I attended an event last week about Third Spaces that opened with the question, “If your soul was a work of art, what would it look like?”. That night I had wild, imaginative dreams about my soul being both art work(s) and sex toy(s). I reposed the question, “If my soul was a sex toy, what would my pleasuring feel like?”. Upon waking, I spent time thinking about my sexuality and my community’s sexualities as third spaces.
I look out at lusty blue on blue of horizon, past where I saw a whole fox, tail still fluffy, fire orange fur, frozen solid in deep winter,
as hard as questions in my head’s hollow, “How? How is this possible?” No answer- the round reality that each day dispenses
loses its flavor after minutes flat. Yet the magic!! cracks open, loud Loud frozen water.
The professional athletes, wicked wizards with blades and sticks,
Gendered and agendered bodies, bruised and brave and bellowing,
With (a life time of and) three periods, Win!
The final whistle blows, we all head home
To wait for the cis men in our lives to finally catch up.
Shrubby cinquefoil is often associated with resilience and endurance. This flower blooms from spring to early fall, providing long-lasting beauty. Its vibrant petals symbolize joy, strength, and pleasure in plant speak.
‘The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.’ Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury'“
Like my mama said last month after I tried to convince her drinking diet coke is not the same as drinking water, “Dammit honey, sometimes you just have to hydrate your pleasure!” I paused, laughed aloud on the phone, and exclaimed, “That is brilliant!”
Poetry. Before, after, during, always, Yes, there’s a deep and interesting kind of troubling poems do. Troubling as in stirring up- and- creating space for expressions of troubles. Art asks for both.
- Tracy K. Smith
The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember and let it teach us. That’s where the storytellers come in. -RWK
Every year, after birthday month adventures, I return, rejuvenated from east coast directness- sexy, smooth, and simple. Schnazzle in the speakEasy. Folx telling me what they want. I spread risky creativity (as in pleasure inducing intimacies expressed) over friendship, family, the familiar 5 generations deep.
When Audre said, “The love of women healed me,” she meant the care, gratitude, and intellectual affirmation she found in women’s community and cultural spaces. But she also meant the erotic thrill and sensual excitement she felt about the women in her life. Those who were lovers, and those who were not.
Summer inspired, I share work by brilliant enthusiasts (aka poets, scholars, activists, and writers) all focused in their own way on queering relationship configurations. "As artists, [we] strive to make pieces that inspire lasting change in how we love, act, practice intimacy, and organize our society."
sitting with things to say, suspended in time,
learning how to control the blooming of my colors.
I am a queer container. Who came into organizing
for the electric eel of imagined change.
Last night I watched a thousand footer leave the Twin Ports. After twenty two years in Duluth, I still marvel at how these ships move through open water. The gritty grand aesthetic equals an eye bending immensity, a slow soft rumble of engineered science, and enormity’s unbelievable ability to stay afloat. I also balked at the name of the boat. Bah “american integrity”. WTF?!
Lucille’s poetry is a ‘shimmer of influence, a kind of glimmering evidence of something beyond oneself’.
I think of such Shimmers and Glimmers as Risky Creativity and often, all letter-writing-love like, put pen to paper and stamp to envelope to explore such honeycombing, queer magic.
Yes, it’s the month I meld into my couch. I’ve been intimate with Women’s March Madness for 21 years. Every “spring'“ as winter on our bigLake refuses to give up center court, demanding another round of celebrity, reminding us who last/every year’s climactic champion is in wavy, drama-queen kind of ways, I watch. Embrace sweaty ESPN-flavored enthusiasms. And watch and watch.
Poetry penned after listening to fabulous episode of ‘Bedroom Eyes’ podcast (an intimate analysis of agency, ethics, relationships, and identity as experienced within oppressive systems of power hosted by badAss brown, queer, non-monogamous community organizer Juno Mariah) about autonomous relating- a not so distant moon of relationship anarchy.
Songs with sexual themes- spanning the subvert to overt, creepy to normative to queer delicious- are everywhere. I’m loving recent conversations in community about tunes that for multiple reasons we’re hearing differently.
This morning I muse on the ways I’m tough skinned. The ways 2023 has asked me and so many of my beLoveds to be both tender hearted and resilient. Tap confidences like we turn up the thermostat, see the gorgeous grain of our surety as strong as wood-cell fibers.
Jordan’s Passion points us not to romantic love or sexual fury but to the tools she uses to make her work memorable, modern, experimental: urgency, time, music, pain, white space, marked silences, hushed pauses, earned wisdom, the language of the female psyche.
Peace for Palestine! and thank you Naomi Shihab Nye- a first teacher about Palestine, a poet whose words changed me at a reading in Texas in 1994.