As a gender-queer freaky about wildness, I feel my expansiveness most outside. My brain stops trying to make sense of things while simultaneously imploding.
This time of year my queer is extraExtra queer. April winds, blizzarding emotions, creativity to explore everywhere, nothing contained to a binary. My queer is explosions of spice in my mouth, books that won’t let go after hundreds of pages together. My queer is multiple realities constantly making more space for pleasure. My queer is stillness in a day that deserves to be tasted down to the trees.
My queer is words on pages that sink, tear, climax, heal deep and fast. My queer is open water after a long winter- sounds, smell, slippery rock corridor. My queer is this body touching the other bodies I love. My queer is confusion about craving intimacy and the cold clean solo.
My queer is so many parts this gender and so many parts that gender and so many parts all the genders in between. My queer is so many parts this place and so many parts that place and so many parts of all the places in between.
The stunning 2018 book Overstory by Richard Powers summarizes (quoting Ovid’s Metamorphoses) my queer well,
“Let me sing to you now about how people turn into other things.”
My queer is science. And chaos. A blend of precise, wild, freaky and relaxed. My queer is fancy as fuck. My queer is northed and southed. My queer adheres to ritual and routines. My queer is creative and professional. My queer hungers for luxurious amounts of time in untamed spaces. My queer is daily connection to who I am as an artist. My queer is intense and casual- in an earthy way about endless lists of things (if you like queer lists, check out this amazing book about queer, solo travel after queer heartbreak by brilliant queer comedian and Broad City co-creator Abbi Jacobson).
My queer is pleasure. My queer is poet. My queer is poly (queerly defined below).
1. Devotion to someone(s) who you a extend a “full” freedom
2. Based in a practice of pure trust
3. Not fear-based, jealousy fueled, role-starved or rule static/stuck
My queer is great love. My queer is leadership committed to and rooted in collective liberation. My queer writes and writes and connects and writes. My queer is a promise to be queerly present. With that, …
The Promise by Jane Hirshfield
Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
Who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
Only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank.
Whatever the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dog’s tail wagged a little in his dream.