Water on stone

 Here's what it is: I kind if like that I'm hard to bruise. That I can send my lovers home with their necks tattooed with the shape of my mouth but I look untouched. Not pure but maybe stone. 

Here's how it is: I play with the edges of stone butch but never settle there. The most euphoric I feel in my body is during sex and I enjoy the pleasure and I tell my lovers sex isn't a competition. 

Here's how it is: Sex isn't a competition but it's nice to feel valued. Desired. Fucked. Capable of making someone's afternoon a little better or a lot better. Of walking away unmarked. 

Here's how it is: I resent that I have to preform my gender for other people but I only wear pants dancing. I still wear low-necked shirts that show off the curve of my breasts. 

Here's how it is: Gender is always a performance and I delight in memorizing my lines and then reading them in reverse. I like to play the part that contradicts with the people around me. Or maybe that complements, matches. I win the Emmy for supporting gender roles and I want more. 

Here's how it is: I want someone in my bed but I hate how empty the bed feels when they leave. I buy a weighted blanket instead. The marks of my lover invisible but sore to the touch.

Here's how it is: I saw an art exhibit at Mass MOCA and it was a room where the light was strange and the floor tilted and you couldn't tell where you stood and so the space seemed infinite, like there were no walls, no floor. I wanted to dance though the space and I thought when I see art, I feel the desire to create as a palpable, aching thing in my gut.

Here's how it is: When I tell my therapist I am a mess of contradictions, they tell me to imagine the grand canyon and just let my feelings echo across it, bouncing off its infinite walls. "There is enough space" They tell me.

Here's how it is: I chose they as my pronouns because the Walt Whitman line "I contain multitudes" cut straight into the softest bits of me. For me, they is a plural because I am a thousand conflicting feelings crammed into a beautiful and stone body.

Here's how it is:  I am infinite but my time is not. My flesh is not. I don't know what this thing is inside me that people call a soul but I know I am divine because Tricia Hersey told me so and I know everyone I love must have that of god in them because the Quakers taught me that and the Jews taught me that god is light and undefinable and infinite. 

Here's how it is: I am the stone walls of the grand canyon, worn away by the river. I am untouched by the gentle bites of my lovers but I am forever changed by a trickle of water, wearing against my skin. 

Here's how it is: I am the echo of sound bouncing off of walls, getting quieter and quieter but never gone. 

Like a pink house

 Poem inspired by All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I want to love you like a pink house where we eat dinner with all our friends and family every night. 

I want to love you like my body is celery so I can be the very fiber of your being.

I want to love you like a manifesto, believing in the power of the universe to change.

I want to love you like the moon, always round, even when I can always see a sliver.

I want to love you like a dandelion in the wintertime, weak and lopsided and painfully colorful.

I want to love you like my very life depends on it. Because it does. 

The seven sisters 2

 We love a series...

The Holyoke mountain range is a giant

Lying east-west so one side of her is always

Too cold and one side too hot. 

She lives in the edge of discomfort and remembers 

There used to be giant beavers in this valley

And glaciers and moose and once long ago

She was the ocean.

Can you imagine

The electricity of being shaded on one side in the cool damp

Of hemlocks and sweeping mossy carpets

And on the other the smooth, hot shivering trunks

Of birches, beech, and goldenrod? 

Can you imagine containing multitudes--

The beavers, the moose, 

The hemlock, the beech, 

And the ocean? 

The seven sisters

The peaks of Norwatuk and Bear flush pink 

In the slanting sunlight, mirroring your cheeks

The Metacomet-Monadnock trail

Lies across the ridge of the Holyoke

Mountain range. I want to tread each step

Of that path until I know its every 

Evergreen. Every moss and princess pine

And quaking aspen. (Is it clear that the 

Mountains are a metaphor for you?)

The whole damn moon

 I'm not embarrassed by the ladder I built

Swaying and soaring into the sky

And the way I climbed hand-over-hand

Until my palms were as tender as my heart

And then the way I reached for her broad face

And stretched and still didn't wrap my arms around her

She was gray and radiant and I'm not embarrassed

That I lay her at your feet because I thought 

She might bring you joy. 

I'm not embarrassed by the butterflies

Preforming ariels in my guts

I'm not embarrassed that I want to spilt belly

And spill my lepidopteran insides across the the glass table of your gaze

And let you judge them, moths and monarchs both.

The princess bride and other cliches

 Filled with the bubbles of champagne

And the memory of your lips

If you want I could fly

Here I am, flaying my heart open--

Begging to rend my ribcage so you can see the tender color 

Of scarlet that is my blood

What is life but the rejoicing in 

The opportunity

To be broken again?

Winter's nearly here

 Winter is nearly here. So you know it's time for....

More poems abut Orion!

Orion my first love is always high

When the days stoop short and crooked. When night

Paints itself in deepest blue across the sky

I look to the south for his three twinkling lights.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,

But the only rage left in me is soft

And shivering. Braced against the growing cold

Until star boy reminds me: not all is lost.

He is the utterly gut-wrenching feeling

Of my first love. He is the emptiness

Of the after. He's the captive appeal 

Of my love's lips before we never kiss

I look south past the horizon to find

Three gleaming stars and all I've left behind