Pragmatic Use of a Blog? What!?

Strategizing means of self-promotion is real new to me in terms of my writing and art, but here goes. If nothing else, this blog can and will serve as a temporary space for updating my public performing, speaking, and publications.

So here are the most recent happenings:

I co-edited and have a piece I'm really excited about in the first of a series of beautiful zines from Femme Family NYC. This first one is on Coming Out as Femme and has work from Damien Luxe, Alysia Angel, Sophie Rogers-Gessert of Shameless Photography, Princess Tiny and the Meats, Taueret Manu, and Bevin Branlandingham among others.
You missed the slammin reading and release at Bluestockings Bookstore, but you can still purchase the zine online! Zines are available via paypal, $8 for hardcopy and $6 for download- visit http://www.femmefamily.com/home.html for instructions.

Next, this Sunday, December 6, I will be a panelist at Gather, "a community builder/social platform for lesbian women in their 20s and beyond to come together and discuss their issues." at The GLBTQ Center in Manhattan. This "Gathering" will focus on the coming out experiences of queer women from a variety of backgrounds and stories. Gather is open to folks of all genders and sexual orientations so be there!
The Center
208 W. 13 St.
New York, NY 10011
5:15-7 Room 312 (not elevator accessibly)

Lastly, I am very very excited to post that I was asked to fill a performance spot at Cupcake Cabaret hosted by Bevin Branlandingham this Sunday, December 6, (yes, I'm like a double-feature, follow me from one event to the next).
The very talented Alysia Angel was scheuled to perform her poetry, but due to illness couldn't make her flight from Olympia, WA. I give you this background info because I feel reaaly honored that I came to mind to fill the spot of someone so badass.
I will be reading some new and some old work and will maybe wear gold lame?
More importantly I am thrilled and a little terrified to be sharing the stage with four AMAZING performers- Spoken word by Femmecee Bevin Branlandingham, World Famous *BOB*- extraordinary burlesque performance artist and storyteller, Dave End- Meandering genderfabulous queer musician, and Miasia, BREATHTAKING Queer Fat Femme belly dance! (I hear you haven't really seen belly dance until you've seen Miasia).
So come on down and eat it up!
CUPCAKE CABARET
doors at 8p, show at 8:30p, $10-$15 sliding scale (proceeds go to performers)

45 Berry St @ N. 11th, Brooklyn L to Bedford or G to Nassau

Don't be surprised to find another post before Sunday evening about how I'm surviving my nerves at this suddenly stunning jam-packed weekend...

OPP: On Poetry in Progress

NSA

1.
Boy with the scars across your chest,
Deliver me from my own frantic fingertips
Into the fisted hand of temptation,

Run your tongue across the
Red purples of my calves
Where I have graced them with the sharpest
Angle of scissor, licked them clean,
Hot metallic swallowed down hard.

Why waste time with gloves and the
Shift. Shift again from my back to my knees
Finding the angle most open
To your wrist,
When we could go to the kitchen
For a butcher knife and carve
A few of the words we’re looking for,
Into my inner thigh?

2.
I have agreed to strings detached
No fibers promised between us.
To whatever convenient words find us here-
Pervert

You are my lover, not my love.
Take me,
Command me,
Taste a little piece of my-

Don’t mind the torn threads at my Achilles heel,
Dragging from my feet, collecting dirt
And the puddles we’ve left on your bedroom floor.
While they are no measure
Of the space between us,
I have never been able to hide like you-
Behind suspenders and dark wood.

3.
I will be your high femme sex cat,
The girl who wants too much
A mirror
The girl who is too much,
But I’m not leaving anything at the door.

Femme Fears: Something Somewhere has Cracked

So any of y'all reading this are along for the ride when it comes to my process of finding a voice and boundaries and structure for this blog.
This is a shot at something new... I seem to have been shying away from the "post from the gut" in exchange for a more expository, developed, patient post, (though nothing has gone through multiple drafts). This will be a tale from the gut- what's happening right now, without retrospect or time to articulate and catalogue it.

Yesterday a friend noted on her perception of me this past New Years Eve. It was a hard night to cap off a year worth weeping and dancing for having survived... The handful of people still at my place come midnight humored me in my favorite New Years Eve activity, "Rosebush," which requires going around in a circle and sharing your Rose- something positive/joyful/exciting/liberating, your Thorn- something hurtful/hard, and your Bud- something you are hoping for in the day(s) to come, (in this case based on the whole year, but can by done for just a day or week or specific event). Not everyone there knew each other. People were shy and fractured into their tiny social comforts, but once I started the game everyone said some amazing, honest shit. I had been walking around like an open wound for the week or two prior to that night. It was the first time I really talked about my year- my self. I cried. I used words. I drank. I felt safe. I couldn't have been any other way- I had no capacity for or agency in my own opening and closing.
So when said friend noted how that felt like the first time she had ever seen me that open, it was all I could say to simply explain that connection does not come easily to me. Because I so resist connection to myself at the same time as wanting it and reaching for it and eating it up more than anything.

Today, after having that conversation, something , somewhere cracked. The connections- small and simple- were coming at me in loads... A B train conductor held the train to try to talk to me. I got hit on by a girl who talked me up about MTA history and my hair on the freezing cold Shuttle platform. The man who played a drum for me from Franklin to Prospect Park all the while hustling me to get up and dance to his beat. All within a span of 15 minutes or so.

People talk to me all the time. I'm known for it. We had actual tallies in high school to quantify the number of strangers who got up in my space for any number of reasons on a given night. But tonight was different...

My guess at some of the why:
Somehow I seem to always forget that activism and organizing around shit in my heart and belly is an act of vulnerability an honesty if I let it be. So when I threw my hat in for some organizing with NY based Femmes I went in pretty stoned against and afraid of other Femmes- of what it would feel like to relinquish the binds of intimidation and competition. Critical as always of my Femme identity.
Tonight was round two of Femme organizing. I felt better, more comfortable. Softer. More present and grounded and articulate. More trusting in my right to share that space. And I imagine it's because of this that I left feeling tremendously full and revealed.
I was full but not heavy. Revealed but not terrified of being seen. This may sound affirming and liberating. It was. And it also hurt.
Allowing myself to go and locate myself and have questions and listen hard meant tremendous risk. Because being with all those other Femmes and so really, all the intersecting shit that has found us as Femmes, means seeing parts of yourself in other people that you maybe wouldn't have revealed to yourself tonight. I might not have let myself think about me as a survivor, but allowing myself to be present when someone else brings it up means it becomes part of my night.

So it seems seeing each other will take tremendous courage.

There is something about this that does not allow for words. But this is what I know. Intuition can kick your ass. Because you can be so damn right in the way you feel someone. You can look at someone and have something hard beat behind your bellybutton. And you can almost hear the same beat in the stomach facing yours. It's not romantic. It's prophetic maybe. And wordless. A deep breath to sustain eye contact. Knowing that you know a lot more than makes sense... Something has cracked for now, making for a hairline space for the storing of big connection.

Tonight I felt something thick. Not fluid or easy to move through. And I think I liked it.