bedrooms with sand on the floor and santos on the walls.

Experiment?

I hadn't planned on/never have posted this or any other video of me singing, but this is me playing at "Fire Sign" by The Gossip in bed at the end of a long day- enjoying the partial loss of my voice- makes me less self-conscious about the strength of my breath, etc.
All week I've been teaching vocals, body-image/love workshops, and helping along with general mayhem and glory at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. A lot of the volunteers at Rock Camp are involved in the DIY women's punk music scene, (i.e. For the Birds Collective). They do great stuff, but I spent a lot of the week figuring out how I could translate their feminist DIY approach to, "just start a band," into the context of my own desired aesthetics and abilities...

Femme Bitch Top

If you don't know about Tribe 8, allow yourself the masturbation-quality experience of doing a little research. I'm angry tonight- brimming, hot. Wanting bad, just for the sake of satisfaction. I feel like my sexuality has been neglected and tempered lately.

Sometimes music is the closest we can get to where we really need to be...

Home

This video feels like home. New York senator Tom Duane wrote me my college application letters. Seeing him now, years later, it is the closest I have come to the in-the-name-of-love rage that filled so much of my childhood during the throws of our family and community living their last months with AIDS. I could have waited a bit to regain composure and better articulate this swell of feelings, but there's nothing I can say beyond what he said in this session. My most core love and gratitude to Tom...!

Arbus

Recently someone told me that my work is like written Diane Arbus... Word?! I can't turn that one down... (And ever since I've been craving some time behind my camera). Often enough I feel like I come to writing when and where I can't afford the art supplies an image in my head requires. And of course, writing is what I go to for the pictures I imagine in motion.
So if you've never seen any of Arbus' work, here's your start- keep on it!

Prompt: Masturbation (In Progress)

Getting Over

To when the finger loses understanding of the switch and can’t
manage to off
To my chest and shoulders cramped from the
conflict— forcing the hand always down
and the chest concave against breath
Body parts not believing one another
To picking up the phone, check email, write poems
and love letters against the buzzing
To my vision gone white and hazy and

To excess of sustaining
muscle ache of holding
bitter taste like full from more
than I knew I could eat or
Excessive draining of the sex and sensation
from my body—

Which is to say, I can’t tell the difference between hunger and bloat.

My skin reckons itself
Only two choices—
Set the hands that dare reach out
with a hungry palm aflame, or
burn myself from the inside in

If I keep on like this
I’m likely to be ash on gold sheets by morning

Redefining Home (old-ish piece)

If You Find Yourself On Christopher Street

like most places
you’ll see it best
if you bring a child. a child
will see fantasy
where there's kink, say
Mom,
you'd look great
in that dress
with a small paint on dirt finger
pointed to a chain link frock
with built in ball gag

a child’ll keep you from
wanting to be
half wasted spun out
too charming or sad
to be 86ed by 3pm
on a Monday at Ty's—

if you're a girl
find a girl's hand to hold
buy her Icees at Rivoli or
if she has a sense of humor
the Deli on the corner of Hudson
where the cabbies go
has giant sour pickles
in a jar on the counter

buy her a rainbow belt
or pleather harness
from the bangladeshi guys
across from St. John's Lutheran
or be that kind of lesbian—
buy her a smudge stick
or piece of amethyst
at Stick Stone Bone then
go get her palm read
by the gypsy next to

the Pet Store Cat still alive
magazines still glossy
no new stars etched outside
the Lucille Lortel
guy that looks like Spock
hasn't been in the window at Hangar
McNulty's still has rare teas
and fine coffees
Leather Man NYC still
has the best window on the block
and there's a handwritten sign
for 10.00 poppers on a paper bag
taped to the door frame of
do any of these porn shops
have names?

Bead Store gone
Record Store gone
Candle Store gone
Lilac's gone to Jane Street

let the losses go.
keep your back
to Stonewall,
your eyes
to the river.



swing her hand
find elegy or procession
at the vigil.
drop a flower off the pier
for the lover's left over
who can't stand to be here
another year

closer to the river
better the game of
find the undercover

closer to the river
better the smell
of salt water and bois

closer to the river
hold her hand tighter
swagger deeper
hold your ground

closer to the sunset

closer to boarded windows

closer to the angels

and you'll need them.