What’s The Weather Inside Me
By Gabrielle Néla
Humid Human
An ID
A low hum
An introduction to
slippery sides of self
The weather inside is light
Dancing in raised dewdrops
And stripes in the skies of me
Rays seen through chimney’s residue.
I’d rather an hour
Inside a dew drop
Than minutes on
A wilting flower or seconds on
Glaring hot rooftop.
In Human,
I’m humid.
A microcosm of
The world
A dollop of earth
Mostly water
On someone’s palm.
Held and holding
Of and in
The bubble feels like a
Microscope
I am not kept in but
The realm can be and is
Anthropo-
morphized.
Droplets morph into another
And race down the glass visor
That protects me from myself
The “ID” in Humid that
Severs “M.E.” from humAN…
And I think of sunny days
and starry nights
And question:
“Did Vincent tell us
Those were sheaves of wheat
Or did man I.D.
Them as other than…”
I’ll sift as I sit.
Though warm and wet
I’ll allow the sun to rise
So long as all other
separations and
hesitations remain
Unleavened.
This Humid Human
Sees through
Furrowed brow,
Beaded temple,
And through disguise.
Inward.
Towards
Damper soils
Softer soles
And
Temperate eyes.
©2022 Gabrielle Néla
No War
No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here.
We, that is, all of us, all of us clicking on Youtube or Reddit or Facebook, all of us watching our own news, we could be the last people to see this woman alive or, very possibly, as she is now, whole and apparently in good health.
We are watching an act of courage in real time. A homemade sign, what we in the politics world call an intervention, a break in what had been a seamless narrative. A disruption—Russians against war. Not in our name, not armed with the fiction that we all think this is fine.
A human rights protest monitoring group, identified the woman as Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer at the Russian news channel where she holds her sign that translates: “No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”
by Robin Podolsky
No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here.
We, that is, all of us, all of us clicking on Youtube or Reddit or Facebook, all of us watching our own news, we could be the last people to see this woman alive or, very possibly, as she is now, whole and apparently in good health.
We are watching an act of courage in real time. A homemade sign, what we in the politics world call an intervention, a break in what had been a seamless narrative. A disruption—Russians against war. Not in our name, not armed with the fiction that we all think this is fine.
Holding up a sign with words drawn badly in sharpie is an act of extraordinary courage when thousands of people are being disappeared for holding up signs with nothing on them at all. Another kind of brave act, holding up a blank placard, daring the regime to arrest them for making everyone think about the unsayable, the act of signifying itself become a subversion, the act of suggesting any meaning at all.
We could be the last people to see this woman alive as she is.
Human Rights Watch has smuggled videos of people being beaten and kicked and burnt with electricity in custody. Of the thousands arrested, hundreds remain unaccounted for. The woman with the sign knew all this, she was a journalist, she knew. She knew that a law has been passed making it a crime to tell the truth about the war, that she could be facing up to 15 of hard time.
She took that risk for one moment, one uninterrupted moment of being a journalist, telling what she knew, doing her real job. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here.
This woman standing awkwardly behind her messy handwritten sign interrogates me. What I am doing is possible she says. It is terrifying but it is possible. Are you doing everything you possibly can?
I Loves Me Some Older Hairy Men
Do you know the psychological concept of the “imprint”? It’s the theory that, at some moment in life, while our sexuality is still developing, we see someone and suddenly—BAM!—that’s what we’re attracted to. You have been imprinted. Most people imprint on a conventional look, thanks to the massive influence of the media. But you can imprint with anyone. Mine happened at the Community Swim Club at age 11.
by John Topping
Do you know the psychological concept of the “imprint”? It’s the theory that, at some moment in life, while our sexuality is still developing, we see someone and suddenly—BAM!—that’s what we’re attracted to. You have been imprinted. Most people imprint on a conventional look, thanks to the massive influence of the media. But you can imprint with anyone. Mine happened at the Community Swim Club at age 11.
My burgeoning interest in men’s bodies had so far manifested with an increasing interest in the Archie Comics, when I started noticing Archie and Reggie’s muscle definition in the endless beach stories that the comics artists drew. But I was about to make a sharp turn.
I was doing my favorite pool activity, bobbing in place at the edge of the pool, by myself, in the medium deep section. When I looked up, I saw him—an older, 50-ish man having a conversation with someone. I had the perfect view of his whole body in profile. Tan from the summer, his gray and black body hair glistening and perfectly backlit. I’d already taken an interest in chest hair, but this was the first time I saw someone with as much hair coming out of his back as his front, sticking out more than an inch. I was entranced by the vision. Spellbound. I couldn’t look away. BAM! Imprint. I now knew exactly what I wanted, and it’s that guy. I knew I couldn’t have him, but he’d set the standard for what’s possible. I gazed for the entire, thankfully long conversation until he went away. Then I never saw the man again. He wasn’t the sole reason I like older men, but he definitely sealed the deal, showing me what I would desire the rest of my life.
Once I grew up, left home, and came out, this would turn out to make a difficult task of the time-honored ritual of two men of the same sexual orientation commenting on a third person as a sexual object. I had to come out twice. First as a gay man, then as a gay man attracted to older men. And a third time if I dared add that I like them not only older, but with as much body hair as possible. It got me weird stares when I pointed out the men I liked. “Are you serious?” “Oh, man, you are bizarre.” “I’m not so sure about your taste in men.” I may as well have been back in high school, pretending to share enthusiasm about girls with my straight friends. So I stopped participating in the ritual with the general gay population. It was no fun.
The coming internet explosion is how we all learned of the countless others who felt the same way. What was once bizarre is now seen, at least in the gay world, as normal. Common.Accepted. Now it’s easy to find others who also likes older, hairy men (which we now call Bears). We can look at the exact same Bear together and objectify him and get very detailed and nasty about what we would like to do in bed with him—it’s just a thing guys like to do together. So when I finally felt normal, with a deepened sense of being part of the gay community, it was because I was, ironically, able to participate in the most superficial aspect of it.
©2022 John Topping
Time…Like A Cock In My Heart
I have so many important things vying for my attention at this moment that it’s hard to pick just one: a new job, my health, maintaining my exercise regimen, writing my solo show, writing a pilot and touching a dick. An actual dick that isn’t mine.
by Dave Trudell
“Dave, what’s the most important thing in your life right now?”
I have so many important things vying for my attention at this moment that it’s hard to pick just one: a new job, my health, maintaining my exercise regimen, writing my solo show, writing a pilot and touching a dick. An actual dick that isn’t mine. Right before omicron decided to rear its ugly head, I actually received head for the first time in almost two years from a married bisexual film buff who’s in an open relationship with his bisexual wife. It was a one-off, so to speak, and we didn’t finish because it was very late and we were tired, so it “kind of” counts but not really. I need a big finish. An explosion of cum that drenches both of us and shakes the bed like the Northridge earthquake, lying there sweaty and spent, unable to move while the cum on our bodies slowly crystallizes into sea salt. Still, although we fell asleep, it was nice to finally feel a mouth on my penis and to actually hold one in my hands again. “What is this strange, fleshy baton within my hands?” Instead of dick, I should be writing about my creative aspirations and believe me, they’re very, very important. I’m not getting any younger, even though I’m trying to roll back the clock like “Benjamin Button,” and it’s time….it’s time to make money from my creative ventures. I don’t mean selling out or solely doing something for cash. I’m talking about making money from my creative passions. I don’t love working in an office, sitting beneath fluorescent lights that illuminate my body like a CT scan while I push paper, but my attention to detail serves me nicely within this world. And it’s a paycheck. The cute intern who worked for us a few summers ago was a musician AND an aspiring attorney with a detail-oriented mindset. On his Facebook page there were pictures of him with his shirt open, his large nipples poking through…and something else poking through his fitted jeans as he strummed a guitar slung across his neck. See that? My mind instantly shifted to dick again. I’ve been trying to book some meetings in order to take “dicktation” but now that omicron is ravaging the country, do they need to take a PCR test before they come over? Swab their nose before I swab their ass with my tongue? Rapid tests aren’t available anywhere. I almost ran into CVS the other day and pulled a Shirley MacLaine from “Terms of Endearment.” But instead of yelling “Give my daughter the shot!” I wanted to scream: “Who do I have to fuck around here to get a rapid in-home test so that I can get fucked?!” It’s probably best to lay low for now and not get laid. Much better for my writing career. I can channel that energy into my one man show or my pilot or an essay. What really matters most this year is balance. Balancing my time: time to write, time to work, time to exercise, time for dick, time to relax, time to read, time to have fun. Hmm. Time to stop thinking about time because it’s not infinite. Oh! And time to have a relationship. It’s been too long. My friends keep encouraging me to set up a profile on OK Cupid or Match.com but every time I get close to completing my profile, I delete it. I don’t have time. Wait….there’s that dreaded word again: time.
©2022 Dave Trudell
Urgent Message
The door bust open and the round of laughs suddenly gave way to gasps and other sounds of panic when a dozen men in uniform burst into the room shouting “Up against the wall!”
Guns. Men in uniform with guns. And so the twenty of us, the twenty journalists who moments ago were a hair’s breath away from the peace of a weekend’s start, flew into police lineup “up against the wall” like hummingbirds on speed.
by Corey Roskin
It was the end of the work week, an ordinary Friday in the first blushes of mid-March glory. With a spring ahead time change on the previous Sunday, at 4:30pm the sun was still ablaze and there was nary a cloud in the sky.
Some of us were already winding down, and a quick gab with my colleague Millicent Ames was about nothing so much as a congenial confab referencing the egg frittata my fiancé Sandra made last night, an overdue baby about to bust out of CarrieAnn Zales in Accounting, and some silly old melodrama I watched on AMC over the weekend.
Idle chit chat started to fill the room, a bevy of “serious” journalists in a collective sigh at the end of a long newsworthy week. Overtimed and overtaxed, a palpable sense of TGIF was in the air as the clock struck 4:55pm.
The bellow of “I’m queer, I’m here, I’m five minutes outta here” from Alan Billings led to a a round of hearty and snorty laughs which almost covered up the sound of a door bursting open.
A door. To our large, bustling space. The journalist think tank. All twenty of us still there at the end of that long newsworthy week.
The door bust open and the round of laughs suddenly gave way to gasps and other sounds of panic when a dozen men in uniform burst into the room shouting “Up against the wall!”
Guns. Men in uniform with guns. And so the twenty of us, the twenty journalists who moments ago were a hair’s breath away from the peace of a weekend’s start, flew into police lineup “up against the wall” like hummingbirds on speed.
I heard one of the men shout of “Face the wall. Hands on the wall. Hands high up on the wall. Now.”
Guns. And so the the twenty of us did as told. Facing the wall. Our hands high.
And then there were screams, not from our room but from across the hall. I heard gunshots and the harrowing sounds of fear, pain and agony coming from Accounting. Oh no. CarrieAnn Zales and the baby.
One of the men in uniform said loudly, “Those sounds from that room can be you. I implore you, do not say a word. Do not move your hands from the wall. In time you will know why we are here.”
Time. In time. It seemed like an eternity of time and my arms were tiring out, high overhead, hands placed firmly on the wall. In my peripherals I could see Millicent’s arms next to mine starting to quiver. I felt the heat of anxiety from Millicent on the left and Lana Charnow on the right, Lana so short and slight that her hands were barely at the level above my head.
One of the men, a fire headed ginger who looked barely out of his teens said “Ok. Arms. Down. Hands by your sides.”
And then. “Turn around. Backs against the wall. Listen carefully. The world as you once knew it is no longer. Do not be alarmed as you can choose to be a part of this new reality and you will be safe.”
And then. “The less you resist, the more likely you will survive. If you survive and comply, you will have the basics of what you need - food, clothing, shelter, healthcare. If you survive and comply and contribute to the cause, you may have the opportunity to be something more than what most of you will end up being.”
And then. And then. And then. I was dizzy from the confusion, madness, and insanity of what I was hearing and what I can only describe as a dream. Because it must be a dream. It’s a dream, right?
But then. More from the ginger. “Your life will be one of listening, listening carefully and responding with a specific set of responses that we will provide you, that you will commit to memory and that you will live by. Without. Fail. When one of us says, ‘Am I understood?’ There is only one answer and that answer is yes. So….Am I understood?”
No one said anything at first and the Lana offered a soft, teary “yes.”
The ginger was not pleased. “Second time. Am. I. Understood!”
”Yes” from about half of my colleagues, the lack of response more a reflection of stunned shock as opposed to disobedience at the risk of death.
The ginger walked over to each of us, peering into one set of eyes after another, penetrating the souls of all twenty journalists with the kind of ice and evil carried by a sociopath of the highest order, slamming us all into submission in short order.
The ginger then walked away from us and into the center of the line of men in uniform, all of them pointing guns in our direction.
And then. “Now. Third Time. Last time. Am. I. Understood!!”
All of us. Loudly. Pleadingly. “Yes!”
Suddenly a colleague from the Accounting Room across the hall, Larry Pace, 20 years on the job, dedicated to a fault, self described nerd, sweet and quiet and unassuming, a near savant of all things numbers, beloved husband and father, burst into the room covered in sweat and holding a scrappy hand held sign that said “Urgent Message! Run! Now!”
Shots rang out.
Larry.
Down for the Count.
Bleeding.
Dead.
And then.
The ginger: “Am. I. Understood!!”
Us: “Yes!!”
The ginger (pointing at Larry): “That. Is Not. Understood.”
©2022 Corey Roskin
Dancing In The Dark
DANCING IN THE DARK
TILL THE TUNE ENDS
DANCING IN THE DARK
AND IT SOON ENDS
DANCING IN THE DARK
TILL THE TUNE ENDS
DANCING IN THE DARK
AND IT SOON ENDS
Fire Island, 1985
Dave and I took a share in a house for the summer. Both of us were working, making good money, enough money to buy a car, a Honda Civic Hatchback. The curtain fell at 10:45 at the Palace, and by 11:00 we were on our way to Sayville, Long Island. Time is of the essence since the last ferry leaves at 12:30. Traffic is light through the midtown tunnel as we connect onto the Long Island Expressway speeding our way to Exit 59, and the ferry to the Island.
Sometimes we had time to spare and sometimes there were only seconds. As soon as I am on the ferry and it pulls away from the dock, a quiet, a peaceful tranquility comes over me. The tensions of week, the drive, the relationship start to melt away and in the twenty minutes to the Pines my entire body relaxes, my breathing is easy as I transition into relaxation.
It’s almost one o’clock in the morning but I can hear pulsing beat from the Pavilion, the Disco at the Pines. For the boys of the Pines, it is still early. Some are just getting up from their disco naps, and getting ready to dance and imbibe alcohol and other substances to keep them raging through the night, I make my way to the house. Most of my housemates are already asleep, they are the older, more sedate type.
I get my second wind. Not ready to sleep. No, not to dance. I don’t dance don’t ask me.
No, it’s to get undressed and dressed again, now with that jock strap and shorts and make my way to the beach. The moon is full, the water shimmers, there is a calmness on the beach. Not too many people to be seen. There are no lights, except the ambient light from the moon, and whatever lights shine from the houses along the beach.
I quietly and quickly make my way towards the Grove. Cherry Grove is the less affluent gays mecca. The Grove is not my destination. Between the Pines and the Grove is the forest of trees, or as it is better known, the Meat Rack. That’s my destination.
It is dark in the forest, but I can make out shapes of men leaning against trees, suggestively posed, some clothed, some not. No one talks. Men of all types, hungry men, looking for a connection. Looking to kiss in the dark. Looking for more than kisses in the dark.
It is 1985, and it is my misfortune to discover this oasis of sex just as the AIDS crisis is coming into full view. Damn. Why does it happen now when I am thin, and ready to do the cruising dance and so much more? Why couldn’t it be five years ago. But then if had, I probably would be dead by now.
Safe sex is the word these days. I touch him. Feel his firm pecs. Find his lips and we kiss, deeply. Shorts fall. Stroking. Kissing. Lots of “kissing in the dark “and “it soon ends” with a sigh and a release.
Then the long walk back along the moonlit beach. I will sleep soundly.
©2022 Jim Pentecost
Tefillin, Gender and Holy Matrimony
“You can be as top as you want, but everybody bottoms for G-d.”
By Rabbi Robin Podolsky
My world was in tatters, and much of the devastation had been at my hands.
I had lost my own respect, because I’d behaved abominably with someone I love. The person I had fallen for as my butch girlfriend had come out as a man, and it turned out that all the postmodern queer critical theory I spouted glibly actually reflected reality.
My identity really was the product of a discourse I did not write and could not control. We would step out in public and I was the girl on the guy’s arm. The public self I had built for decades was erased. I was being read as straight and there was nothing I could do about it.
Of course, I was far too politically advanced to object to my lover’s transition. I did, however, find occasion to object, loudly and at length to almost everything else—his conversation, his friends, the way he moved, his taste in food and the shit he watched on TV. I was being really mean and dishonest about why. Of course, he ended it.
Ashamed of how I had behaved with my lover’s transition, I went to summer camp.
Queer Camp was a yearly spiritual gathering in the New Mexico desert, fashioned by whomever showed up. It might include a Kali bonfire, a Beltain circle, Shabbat services, Buddhist meditation, erotic temples or an Episcopal mass.
Felipe, a two-spirit within the Jicarilla Apache tribe, was an important teacher at Q Camp. He lived at so many intersections: a tribally recognized two spirit who presented as a nelly man; a Native American who kept his ancestral tradition and also prayed with a Catholic brotherhood; a descendent on his mother’s side of bnei anusim, crypto-Jews who had fled the inquisition only to find it in Mexico, driving them underground with half-remembered remnants of secret traditions (candles on Friday evening, altars to Santa Esterica—Queen Esther, the closeted Jew), their origins almost forgotten.
I sought him out, and we talked. He asked me to attend the sweat lodge he was running as a ritual atonement, connecting it that way to my Jewish roots. Years before it happened, he told me I would be a rabbi.
At the time, I was an ordained Faery priestess, having passed the year and a day process of initiation. In my ACT UP world, Wicca was pretty much the official religion of the movement. Most of the people I knew well had altars in their homes with meaningful gemstones (blue for serenity, pink for love) and candles we burned to fix intentions and derive outcomes. I had been content as a Jewitch, happily syncretizing.
But I was not happy after my disgrace, and I was not content with the support I received from my spiritually libertarian pagan friends. They kept telling me to honor my rage. But I could not honor conduct that I found disgusting. I began turning back to the tradition of my mothers and fathers, the tracery of law and value that could hold me up and hold me back from the worst of my nature, the tradition that respected me enough to make ethical demands.
Two years later, I returned from another Q Camp quite changed.
I had made a sweet friend, a pretty tomboy with eyes like dark water. We agreed to stay in touch and sealed our intention with a ritual guided by a Yaqui witch who gave us temporary cuttings over our hearts. I chose the Hebrew letter shin for Shalom, peace; for Shema, listen.
Driving back to L.A., I felt so soft, so open. And it was almost Shabbat! I went directly to synagogue where services were over, but the congregation was still mingling. I sought out the lesbian rabbi who had become a teacher and friend.
Artlessly excited about my cutting, I pulled aside my shirt: “Look!” Proudly, I showed off the Jewish thing I’d done at queer camp.
Calmly, she observed, “Oh I see. Shin for Shema for Shalom.”
“Yes!”
Soon after, we had a talk.
The rabbi suggested it was time to stop straddling the margin and just commit. She said, “You know, Judaism is not only our texts and liturgy. There are tactile, sensual rituals—if you’re drawn to that sort of thing, why don’t you wrap tefillin?”
Tefillin are prayer devices made from black leather, two boxes containing scripture that one binds to one’s arm and forehead with straps. Excluding Shabbat and holy days, observant Jews wrap tefillin once a day. This practice was once exclusively for men. Now many of the rest of us are discovering the thrill of binding ourselves to God.
My rabbi suggested a Judaica store on L.A.’s Fairfax Avenue, packed with dusty candles, tallisim, yarmulkas, books, menorahs and many kitschy oil paintings of bearded old men and lily-faced boys at study or prayer.
The bearded proprietor nodded when he heard my request. Gravely, he asked who my rabbi was. I named my teacher, one of the outest of the out rabbis in L.A. His face bloomed into a smile: “Ah, Rabbi Denise. I trust her! I give you good price!”
And he did. He showed me how to wrap tefillin and threw in a prayerbook. He said, “If you do this every day, your life will change.”
He wasn’t wrong. When I I wrap my arm, I am tied to the Holy One’s embrace. When I encircle my head, I feel Her kiss. When I complete the process by wrapping my fingers, I say the ancient words, “I betroth you to Me forever, I betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice and in kindness and compassion; I betroth you to Me in faithfulness and you will know HaShem.”
These promises come from the book of the prophet Hosea in which God addresses the people Israel, designating them with female pronouns as God’s collective bride. (The story of Hosea himself and his Godly mandated marriage to Gomer, a woman who had either been a sex worker or simply active sexually, is one of Divine subversion and radical acceptance.)
For generations, Jewish men have married God with those words of betrothal, strapping themselves with tfilin into the holy embrace. Who is lover and who is beloved, addressed with Hebrew pronouns as you/she? And what happens to all these gender slippages when the person praying is female or nonbinary?
When I strap myself into that ever-changing web of discourse and obligation that is Judaism, I am reminded of something a wise working class butch said to me long ago:
“You can be as top as you want, but everybody bottoms for God.”
©2022 Rabbi Robin Podolsky
Levinas in London: A Working Class Hero is Something to Be
By Rabbi Robin Podolsky
My friend Rachel and I were in London for a celebration at Leo Baeck College, marking 25 years of LGBT rabbis being ordained in Britain. During our free time, we visited Postman’s Park, a space of green quiet in the heart of London’s financial district. This is a gated garden with benches and paths winding through beds of purple and vermilion flowers on long green stems mixed with varied foliage; hunter’s green, chartreuse, chalky white. Built into a wall at one end of the park is a monument to human decency.
London is dotted with enormous statues of heroes on horseback, most of them wealthy white men celebrated for acts of martial courage or statecraft; acts that, justifiably or not, cost some other people their lives. Toward the end of the 19th Century, an artist named George Frederic Watts, the son of a piano-maker thought that there should be in London at least one monument to working class people who saved lives at the cost of their own. In 1900, Watts’s vision, now called The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, was realized in Postman’s Park.
Into that wall at the back of the park are set ceramic tiles. Each bears a name, a story, and a year:
Godfrey Maule Nicholson Manager of a Stratford distillery and George Elliot Robert Underhill workman. Successively went down a well to rescue comrades and were poisoned by gas. July 12, 1901. Alice Ayres daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house at Union Street Borough at the cost of her own young life. April 24 1885. Samuel Lowdell Bargeman. Drowned while rescuing a boy at Blackfriars. Feb 25 1887. He had saved two other lives.
Rachel and I did what Jews do at graves: we left stones, doing our part in laying the dead to rest. Rachel chanted Psalm 23, “HaShem is my shepherd…” We shed tears of awe. Here was a shrine to a special variety of hero who reminds us of a sometimes-forgotten heritage. If human beings can be capable of shocking cruelty and greed, so too do we produce people who, in moments of immediate decision reveal a reflexive care for others, a greatness of soul.
Of course, when Jews mark a celebration, as we had done at Leo Baeck, you know that study will be involved. During the colloquium, I had the honor and pleasure of conducting learning about the work of Emmanuel Levinas, my favorite Jewish thinker.
Levinas taught that the human subject comes into itself in relationship with the other person—not the categorical, sociological Other, but the immediate human neighbor in proximity to oneself, the “one who comes along.” He wrote in the long shadow of the Shoah.
Levinas survived the war, because he was taken prisoner as a French soldier and put into a stalag, not a death camp. But his entire extended family, whom he had left behind in Lithuania when he moved to France as a student, was murdered. (His wife and daughter survived, because they were hidden by brave French Catholics who risked their own lives to do it.) Levinas was fascinated, not with the banality of war and power, but with those people who hoarded and stole bread in the death camps—not to eat but to give to those too sick to obtain it for themselves. He was awed by the human genius for what he called substitution, the ability to find meaning despite one’s own unjust and untimely death in the fact that others would live on.
Levinas would have loved the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice.
It had seemed serendipitous to me that I heard a story about the Memorial on NPR as I prepared for London. Visiting the place was a highlight of the trip for me. I was so happy to find this unique installation and so looking forward to telling everyone all about it. Then I went to the Google for a little extra background on Watts the artist and received a nasty shock.
Turns out that what I had taken to be a work of pointed anti-monumentality was not Watts’s only mode of expression. Watts had, in fact, capped his career with a textbook example of martial monumentalism—a bit of naked beefcake called Physical Energy, intended as a tribute to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes–a figure Watts admired. (He also professed to admire Atilla, Ghengis Khan and Mohammed, so, at least, it wasn’t only white Christian conquerors whom Watts venerated; he seems to have had a warm spot for any masculine hero who imposed his will.) Nevertheless, Watts was the author of a pamphlet written during the Boer War called “Our Race as Pioneers,” a defense of British imperialism. Oh. Oh dear.
This working-class champion who had turned down the opportunity to become a baronet, a British noble, and had called into being a tribute to human solidarity, could see only a glorious march toward progress in white imperialist conquest. Watts, whom a biographer called “The Last Great Victorian,” died in 1904 as the 20th Century began, never knowing that century would be littered with the wreckage that conquerors and colonizers left behind.
From the other side of that wreckage emerged thinkers like Levinas who insist that we learn to live in a world of multiplicity, in which the other person’s difference is a wonder that elicits our receptive response, not a provocation that demands retaliation or erasure through conquest. Levinas taught that the acts of substitution performed by those memorialized in Postman’s Park teach us more about worthy heroism than the deeds of conquerors ever could.
I still believe that Levinas would have loved the memorial. But Physical Energy would probably have earned his scorn. At any rate, it earned mine. What had begun as a simple story of my delight in an affecting work of art was becoming something else. This was turning into a story about the wound at the heart of Western white working-class movements, the corruption of racism and identification with national projects that depend on racist narratives. We see it in the rise of so-called populism in the United States—a kind of faux working-class styling on the part of born elites like Donald Trump and George W. Bush who affect regional accents and the kind of crudity that they were taught to associate with the less privileged. The painful truth is, sometimes that deception works, especially when it offers white working class people a place above the bottom rung of hierarchy, be it imperialist or racist—and when it offers working class men a heroic vision of themselves that comports with traditional (and by traditional I mean reactionary) visions of masculinity.
Too often, trade unionists and other labor groups have been seduced by the story of white national pride, giving their support and their lives to the colonial projects of the men whom they enrich with their sweat and sacrifice. G.F Watts, the son of an artisan who celebrated the personal heroism of working people had also celebrated the conquerors who found ways to waste that capacity for sacrifice on projects of dominion.
All right then. This would be one of those kinds of stories.
And then I read further. And complications multiplied. In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, President Barack Obama describes a moment of spiritual exaltation, simultaneously a flight and a grounding, that seized him during a Sunday morning at Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s (much misrepresented) Trinity United Church of Christ. The reverend’s sermon centered on a painting by—none other than GF Watts, a painting called “Hope.” The canvas portrays the figure of a blindfolded woman, curled around a battered harp, of which only one string is left, straining to produce a sound. The reverend’s oratory, linking this image of that pale, allegorical figure to the stories of his very real Black congregants who struggled to pay their bills and nourish their relationships with one another, brought the future president to tears.
The intertextuality goes even further. The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon was “The Audacity of Hope,” a phrase which would become the title of one of Obama’s books and would crystalize the message of his historic campaign. Also–the Reverend was not describing a painting that he himself had seen in the original. He was harking back to a sermon he had heard, given by another Black clergyperson who had seen the work and been himself inspired.
So–art created by a working-class born, Romantic, European, imperialist apologist becomes, at various levels of remove, a source of spiritual inspiration for two Black Christian preachers, a future president, and a queer anti-racist rabbi.
All right then again. Maybe cultural appropriation can go in two directions, maybe we can rifle the toolbox of the dominant culture for whatever will move us just a little further toward that world of peace and plenty we fight for, that promised land we remember although we have never been there. Audre Lourde taught us, famously, that, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” On the other hand, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas’ friend and sparring partner suggests that we have no tools, no language, verbal or visual, untainted by the dominant culture. Says Derrida, “I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”
Derrida and Levinas sparred because Levinas believed in the Transcendent, a beyond-being Whom one might as well call God and Whose ongoing revelation we discover in the face and speech of the other person. He agreed with Derrida that all human knowledge is partial, fallible, situated and interested, but he believed that speaking itself is a manifestation of something like the universal—the interhuman. For Derrida, the discursive fields into which we are born, the linguistic maps of the world, the discourses of manners and custom and narrative, and the concrete conditions that situate them, are all there is. We can seize hold of that cultural material and begin to write or speak or govern ourselves into something new, but we do not choose the material we get to work with.
Queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz in his important book, Disidentifications accepts that, “identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates.” We are not immune to the power of those images that shaped our consciousness, even when we disaffiliate from the worldview that produced them. But perhaps we can recast their meaning—in the way that Frederick Douglass recast the American constitution to mandate the inclusion of Black troops in the union army; that same constitution which had legalized slavery. In the same way that our rabbis determined that “eye for an eye” means monetary indemnities, that is to say, restorative justice for people who have been harmed. In other words, we take our inspiration where we find it and we wield it as we can. As did Reverend Wright and President Obama.
If this turned out to be, in part, a story about disillusion, it is not a story of defeat. Reverend Wright really did uplift his congregants with his sermon about received hope, inspiring a successful campaign by the first Black president in US history. Rachel and I really did respond to the Memorial to Human Self-Sacrifice as a living commentary on Levinas, an inspiring teaching. And it’s not a bad thing that I was reminded to scrutinize my sources of inspiration and untangle the threads from which progressive narratives are woven, determining each time what to keep and what to discard.
These days, in the United States and around the world, people are tearing the old monuments down. Physical Energy might go the way of Columbus and Stonewall Jackson. But I do believe that the memorial in Postman’s Park will be allowed to stay, a green space amid commercial concrete and steel, a reminder of what people can do.
©2022 Rabbi Robin Podolsky
Published on Tribe Herald on Dec 27, 2020
Living On COVID Time
by Lucia Chappelle
You would think that after two years in the pandemic straight-jacket, when low-wage workers are saying, “fuck this lousy job,” and middle-class workers are redefining themselves – a polite way of saying, “fuck this lousy job” – and quitting in record numbers, you’d think I’d take the hint instead of just reporting on the phenomenon. The whole world has enough to worry about without being on my back, too. So why do I let myself be a pinball in my own life, bouncing, or being bounced around by little paddles of what everybody else wants me to do? Isn’t quarantine enough to show me the way to extract myself from other people’s plans and follow my own plans?
Quarantine time should have wound a different clock, set up a different calendar. In quarantine time I should have seen the opportunity to make my world my days, my sundial (or whatever device I use that’s never quite in sync with satellite time) all my own, revolving around me.
Maybe Omicron time is a second chance, going into a third year of COVID (three’s the charm?), to actually build a day (or some revolving expanse of time) around my needs. No rushing meals for deadlines – meals come first. No cramming in one more task instead of doing some yoga – yoga comes first. Eating and sleeping and yoga: making those the main events instead of the sideshow.
In this 2022, the third year of the pandemic, history will say that some people went mad, many people died, some people found faith, many people needed to grieve, but the catastrophe gave them no time for their grief. Some people dwelt in anger. And some people created lives that were centered on the things they always wanted. They survived.
We survived.
©2022 Lucia Chappelle
Virgin Mary Blue
by Marie Cartier
NICOLE STARED AT the blue water in the pool. It was so wet and so blue—Virgin Mary blue. It was so hot in Texas, she thought that over and over, ever since her parents moved the family to Fort Worth for her dad’s job.
They were living at the Naval Air Station. It was 1965 and they did not have air conditioning in their apartment: with its one bathroom, two parents and four kids. The heat was an animal. To escape it she played in the mud between the buildings. This was nothing like the woods of New Hampshire, but here they were and they weren’t going home—maybe ever. That’s what her mother said.
Nicole rarely saw Negro kids in New Hampshire, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t thought about it before they moved to Texas. But being in second grade in a Texas school on the base, she’d seen Negro kids. And she’d never seen a teacher be so mean to anyone as the second grade Texas teacher was to the Negro boy in her class. She sent him out of the classroom for small stuff like standing up to tuck in his shirt, when they were all supposed to be sitting down.
Texas was hard. Texas was hot. She didn’t like it.
It was a relief to be in the pool. Dad said he finally found a pool “they could afford.” It wasn’t like going to the beach back home – but it was water. Nicole waded in the shallow end—slowly going deeper and deeper to the end where the water luxuriously lapped her chin. She closed her eyes.
Then her mother started screaming. Her parents had been lounging in chairs by the side of the pool. Both of them were now on their feet. An older white man in a T-shirt and swim trunks was yelling to two Negro girls who had joined Nicole in the pool, when she waded out of the shallow end.
He was grasping for the Negro girls with the long pool net used to lift leaves out of the pool. Nicole froze in place. Her mother was yelling, “Out of the pool, Nicole, now. All of you kids—out!”
The man kept yelling, too. “Coloreds make the water dirty. That’s it. They are not allowed. Can’t you damn kids read?” He kept chasing the Negro girls with the pool net. “I’m not cleaning this pool because they decided to get in it. They’ll leak their damn color all over the pool.”
Nicole was still frozen. She let her eyes swing to the two girls and she looked at their skin. Nothing was coming off. She started to say something, but then the pool stick knocked one of the girls, and the older girl looked at the younger one and shook her head. They waded to the ladder and climbed out, dripping clear water.
Her mother was livid. She yelled, “Out kids! Now, Nicole.” Nicole’s three sisters were already out of the pool.
“Your daughters don’t need to get out,” said the pool manager. “They are fine. They’re not gonna leak.”
Her mother turned on him, “If Negros can’t swim here, my kids can’t swim here. Are you out of your mind?”
The man was silent. Then he thumped the pool stick like a long torch, the net dripping clear water. “Suit. Yourself,” he said, explaining nothing. Nicole and the older Negro girl, who looked to be Nicole’s age, eyed each other. Nicole climbed out of the pool, and reached out to touch her. Her mother immediately pulled her back, “What are you doing?”
“Look, Ma, she is not leaking color,” Nicole said.
The Negro girl half-smiled. She rubbed her arm herself.
“She’s not, Mom,” Nicole protested. She looked at the pool guy. “She’s not.”
He cocked his head. “Y’all ain’t from around here, so I imagine it’s best for you to figure out how those of us who are from around here --do things.”
Nicole’s mother grabbed her father’s hands. “We don’t do things this way.” She looked at the Negro girls. “I’m sorry.”
The last Nicole saw of the Negro girl was of her leaving the pool with her sister—both of them wet with their towels around their shoulders—holding hands.
“Do they, Mom? Do they leak color?” Nicole asked as her parents hustled them out of the pool.
Her mother looked at her and just shook her head. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph…,” she muttered.
It would be two years later, in fourth grade in New Hampshire, when Nicole finally had a Negro friend that she could ask, “Do you leak color in the water?”
And the friend laughed. “No, that’s ridiculous. Who told you that?”
“This guy,” Nicole said. “I tried to ask my mother about it—the day she decided to leave Texas.”
Last Call At The World
by Lucia Chappelle
That infamous atomic “doomsday clock” that always lingered at just a few minutes before midnight throughout my childhood doesn’t really capture the time we’re in now. It’s even later. It’s past midnight. It’s last call.
People are scrambling to get their hands on whatever it was they came out into the night to find. A fleeting sense of security in the arms of a stranger with hypnotic tales to tell. The jolt of excitement from diving into the outrageous. The anonymity of darkness and the lure of enticing, forbidden deeds. People have had one too many – one too many shocks to the system, one too many reality martinis, one too many trips to the bathroom that stinks of barfed anxiety and the stench rising from the political sewer. It’s last call and everybody is poking at their personal escape devices to book a ride home even though they have nowhere left to go. It’s last call and it’s raining outside.
The music that kept the illusion of permanence thumping under foot has stopped, and the hubada-hubada of the abandoned crowd is the only rhythm that remains. You can tell that the voices are full of frustration and longing, no matter how casual they try to sound. They’re all making statements that are really questions: the sun will rise, the coffee will be waiting, the A/C will come on, the TV will predict the weather and it’ll turn out just as they say, the gas station will be open.
Each person wanders out still searching for something – lost keys, stolen wallets, cars parked in forgotten places on unknown blocks – confused and agitated, less than desperate and desperate just the same. It’s last call and the moon is full.
©2022 Lucia Chappelle
Valentine’s Day 1979
by Jane Cantillon
It was Valentines Day 1979 at Frederick's of Hollywood.
Gini loved working at the legendary store, and didn’t care about the dirty shadow of the boulevard, a tragic has-been offering nothing but wig shops, pimps, whores and underwear stores. Even the tourists had fled, which made Frederick's of Hollywood a safe place for celebrities to duck into.
Just the other day, Rock Hudson came in with some friends and screeched their way through the men's tasseled rainbow G strings, while lightly touching the pleather and studded man sacks.
Gini found it thrilling when Dolly Parton had recently shopped with her assistant and was buying the superstar the sexy bras and panties. Though Dolly’s gigantic buttery wig was featured in the window display, that day she wore a concealing hat and two rather thin braids, all while sharing a small dressing room with her assistant, Judy.
Today Gini was waiting for her roommate Kevin to arrive at the store exactly at 1:25 PM when the security guard took his lunch break.
He would come in wearing his baggy jeans and his too big Fonzie leather jacket. She would take him into the dressing room and put lacy push-up bra after bra on him, crotchless panties, Mylar G strings with gizmos and vinyl neon butt plugs and cobalt blue velvet panties that said “Eat Me.” Sequence hearts, chains and pasties all layered on his chest and crotch, and finally, lots of cherry edible undies were shoved into his pockets. Then, his bulging body slipped out of the lavender deco building unnoticed.
Back at the apartment, after a couple of bong hits, Kevin would rip the edible undies open, spread a little sugar and peanut butter on, fold it and begin to chew away at the gelatin panty sandwich. Then for dessert, he would munch down the cherry red licorice strings and straps. “Good eatin’,” he would think as he washed it down with a Budweiser. Kevin would be glad that he helped Gini get new underwear and presents for their friends on Valentine's Day. As for him, after he paid his rent, bought his pot and beer, he barely had enough money for food so the edible undies really came in handy.
Another bong hit later, and he would laugh at the thought of people actually wearing them.
©2014 Jane Cantillon
I Dug My Mother From Her Grave
by David Parke Epstein 2014
I dug my mother from her grave on my eighteenth birthday. For nine years she slept in a coffin beneath frozen ground. I took her from the dirt to kiss the cream that is her face, to kiss the rose that is her lips, to sink my head beneath the ocean of ravens that is her hair, to kiss her full on the mouth, to once again suck the meaty nipple that is her tongue.
©2014 David Parke Epstein
My House
by Deanie Hochman
My house was always dark, musty, as if we were afraid that something that smelled or reeked of light might peek around the corner. God forbid light should come into this house. Mystery. It was the mystery that made the air in my lungs want to be something different. I felt like I was in a coffin with all the nails in but one. I could peek out with half an eye. You know it was almost as if a blindfold was even on the dishes. And the silverware tiptoed around the table aware of a mystery that needed to be dissected, its red underbelly exposed. The mystery terrified me. I felt I was already in a tunnel of my own. My eyes looking at my hands, touching, touching myself, looking for relief from a world I didn't understand.
Auschwitz.
What a big word. It must have a million letters stretching across the galaxy, wrapping around Hannah and Eli, so beaten, so beaten, not survivors. They thought that adopting me would bring back lives that were taken, the aunts, the uncles, Grandmas, shopkeepers, lovers. They were all there like rats in the holes of every room looking for sustenance, a crumb, a morsel, a gentle hand. No light. Coffins, all the nails down, screaming to a God who was hanging out on the porch smoking and chattin' with awfulness, playing ball with evil. It was a red ball, exposing his true position, his red underbelly so to speak.
Auschwitz.
It rings. The word reverberates loud yelling as the gray days of my life march forward, soldier-like, all my Jews desperately trying to find home. Hannah and Eli. Good, not good. I touch myself. I didn't die. I am alive. I shout, I Am. Yes. No more collecting cans of tuna, no more huge piles of money stuck under a comforter that had lost any sort of comfort, any sort of warmth. I lay in the bed with that money under the mattress. Cold, so cold. I touch myself. The darkness, not so much darkness as an absence of light. Rolls of toilet paper stockpiled in corners. Boxes of Ramen, the noodles that only need one cup of water to put nourishment into a starving body. Dry beans, pasta, tins of herring, sardines piled up in high places. Even crusts of stale bread as if the memory of those tiny crusts, tiny morsels was needed to remind us over, over, and over again The coffin feels so tight, cold. I touch myself. My beingness, my essence inside of me buried outside. I am chained. Auschwitz surrounds our days. I am in a bed that not only has money stuffed under the mattress, but so many documents; different passports, different names, offering promises of freedom when God decides again to hang out on the porch smoking, playing with that red ball. That ball hurts my eyes, exploding with a brilliant darkness that makes me want to burrow deep, looking for my hands. And then I touch myself. Touch myself again and say, I am.
©2014 Deanie Hochman
Bawdy Women’s Blues
by Ariana Manov 2014
It’s those full throttle racy women’s blues songs from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s that really get me going.
Bessie Smith teasin’ “I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl”; Lil Johnson’s “Push My Button, Ring My Bell”; Sippie Wallace braggin' “I’m A Mighty Tight Woman”; and Monette Moore’s “Two Old Maids In A Folding Bed”. Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, and Big Mama Thornton.
This little white girl didn’t take much note that they were all Negroes—which is what they were called way back. (And, as it turned out, most all of them were lesbians) But to me, they were just big, luscious women who belted out gut-bucket-get-down- and-dirty blues.
Those women, and some of the ones that imitated the greats, belting out those old style songs, and strutting their stuff (and they had lots of it) up and down the dive bars and storefronts on Central Avenue—oh my.
As a child, I hid under the creaking wooden seats with my best friend where we could peek and hear. (And we sure did.)
Their syncopated rhythms, their hip thrusting, and swiveling seemed like the only possible way a body could move. Their voices over-filled whole rooms while their audiences stomped and squirmed at the edges of the music.
From the time I was eleven (too young to understand what a jellyroll was), I listened to “race" records. (Didn't know they were called that.) With my much-too-old-for-me-to-be-hanging-out-with friends, I'd go to their funky homes and suck up the pure joy.
And I'd feel a creaminess—yes –at age 11—a creaminess between my thighs. No words for those feelings.
But with the hospitable smell of hocks and greens seeped into my skin, I'd drag my sorry little ass back to my wonderbread house, hide under the bedcovers and touch myself until I was exhausted.
I have the words now—some of them anyway. The unlawfulness of desire. This music still grabs me and works its mojo. We all own this music -- like our own souls—like owning the deepest, juicy rose-pink insides of my own body.
This white girl all grown up learned to be shameless (relatively anyway) about my lusty appetites.
And my lover learned to vibrate to the beats of my wantonness and smooth them with her tongue.
© 2014 Ariana Manov
The Hitchhiker
by Jennie Oconnor
I always wanted to pick up a hitchhiker and have wild passionate sex with her. Until the time that I did pick one up.
There was a gorgeous blond at the entrance ramp to the Hollywood freeway on Sunset. It was summer and she was wearing a very tight tank top, no bra, a pair of very short Daisy Duke shorts and bright red cowboy boots. Her long blond hair whipped in the wind and her thumb sported crimson nail polish. Her other hand caressed her round hip and teased the shredded bottom of her Daisy Dukes.
I marveled at the fact that no one had picked her up yet, but I knew I just had to. This was too good to be true.
I screeched to a dust-blowing halt, rolled down the passenger window and, hoping I wasn’t leering or drooling, said jauntily: “Need a ride?”
“Sure, lady,” came back the huskily sexy answer. I flung open the car door and she got in.
Well, actually, she insinuated herself in with a number of almost choreographed moves, beginning with turning her back to me and bending over – oh my god – until her beautiful ass hit the seat. Then she tossed her hair and looked over her shoulder at me wantonly. Next, she pulled her long, long left leg with the red boot glinting in the sun inside the car. She stretched that leg over until her creamy calf made contact with the gearshift in the floor.
She gave me another come hither smile – full red Angelina Jolie lips, and then some – and started to swing in her right leg. Not to be outdone by the spectacular dance of the left leg, the right bent at the knee into a little kick as she lifted up slightly and the red booted leg slid sinuously underneath her delectable bottom. Then, with a soft prolonged sigh, she raised her arms languidly, rested them on her glistening knee and turned to look at me.
I croaked out: “Where to?”
“Portland,” she breathed.
“No problem,” I said and roared up the entrance ramp.
©2014 Jennie OConnor.
Tatoo
by Tim Mack 2014
Listen.
There are mysteries that exist in palm trees. The hissing and humming of leaves pulsing from perfumed trade winds, winds that tap and massage over pineappled landscapes as well as dolphin populated waves that lap onto pearled beaches reflecting their majesty from the light of an absolute Pacific moon.
Watch.
A scattered flotilla of clouds sail in front of the glowing goddess without her permission giving the island paradise a ghost like warmth to this haunting spiritual night.
Feel.
I lift my silent, blank body onto the table and without permission give to myself a gift that begins the reimbursement of years of tormented conformity and hated compliance.
Celebrate.
The painting, on my flesh, made with statements and observations, not as a wallflower, but with the intrusive scent of the plumeria and the self anointed, well deserved arrogance of the bird of paradise.
Aloha ohana.
Much, much aloha.
©2014 Tim Mack.
Respect
by Jim Pentecost 2014
I fucking hate the word elder. But I have to admit is does comes in handy on some occasions.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself saying to the acne faced, wise assed punk teenager in the drama class I teach in a mostly Latino neighborhood, downtown Los Angeles.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself thinking when some young thirty-something vice principal gets all snippy and arrogant with me.
But that doesn’t mean I like being an elder.
It means that I am closer to the end than to the beginning. These days the end could come at any time (not that the end couldn’t have come at any time before but it doesn’t occur to us when we are younger). In the last two months, friends younger than my 62 years of age, have suddenly died. One, seemingly in good health, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and died in four weeks from the time of the diagnosis—58 years of age.
Like many of the teenagers I am around, I often thought my life would be a run on sentence and prefer not to think at some point there was going to be a period. For fuck’s sake, I’d want to go out with a big exclamation point.
But recently I have been looking at life through the prism of an hour glass but not knowing how much sand is still left.
I am impatient with people who don’t have the sense to inquire about my life experiences. Was I this way when I was in my twenties and thirties? Or was I born an “old soul”? I was endlessly fascinated by the experiences and stories of my elders.
But in this day and age of video games, I pods, cell phones, text messages, DVDs, internet porn, does anyone have time to hear a story?
Every once in a while, with my teenagers in school, it clicks that I have been around the block once or twice. When we study frozen stage pictures, one of the photographic examples I show is the iconic photo where Lee Harvey Oswald is shot as he is being transferred from the Dallas County Jail. First they are amazed to learn that I was alive then, and remember so many details of that day JFK was assassinated: Sister Rose Eileen’s eighth grade class, the weather, etc. Some of them do the math and realize that I am older than I look (thanks to staying out of the sun and Grecian Formula).
Sometimes I tell my class, “When I was in college, gas was only $.29 a gallon” and that same acne punk assed kid says, “Really Mister, $.29? Shiiiit Mister.”
Although I may be in the Chekhovian time of my life, the poem by Robert Lowell still resonates loudly:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
©2014 Jim Pentecost.
Loves Me Not
loves me, loves me not
car door slammed
garage door closed
Mercedes tires sprinted down the drive
silence
gone
she peeked
he was gone
garage reeked of alcohol
gun lock box open
handguns and bullets strewn about the bench
the new 20/20 under and over shotgun
laid out
loaded
her body screamed from his recent beatings
"four months of wedded bliss, darlin’”
he'd snarled as he hit her last night
four months of marriage
three of hell
how impetuous she'd been
new divorce.
new town
new job
ten and twelve year old daughters
Connor was a nice looking
successful
local attorney
who pursued her
aggressively
they dated for six weeks
eloped to Norfolk on his insistence
weekend binging arrived with a bang
the first beating
stopped appearing in public
lewd and suspicious comments
“they all know you're divorced, darlin'
they all come sniffin’ around you
lookin’ for a piece
of free ass
they're all wantin' to try your rosebud daughters on
for size, too"
the girls told her yesterday that they saw Connor hiding in
the bushes outside of their bedroom windows
instant nauseous horror
home at 3am last night
drunk
demanding sex
she demanded a divorce
he gave her a beating
extracted the sex
left at noon today
smelling of alcohol
his parting threats reminded her
a woman has no rights in Virginia
"divorce be damned, darlin.
you are my property in this state
along with your brats
hear me darlin?
you're just a slit
get ready for family fun night tonight
be ready"
she tucked the girls in
with a favorite video to watch
placed a chair in front of their bedroom door
sat
waited
alone
thought
frightened
desperate
cold sweat dripped
stinging the abrasions and cuts on her arms
from last night’s beating and rape
they were not old enough
was any woman ever old enough?
she sat and thought
pensive, then determined.
tires screech
screen door rips
back door explodes
he plows his way through the kitchen
dining room
"I’m home, bitch!
"get those juicy tight rosebuds of yours ready
watch me ram my cock out the back of their heads
answer me
bitch!
answer me!”
flushed
wild-eyed
sweating
turning the corner into her line of vision, .
unzipping his fly
“answer me
answer me”
the shotgun
answered
©2014 Cass Sowa.
QueerWords from QueerWise
JANE CANTILLON
Valentine’s Day 1979
It was Valentines Day 1979 at Frederick's of Hollywood.
Gini loved working at the legendary store, and didn’t care about the dirty shadow of the boulevard, a tragic has-been offering nothing but wig shops, pimps, whores and underwear stores. Even the tourists had fled, which made Frederick's of Hollywood a safe place for celebrities to duck into.
Just the other day, Rock Hudson came in with some friends and screeched their way through the men's tasseled rainbow G strings, while lightly touching the pleather and studded man sacks.
Gini found it thrilling when Dolly Parton had recently shopped with her assistant and was buying the superstar the sexy bras and panties. Though Dolly’s gigantic buttery wig was featured in the window display, that day she wore a concealing hat and two rather thin braids, all while sharing a small dressing room with her assistant, Judy.
Today Gini was waiting for her roommate Kevin to arrive at the store exactly at 1:25 PM when the security guard took his lunch break.
He would come in wearing his baggy jeans and his too big Fonzie leather jacket. She would take him into the dressing room and put lacy push-up bra after bra on him, crotchless panties, Mylar G strings with gizmos and vinyl neon butt plugs and cobalt blue velvet panties that said “Eat Me.” Sequence hearts, chains and pasties all layered on his chest and crotch, and finally, lots of cherry edible undies were shoved into his pockets. Then, his bulging body slipped out of the lavender deco building unnoticed.
Back at the apartment, after a couple of bong hits, Kevin would rip the edible undies open, spread a little sugar and peanut butter on, fold it and begin to chew away at the gelatin panty sandwich. Then for dessert, he would munch down the cherry red licorice strings and straps. “Good eatin’,” he would think as he washed it down with a Budweiser. Kevin would be glad that he helped Gini get new underwear and presents for their friends on Valentine's Day. As for him, after he paid his rent, bought his pot and beer, he barely had enough money for food so the edible undies really came in handy.
Another bong hit later, and he would laugh at the thought of people actually wearing them.
©2014 Jane Cantillon.
DAVID PARKE EPSTEIN
I Dug My Mother From Her Grave
I dug my mother from her grave on my eighteenth birthday. For nine years she slept in a coffin beneath frozen ground. I took her from the dirt to kiss the cream that is her face, to kiss the rose that is her lips, to sink my head beneath the ocean of ravens that is her hair, to kiss her full on the mouth, to once again suck the meaty nipple that is her tongue.
©2014 David Parke Epstein.
DEANIE HOCHMAN
My House
My house was always dark, musty, as if we were afraid that something that smelled or reeked of light might peek around the corner. God forbid light should come into this house. Mystery. It was the mystery that made the air in my lungs want to be something different. I felt like I was in a coffin with all the nails in but one. I could peek out with half an eye. You know it was almost as if a blindfold was even on the dishes. And the silverware tiptoed around the table aware of a mystery that needed to be dissected, its red underbelly exposed. The mystery terrified me. I felt I was already in a tunnel of my own. My eyes looking at my hands, touching, touching myself, looking for relief from a world I didn't understand.
Auschwitz.
What a big word. It must have a million letters stretching across the galaxy, wrapping around Hannah and Eli, so beaten, so beaten, not survivors. They thought that adopting me would bring back lives that were taken, the aunts, the uncles, Grandmas, shopkeepers, lovers. They were all there like rats in the holes of every room looking for sustenance, a crumb, a morsel, a gentle hand. No light. Coffins, all the nails down, screaming to a God who was hanging out on the porch smoking and chattin' with awfulness, playing ball with evil. It was a red ball, exposing his true position, his red underbelly so to speak.
Auschwitz.
It rings. The word reverberates loud yelling as the gray days of my life march forward, soldier-like, all my Jews desperately trying to find home. Hannah and Eli. Good, not good. I touch myself. I didn't die. I am alive. I shout, I Am. Yes. No more collecting cans of tuna, no more huge piles of money stuck under a comforter that had lost any sort of comfort, any sort of warmth. I lay in the bed with that money under the mattress. Cold, so cold. I touch myself. The darkness, not so much darkness as an absence of light. Rolls of toilet paper stockpiled in corners. Boxes of Ramen, the noodles that only need one cup of water to put nourishment into a starving body. Dry beans, pasta, tins of herring, sardines piled up in high places. Even crusts of stale bread as if the memory of those tiny crusts, tiny morsels was needed to remind us over, over, and over again The coffin feels so tight, cold. I touch myself. My beingness, my essence inside of me buried outside. I am chained. Auschwitz surrounds our days. I am in a bed that not only has money stuffed under the mattress, but so many documents; different passports, different names, offering promises of freedom when God decides again to hang out on the porch smoking, playing with that red ball. That ball hurts my eyes, exploding with a brilliant darkness that makes me want to burrow deep, looking for my hands. And then I touch myself. Touch myself again and say, I am.
©2014 Deanie Hochman.
ARIANA MANOV
Bawdy Women’s Blues
It’s those full throttle racy women’s blues songs from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s that really get me going.
Bessie Smith teasin’ “I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl”; Lil Johnson’s “Push My Button, Ring My Bell”; Sippie Wallace braggin' “I’m A Mighty Tight Woman”; and Monette Moore’s “Two Old Maids In A Folding Bed”. Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, and Big Mama Thornton.
This little white girl didn’t take much note that they were all Negroes—which is what they were called way back. (And, as it turned out, most all of them were lesbians) But to me, they were just big, luscious women who belted out gut-bucket-get-down- and-dirty blues.
Those women, and some of the ones that imitated the greats, belting out those old style songs, and strutting their stuff (and they had lots of it) up and down the dive bars and storefronts on Central Avenue—oh my.
As a child, I hid under the creaking wooden seats with my best friend where we could peek and hear. (And we sure did.)
Their syncopated rhythms, their hip thrusting, and swiveling seemed like the only possible way a body could move. Their voices over-filled whole rooms while their audiences stomped and squirmed at the edges of the music.
From the time I was eleven (too young to understand what a jellyroll was), I listened to “race" records. (Didn't know they were called that.) With my much-too-old-for-me-to-be-hanging-out-with friends, I'd go to their funky homes and suck up the pure joy.
And I'd feel a creaminess—yes –at age 11—a creaminess between my thighs. No words for those feelings.
But with the hospitable smell of hocks and greens seeped into my skin, I'd drag my sorry little ass back to my wonderbread house, hide under the bedcovers and touch myself until I was exhausted.
I have the words now—some of them anyway. The unlawfulness of desire. This music still grabs me and works its mojo. We all own this music -- like our own souls—like owning the deepest, juicy rose-pink insides of my own body.
This white girl all grown up learned to be shameless (relatively anyway) about my lusty appetites.
And my lover learned to vibrate to the beats of my wantonness and smooth them with her tongue.
© 2014 Ariana Manov.
JENNIE OCONNOR
The Hitchhiker
I always wanted to pick up a hitchhiker and have wild passionate sex with her. Until the time that I did pick one up.
There was a gorgeous blond at the entrance ramp to the Hollywood freeway on Sunset. It was summer and she was wearing a very tight tank top, no bra, a pair of very short Daisy Duke shorts and bright red cowboy boots. Her long blond hair whipped in the wind and her thumb sported crimson nail polish. Her other hand caressed her round hip and teased the shredded bottom of her Daisy Dukes.
I marveled at the fact that no one had picked her up yet, but I knew I just had to. This was too good to be true.
I screeched to a dust-blowing halt, rolled down the passenger window and, hoping I wasn’t leering or drooling, said jauntily: “Need a ride?”
“Sure, lady,” came back the huskily sexy answer. I flung open the car door and she got in.
Well, actually, she insinuated herself in with a number of almost choreographed moves, beginning with turning her back to me and bending over – oh my god – until her beautiful ass hit the seat. Then she tossed her hair and looked over her shoulder at me wantonly. Next, she pulled her long, long left leg with the red boot glinting in the sun inside the car. She stretched that leg over until her creamy calf made contact with the gearshift in the floor.
She gave me another come hither smile – full red Angelina Jolie lips, and then some – and started to swing in her right leg. Not to be outdone by the spectacular dance of the left leg, the right bent at the knee into a little kick as she lifted up slightly and the red booted leg slid sinuously underneath her delectable bottom. Then, with a soft prolonged sigh, she raised her arms languidly, rested them on her glistening knee and turned to look at me.
I croaked out: “Where to?”
“Portland,” she breathed.
“No problem,” I said and roared up the entrance ramp.
©2014 Jennie OConnor.
TIM MACK
Tattoo
Listen.
There are mysteries that exist in palm trees. The hissing and humming of leaves pulsing from perfumed trade winds, winds that tap and massage over pineappled landscapes as well as dolphin populated waves that lap onto pearled beaches reflecting their majesty from the light of an absolute Pacific moon.
Watch.
A scattered flotilla of clouds sail in front of the glowing goddess without her permission giving the island paradise a ghost like warmth to this haunting spiritual night.
Feel.
I lift my silent, blank body onto the table and without permission give to myself a gift that begins the reimbursement of years of tormented conformity and hated compliance.
Celebrate.
The painting, on my flesh, made with statements and observations, not as a wallflower, but with the intrusive scent of the plumeria and the self anointed, well deserved arrogance of the bird of paradise.
Aloha ohana.
Much, much aloha.
©2014 Tim Mack.
JIM PENTECOST
Respect
I fucking hate the word elder. But I have to admit is does comes in handy on some occasions.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself saying to the acne faced, wise assed punk teenager in the drama class I teach in a mostly Latino neighborhood, downtown Los Angeles.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself thinking when some young thirty-something vice principal gets all snippy and arrogant with me.
But that doesn’t mean I like being an elder.
It means that I am closer to the end than to the beginning. These days the end could come at any time (not that the end couldn’t have come at any time before but it doesn’t occur to us when we are younger). In the last two months, friends younger than my 62 years of age, have suddenly died. One, seemingly in good health, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and died in four weeks from the time of the diagnosis—58 years of age.
Like many of the teenagers I am around, I often thought my life would be a run on sentence and prefer not to think at some point there was going to be a period. For fuck’s sake, I’d want to go out with a big exclamation point.
But recently I have been looking at life through the prism of an hour glass but not knowing how much sand is still left.
I am impatient with people who don’t have the sense to inquire about my life experiences. Was I this way when I was in my twenties and thirties? Or was I born an “old soul”? I was endlessly fascinated by the experiences and stories of my elders.
But in this day and age of video games, I pods, cell phones, text messages, DVDs, internet porn, does anyone have time to hear a story?
Every once in a while, with my teenagers in school, it clicks that I have been around the block once or twice. When we study frozen stage pictures, one of the photographic examples I show is the iconic photo where Lee Harvey Oswald is shot as he is being transferred from the Dallas County Jail. First they are amazed to learn that I was alive then, and remember so many details of that day JFK was assassinated: Sister Rose Eileen’s eighth grade class, the weather, etc. Some of them do the math and realize that I am older than I look (thanks to staying out of the sun and Grecian Formula).
Sometimes I tell my class, “When I was in college, gas was only $.29 a gallon” and that same acne punk assed kid says, “Really Mister, $.29? Shiiiit Mister.”
Although I may be in the Chekhovian time of my life, the poem by Robert Lowell still resonates loudly:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
©2014 Jim Pentecost.
CASS SOWA
Loves Me Not
loves me, loves me not
car door slammed
garage door closed
Mercedes tires sprinted down the drive
silence
gone
she peeked
he was gone
garage reeked of alcohol
gun lock box open
handguns and bullets strewn about the bench
the new 20/20 under and over shotgun
laid out
loaded
her body screamed from his recent beatings
"four months of wedded bliss, darlin’”
he'd snarled as he hit her last night
four months of marriage
three of hell
how impetuous she'd been
new divorce.
new town
new job
ten and twelve year old daughters
Connor was a nice looking
successful
local attorney
who pursued her
aggressively
they dated for six weeks
eloped to Norfolk on his insistence
weekend binging arrived with a bang
the first beating
stopped appearing in public
lewd and suspicious comments
“they all know you're divorced, darlin'
they all come sniffin’ around you
lookin’ for a piece
of free ass
they're all wantin' to try your rosebud daughters on
for size, too"
the girls told her yesterday that they saw Connor hiding in
the bushes outside of their bedroom windows
instant nauseous horror
home at 3am last night
drunk
demanding sex
she demanded a divorce
he gave her a beating
extracted the sex
left at noon today
smelling of alcohol
his parting threats reminded her
a woman has no rights in Virginia
"divorce be damned, darlin.
you are my property in this state
along with your brats
hear me darlin?
you're just a slit
get ready for family fun night tonight
be ready"
she tucked the girls in
with a favorite video to watch
placed a chair in front of their bedroom door
sat
waited
alone
thought
frightened
desperate
cold sweat dripped
stinging the abrasions and cuts on her arms
from last night’s beating and rape
they were not old enough
was any woman ever old enough?
she sat and thought
pensive, then determined.
tires screech
screen door rips
back door explodes
he plows his way through the kitchen
dining room
"I’m home, bitch!
"get those juicy tight rosebuds of yours ready
watch me ram my cock out the back of their heads
answer me
bitch!
answer me!”
flushed
wild-eyed
sweating
turning the corner into her line of vision, .
unzipping his fly
“answer me
answer me”
the shotgun
answered
©2014 Cass Sowa.