Pride & Poetry

Proud, defiant poetry & prose from Gabby, Mark McCormack, Keith Aron, Sam Vallius, Margin Zheng, blueglass, and Robert Birch

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Pride & Poetry ❤️🍊💛💚💙💜🩷🩵🤎🖤🩶

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gabby

when i was a kid i thought danny phantom was a lesbian

despite not knowing what a lesbian was. i spent weekend afternoons studying his silver shag and black bodysuit, or maybe the way it smoothed every part of his body into obscurity. i ached for danny, a closeted ghost floating through a town of ghost haters. we grew together in our adolescence. his simping infatuation for a goth, ultra-recyclo-vegetarian. i got high off their first kiss; his eyelids veiling his bright green glows and her glossy bob parted by his gloved fingers. their love being the only force to pierce through danny’s thick, ectoplasmic exterior. i am still wondering if invisibility is a superpower or a curse. if a lesbian is a superhero or a ghost. maybe there was no difference when i was a kid

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Mark McCormick

Dear Corey

Photo courtesy Mark McCormick

I wrote a poem about you and it’s called
Dear Corey.

Dear Corey, you are my brother and I forgive you.
I will forgive you if you pass me in the halls
In the depth of hell and ignore me, because
You don’t want your frat brothers knowing you’re
Friends with a fag.

Dear Corey, I know you weren’t in a frat
And dear reader, we’re not real brothers.

Dear Corey, I know so much about your father
And mother and the uncle you think of as a father.
I know about your college days, and I know
Enough not to write it down here, because I
Respect your secrets and you respect mine,
Though I haven’t told you all of them.

I told you one or two and I cried.
I told you one or two and I cried at a place in
Walnut Creek where crying is not allowed.
And still I think, but I’m not sure, I think
You saw me again in public.

I forgive you
And you will forgive me.
I don’t know for what, for adoring you maybe,
When maybe that made you uncomfortable,
For continuing to treat you like a protégé
When you outran me?

I’m drunk Corey, and it’s not the Lone Palm bar
But close. You should come here Corey. With me.
Let’s forgive each other again and again and again
Until we’re not crying anymore for all the men
In our lives who did unforgivable things.

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Keith Aron

Queer As

Photo by Aiden Craver on Unsplash

Queer. Queer, queer, queer
as a $2 bill, queer as a coot,
queer as a Brighton Pier.
Queer as a football bat, I am
queer as they come, queer as
I want to be, queer as
I’m meant to be. Queer at last,
queer at last, thank God almighty
I’m free at last.
The truth is, I was always queer,
even before I got here.
I came in this way and so shall I go
when at the last, I disappear.
I have no memory, not even a fragment,
of ever feeling like a girl, but
I have plenty of them - me and my cells -
of bristling and twisting
at being told that I was.
And moreover, of wondering:
was it me or them getting things wrong?
As I wondered, sometimes I hummed
that classic Sesame Street song,
the one that told me one of these things
is not like the others, one of these things
just doesn’t belong. But the wondering
got to be too much, and I grew to hate
that song, so I decided maybe,
if I just closed my eyes to myself,
maybe, if I just didn’t see
my not belonging, it might go away.
It didn’t, but I nearly did, again and again.
Until one day, grace
darted out in front of me and
shame slammed on the brakes.
What a glorious mess that collision made -
everything shattered
except the most brilliantly colored
essential bits. They scattered,
unrecognizable for what seemed like forever
until time bound them together,
enlivened them into a rainbow with
a voice as proud as it is clear.
We’re here,
we’re queer,
get used to it.

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Sam Vallius

I am my own best friend

Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash

I am my own best friend.

I am my own best friend,
Because I know every chapter,
Every broken heart,
Every ripped open part.

Oh my,
I see my eyes,
So beautiful,
The brown iris,
The bark of a tree,
A life,
A life,
A life.

Stretched skin of a growing body,
Muscles from a steel pole that forced me to see
My rejected humanity.

I am dancing the pain away,
A beautiful relief.

My hair is beautiful,
Though it annoys me sometimes.
Such stubborn flicks arise in the
Breaths of life.

I have now only realised that my mind deflects
From mortalities kisses,
And I forget how lucky I am to remain alive.

I turned sadness into art filled pages,
Lost tears into imaginary drawings,
A life of anguish into the beginning of something
Joyous.

I can tell you so much more,
About how I became my own best friend,
But I won’t.

For I’d only be deflecting from the time you now have to realise,
You should be your own best friend to.

Sleep well in your own love,
Let this painful world feel lighter,
If not from the sight of your eyes,
Than from the depth of your heart,
When you fall asleep with the words you tell yourself,
Kind words of love.

I’ll sleep well in mine.

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Margin Tianya Zheng

The Fool

Photo by Rachel on Unsplash

At the end of the rainbow, they found fool’s gold.
(What other currency would one need
on the journey of the fool?)
The land was verdant with greed, and they
were delicate blue-white porcelain —
gentle, love, gentle, my pal —
serving delicious shiitake
fresh-picked from myriad mycelium.
The day was not special but spectral,
a seer’s mirror sincere.
How ordinary was their consciousness,
estimated against clairvoyance.
Yet they knew — they know — their NO.

The sky was pallid, like the whites of their eyes
after plentiful sleep and pleasant dreams.
Their irises so gray ushered in light
of colors fruity with the seeds of love.
Once, they were warned of watermelon seeds
taking root in the soup-bag of their stomach.
Now, they were pregnant as the primordial sea
in which miniscule life first drank its sustenance,
its secret wish for a future broad as the heavens and earth.
yesteryear they saw no future,
for their body tired quickly
as if they carried a giant watermelon
beneath their choked-up lungs.
But today was different and new.
The fool’s gold enraptured them.
I am not who you think I am, it declared to the world.
I am beauty my own.

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blueglass

Queer Sex is so Fucking Revolutionary

You can't take this away from me.

They cannot take away your memories of queer passion. No matter what they do to us they cannot take this away. Nobody can stop the soft aching kisses and the hitched breath and the want from playing in the private theatre of your mind

They can try to take our art and our freedom and our family. They can try to crush us body and community. But they can never take our memories of burning, passionate, queer, revolutionary love. Pry it out of my cold dead head, fascists x

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Robert Birch

American Spring
In the face of their fuckery, we dance our own bread.

In The Faggots and Their friends Between Revolutions, Larry Mitchell wrote: “The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.”

The history of queer has been a braided effort between the radicals and assimilationists. We’ve been here before. This is what revolution feels like. Dying lovers throwing their dead partners ashes onto the White House lawn.

With our heart’s raging: we call on the radical spirits of our ancestors, from the Suffragettes, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, to Compton’s Cafeteria and the Toronto bathhouse raids; from the "flame queens, hustlers, and gay street kid” rioters of Stonewall to the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, from Act Up and Queer Nation to the high-kicking Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who Alice Walker reminds us:

"Joy is an act of resistance"

(Please take a breath with me)

We will neither be the oppressor’s conscience nor their scapegoats. Like the body resists infection, we make an immune system of ourselves. We queer mutual care and connection. We for, rather than against. As cultural initiates, queers come out from barefaced oppressions by exposing straight-parroting undercover cops in the head. We flip-flop-flap into a Rainbow Alphabet of sun-showering bio-degradable glitter —to arrive under the only flag that keeps growing.

Let the auto-immune inflammations amongst us end. We re-language so they can relinquish. They didn’t know they were straight until we called ourselves gay. Neg, until we called ourselves HIV Poz, Cis, until trans showed us how. Let’s sort rather than divide. Our burrowing non-binary nature is to clasp, coil and curl toward and into evolutionary spaces of refuge and reciprocity.

Queer is a complex network of interacting cells, and cell-forming tissues that protect our body from hegemonic pathogens that produce toxic tyrannical substances. When healthy, we reject the supremacy-infected and colonizing- malignant. We detox from their inescapable-high school malaise when we queer-ceremony one another as necessary.

All Little Lord Fauntleroys will be dethroned. Their viruses of hatred and greed shows how sick they are. When whole nations of infective perpetrators are possessed, we do what it takes to make ourselves zombie-proof. We inoculate by role-modeling, we help to heal, heal to help. We reassure and reassure again.

Radical, originated as Radix meaning to Root. Queerness rises-up to root out. We paradox ourselves. We go to ground; We nourish the soil of our arts and crafts; we mycological tendril, beneath contaminated surfaces tunnel, until we make ready to spore. In subversive mycelial spaces we karaoke the body electric, our faggoty voices raised to praise the queer perennial, our right to flower each spring. We make glorious a garden of ourselves by remembering our secret powers of concealing and revealing, rupturing and repairing. Nature is queer.

(Thank you for taking another breath with me)

Queerness exhales to waft through borders of Other-Same. We’re yeasty like that. Radicals are the wild yeast of the environment, in the air and on the fruit.

Assimilationists represent a specific strain of yeast cultivated in a laboratory, added to a process of fermentation to achieve consistency. The radicals are the roots of change that naturally occur, albeit unpredictably; the assimilationist, those devoted to a single-selected-strain are considered more reliable, controllable.

As a doughboy fan of the sweet and sour, I dream of a fringe-network of neighbourhood bakeries called the Yeastie Bois, making delicious treats to foment local cultures. Let’s wild yeast ourselves to ferment our “Ow!-Wow!” Revolution! — do what we’ve always done in the face of their fuckery, dance our own bread.

If self-care is sexy, community care is ecstasy. From the trenches of our former lives, we edge despair to lubricate cultures of the erotic; we toughen up to make tender; we invisible until together we invincible. Love’s infiltration, we resurface from long lineages of fierce strategists, soul-mechanics and fairness-warriors —marching, pinky to pinky, with the wisdom of the healers, the nobility of educators; we rave to the beat of poets, we writhe with the moans of lovers. We knead, roll and rise —or mold in this together.

(Fellow conspirators, thank you)

No one is coming to save us, no one will tell our stories for us. We are one another’s war bonds; we threshold, mushrooming at the pace of trust. As soil nourishing networks of queer, whatever we have been called or will call ourselves in the future, —on behalf of our benevolent ancestors and baby queer descendants, we enculture the heart’s dignity when we bio-logical our ways of loving.

If we are to meet the needs of this transubstantiating world, —appreciated for it or not, we spread our joys, share our harvests, muse our sorrows. Whatever our flag, whatever our era-defining roles, whatever our chosen responsibilities may be —this is our American Spring.