A couple of holidays ago, you know the one formally/racistly known as Thanksgiving (wait, we aren’t yet in a post turkey-obsessed-fourth-Thursday-of-November world?), I reached through a small square of storage that lives behind one robin-egg blue swinging door in my ballroom apartment. I groped the unlit space for a roasting pan, or wire rack? Something metal and sturdy, instead I met 130 year old wood. A splinter, at least 1.5 inches long, lodged itself into the fleshy alcove between right thumb and forefinger.
I felt the sliver (queer etymology-a sliver is a foreign object that has become embedded in the skin, most slivers are small wood splinters that do not penetrate deeply) find its way into me, wild and confident. With fingernails, tweezers, an orange handled paring knife I pulled out the half willing to relinquish a hold. The other 3/4 inch still lives in the same spot. Now a thin purple line, before the frame of 1890s Victorian era home built by a lumber baron.
This sliver - of a time before me, of a place I’ve called my own for almost ten years, of a forest white pine laden, birch highlighted, balsam heavy, removed entirely from land alongside a great lake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries- invited me to engage in subversive word play. Offers ways of looking at other pieces parts, cleaved from a whole.
I’m thinking of sex- the slivers of ‘intimacy’ and “romance” lodged in my body. How commitments to decentering and disrupting colonizer notions of state sanctioned, couple centric monogamy is similar to difficult sliver removal. It fucking doesn’t want to give.
To disrupt old ideas of sex is to feel up the radical act of being in right relations to other humans, otherkin, earth, water. It involves learning the history of land taking. Of monogamous relationship as land grab and bodies enslaved. 1862 and counting, ownership of 160 acres required a wife and promise to reproduce. Women as property, indigenous folx removed and boarded up. Settler sexuality became the standard. My beLoved house proof, an urban product of that time and the profits made by white people focused on building one flavor of “family”.
I also think of sex as splinter. A unit (still lodged, living in me, a measurement of old notions of intimacy) separated into smaller units, often because of disagreement or unraveling or unlearning, say in this instance “of the couple”. How small, thin, sometimes sharp pieces of the (monogamous) queers I’ve fucked, fallen for, felt climb inside of me still live in my polySolo body.
So to pry out half the splinter is to try to do it “less wrong”. As in unsettle my inherited settler sexuality and expunge the bequeathed rules of compulsory monogamy. There isn’t only one way. Yes the splinter is there, a reminder of relationship anarchy, to queerly love to love, build and practice new trashE intimacies.