Poem a day #14 Getting Dressed for Work

here’s a little lesson in what first drafts can look like. This not-yet-a-poem wanders all around, taking forever to tell a story which will probably be reduced to a few descriptive details when I’m done blithering and ready to really write. Inside every narrative is a lyric waiting to happen, but sometimes digging it out [...]

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When I was a Boy

As I’ve been thinking about imaginary bodies my mind has wandered to the Dar Williams song “When I was a Boy.” on her album The Honesty Room. Certainly one of my imaginary bodies as a child was a boy—not so much in terms of sex as of gender privilege. I wanted what boys had, all [...]

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new work up – Ken and I Were Dykes

Look in “Creative Nonfiction” for the first section of a new long essay whose working title is “Gender: A non-theoretical autobiography.” Section one is called “Ken and I Were Dykes”

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Manly Sappho

quotations from various ancient sources about Sappho, as listed in Willis Barnstone’s translation Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho [She was called] “manly Sappho,” either because she was famous as a poet, an art in which men are known, or else because she has been defamed for being of that tribe [of homosexuals]. from Porphyrio, in [...]

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I always wanted more

from “Adah Isaacs Menken” by Enid Dame in Confessions You see, most people stun themselves through life convinced a half-dead state is all that they can bear. I always wanted more: to mount the world and ride it through the farthest galaxies, to feel that power flow between my legs.

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