The goodbyes have overturned the horizon and lay bare their seed on fertile ground; there is a pale face receding, framed by a curtained windowpane. He’ll rise, forgetting, but as he slides the curtains open and hears the tinny metal slide of the rings suspending them, he will be flooded with misery, a desire to lay back down in bed.

The light filters through the trees—strange blocks of shadows dance on the wall. Some leaves are bright, mantis-green, backlit by the sun—others are fern-green, muted and shadowed. They tremble on their branches; the burgundy maple tree in the background reminds him of rust or blood. He turns and fingers the sheets where they used to lay, obsessed for many weeks with one another’s bodies.

Her period was intense—thick and streaming out of her. She was afraid of taking anything with hormones, so the copper IUD had rendered one day of every month a kind of horror scene, but in truth he thrilled at the intimacy of it, even as he was repulsed by it. It was hot to the touch, he could almost see steam rise from the rivulets running down her legs. He thinks of a dead rabbit sighing its life into the sky.

The stains of her blood trace their bodies and he can’t bear to throw them out. He decides that the next time he brings someone home he’ll say he’d cut his foot—or his hand. If he decides in the moment it will sound more true.

How do you imagine the future? I often conceive of it in vignettes like this. Although conceive is the wrong word because in truth they come to me—the visions are full-bodied, screaming or sashaying into my consciousness—I don’t have the sensation of creating them.

But why are the imaginings so cruel? Why do I imagine his dread at my recent departure when that departure is not coming. That kind of sadness—those sickening final goodbyes that coat your days in thick grey ash—is currently coiled sleeping, docile as a sun-drunk cat.

I remember reading that you often dream of horrible things so you can psychologically prepare for the very worst things if and when they happen. Like circuit training for your nervous system.

I recently wrote about another one of my morbid fantasies, which involves my brother’s tweed coat and my mother’s grave. My mother was disturbed; she told me she didn’t like experiencing the “shadow of her own death.” I said I understood. But I also knew I’d keep imagining it.

Sometimes the casket is open. Sometimes I sing Celine Dion, choke-laughing at how saccharine and awful the lyrics are, but goddamn they feel good to belt out on the highway. Sometimes my father is crying, unshaven. Rattled and terrified. Sometimes it’s spring and the brightness of the daffodils silhouetted against the late March frost is spectacular; I pick as many as I can hold; I fill her whole casket with them.

It’s one of the hardest days I’ll ever have and I think my mind is trying to help me pre-cope with my own inevitable unraveling. Perhaps if I imagine it 100 different ways, one of them will be close to the truth and when the daffodils rear their rippled yellow heads, I won’t scream into the snow; I will have been here before.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dialogue between imagining and forgetting. In truth, both feel predicated on possibility. Imagining lances all kinds of psychological blisters. Adults happily pretend they can forge the future. Self-help books insist that the Universe sees your pining and just might bend to your will.

So go ahead, conjure that piano, that Porsche, that perky-titted blonde; try things on! Change the furniture, the rage, the loss; try pesto instead of that alfredo sauce. Imagine the world being kinder, more just.

Imagine a world that feels less like purgatory—filled with indiscriminate killings, venomous spiders, leaking sphincters, inexplicable rashes, impossible cruelties to children and the environment—and more like a fraught family reunion! We’re all gathered here together for a few days…sort of by our own will! We should all do our best to take care of one another while we’re here and have a good time before heading our separate ways again.

But isn’t forgetting also a kind of imagining?

I’ve been reading a lot about amnesia recently. The Mayo Clinic breaks it down into three types: The first is retrograde amnesia (difficulty remembering the past, things that were once so familiar), and the second is anterograde, which is difficulty learning new information. These two are caused, of course, by a delectable variety of absolutely terrible things from brain swelling and alcohol abuse to seizures and tumors—you get the idea, the human body is nothing if not fragile as a paper mache egg…but the kind of amnesia I’m interested in is the more rare, dissociative, or psychogenic amnesia, induced by trauma.

The brain protects itself from remembering something awful. And in this void, in this once-was-pain space, we find another kind of imagining. A place where that thing never happened. You can imagine a life that isn’t marred by the inky edges of darkness; violence, death, depression. The mind, knowing what it does to your poor heart, to your central nervous system, to your bowels which run with ice when you remember—tidily blurs those edges until the memory is gauze.

It helps you imagine a better past. It is, of course, often not much more than a fleeting parlor trick—the memories course back and crush you—but it’s a lovely respite.

Isn’t forgetting a kind of imagining?
Click To Tweet

My fascinating if mildly morbid research started because I couldn’t remember having sex with my ex boyfriend. I realize this is a trivial thing in many ways, but it started to eat at me. It was a small, but potent and disconcerting void. It was as though someone had come in with kindergarten scissors and started sloppily snipping those memories away. Like that very sad, very wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Did I bring the scissors? Did I wear a stocking on my head—my features mashed against the silk mesh—and start lopping out our love making?

…and then I realized I was relieved. In part. It is both the cruelest and most lovely of gifts. To forget his face and hands and feet. It’s like losing time—the minutes that made hours which made days and weeks—simply vanished.

I started looking at the few photographs I had of his naked body. I’ve always wondered if post break-up one is even allowed to do that…but I suppose if you remember their body in your mind it’s tantamount to the same thing, but I didn’t anymore. So was it a violation?

I started to scroll—that eerily familiar sensation of thumb-sliding, a gesture once awkward and unimaginable now ubiquitous—and stare at his limbs, trying to conjure what once felt like an extension of my own body.

I suppose my mind is willfully forgetting so I can move on. His whole body is a scar that’s blistered and ran and is just a bumpy ridge I run my fingers over in the dark; I can’t really feel or see it, there’s just a shape where he once was.

And now? I’m busy imagining more goodbyes; I’m imagining the void that my absence will bring to another person’s life. We’ve only just begun and I already need to forget.

Here at The Establishment, we spend a lot of time talking and writing and thinking and scream-crying about the elaborate ways in which homosapiens wrong one another. (In addition to the planet, non-human animals, and maybe even extraterrestrials—there’s a LOT of space-junk out there people.)

We thought that this Valentine’s Day, we should talk about love, but Establishment-style, because the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy doesn’t take a day off.

So we partnered with the Creative Action Network — which “crowdsources campaigns around causes, inviting anyone and everyone to contribute their own designs” — to help us host an art project to talk about love in 2018…

…and turn one chosen design into our official Est. Love T-Shirt.

Out of 14 amazing submissions we chose the work of Artemis Xenakis, which you can buy below!

Here’s what Artemis had to say about her work, her life, and the beautiful aberration we call love.

“Our bodies are the vessel for how we experience the world, and the world has an ever growing fracture from the absence of love. Where love has recessed, systems of oppression take hold, diminishing humanity down to the bodies that carry us through this existence. Living under these measures, we are all at odds within our very selves, with our fellow people, and with our home planet. This is because Love needs a space to manifest, a vessel to carry its truth in the forms of empathy and true equality. Love needs to grow from the decay of hatred. Love needs to heal fear. Loves needs the full participation of people to be felt, given, and known. Love needs all bodies to be.”

We talked to Artemis to find out more about her brilliant design, her artistic process, and her thoughts on love and existentialism.

(Check out the other holy-shit, hell-yes submissions throughout this interview as well — all of which are on sale too!)

KATIE: Tell me a bit about yourself! Where did you grow up, when did you realize you wanted to create art and anything else wonderful or strange you’d like to include…

ARTEMIS:

It’s hard for me to trace back to a moment of realization with art because I can’t remember a time I didn’t draw on something, anything; a coloring book; a napkin; my bedroom door (the latter was much to my parents’ chagrin, yet they understood my drive).

My mom especially is very supportive of the Arts and Artists; she was an art docent for my classes all throughout elementary school, so I just grew up with a strong yet subconscious understanding of its importance in education and societal roles. I say subconscious because as an adult I see in retrospect how that form of expression influenced each of my interests and drives. Drawing was certainly art’s first manifestation in my creative pursuits, and it only ever spiraled from there.

Mythology was presented to me early on—in part because of my name and Greek heritage—but also because of my psychological response to these stories. When I wasn’t actively pursuing a creative work I was taking in myth and symbol from all corners of storytelling and filtering them through my passive thoughts and feelings.

And in the nature of peculiar things children do when left to their own devices, I would make art in ritualistic ways that I understood later in my early adulthood to be akin to Witchcraft practices. For instance, I loved to climb trees and carve made-up symbols in the branches that were meant for only the tree and me to understand; I would write poems that were meant to conduct any negative feelings I had and then I would take my frustration out on tearing up the paper and throwing it away. Communing with nature, directing your energy in sigil writing, banning negativity and enacting for what you want, all take creative thought and process.

KATIE: How did you develop the idea for your submission? Where did you find the heart and body and rose to collage together?

ARTEMIS:

I’m an amputee, and I’ve been trying to craft a dialogue about disability in my art for a few years now. It’s a subject that’s still otherwise in progress because I feel like it deserves an exchange of voices outside of my perspective of disability, too. This image used for “Love Needs…” is one of the first I created pertaining to the concept of just addressing what being disabled is, sans able-bodied expectations. I’ve participated in live figure drawing both as an artist and a model, and I was surprised to experience the latter with the response of people expressing that they saw me as beautiful despite being disabled.

I was so distraught over the idea that there must be a lack of self ownership over all parts of me to function; as if I adorn my aesthetic in spite of one thing that’s perceived to be unlike the rest of me.

I knew it was time to take control of this misconception and demonstrate my self-love and autonomy. It came from having to live in a culture that wants me to live in spite of myself, and learning through my process of resistance to this that there’s a multitude of reasons other people are expected to do the same.

Buy Some Swag And Help Build A New Establishment!

Ultimately, it expanded my empathy for understanding all kinds of systemic oppression. So this image roots in disability, but for this particular project I wanted to express the sentiment that we intersect at our bodies, especially for those of us that are minorities to the default and who have a common goal of having to declare our truth and demonstrate our importance. By embodying empathy for one another we can create a larger voice in response to what is considered normalcy.

For the image itself, I used illustration combined with photography that I took during my personal nature walks while living in San Diego. I love the synchronicity of nature’s cycles, and observing the intricacies of how these processes express themselves in color and form. I love getting up close to plants and using micro-focus to display them as greatly as the role they play in our Earth.

These walks I took by myself were the beginning practices of learning to enjoy my own company and make time for myself. This rose and these leaves in particular, I remember from a whimsical stroll through San Diego’s Rose Gardens. Nothing extraordinary happened during that walk, but when looking at those photos I remember it as if it were yesterday. And those leaves are naturally those colors; that vibrant red and green kissing is nature’s complimentary contrast, not mine. I just played with their tone.

As my most formal discipline is Graphic Design, I was able to combine all these elements together digitally. I feel like Graphic Design is the “Math” of the Arts, and I definitely apply a calculated approach when trying to balance the organic forms and enigmatic symbols I love, with the articulation that proper expression calls for.

KATIE: What is the role of art in actualizing social change? Do you believe that the Artist needs to play a role in undermining systems of power?

ARTEMIS

Art definitely serves as a conduit among major movements, I think largely in part because artists are usually individuals oppressed by these systems of power. Rather than focus on the trope of the “tortured creative,” I think we need to begin considering the ways our society (at least in America) diminishes the arts as a viable skill and career that sustain both the artists and the cultures we contribute to.

Authentic art can’t function under capitalism, censorship, or other forms of oppression and exploitation without becoming propaganda, and I believe authentic artists are among the first to call that out. And I do mean “Artists” as more broad of a term than I think we’re used to attributing to it; I think the upswing in progressive activism we’re seeing is a perfect example of demonstration as art.

KATIE: How do you describe your work as an artist? What mediums or themes are you drawn to?

ARTEMIS:

Drawing is more like a sense to me that I rely on for executing spatial intelligence, and the mediums I use are the moods I shift them in. I love graphite when I’m being open to interpretation; it’s something I use when I’m open to letting a piece stand alone without needing a background or any sort of detail framing it.

I love ink when I’m feeling precise and have an organized subject in my mind; even my pieces where I get messy with ink are more illustrative and balanced than most of my graphite drawings. I do very amateur photography, but I developed an inclination to use this medium when I feel like any way I attempt to hand-render a subject wouldn’t do its beauty complete justice.

I can’t draw roses worth a damn, but look how richly nature produces these all on her own. I find inspiration in the storytelling of female archetypes in ancient mythology, the lens into the old ways our fore-mothers across the world have contributed to society that often gets overlooked.

Most of my subjects involve deconstructing the traditional forms and adorning them in natural elements that have been attributed as feminine symbols. These elements also reflect the same impermanence found in all forms; the phases of the moon; the crystallization and disintegration of earth.

KATIE: What role does Love play in your life? How does it manifest?

ARTEMIS:

I’m fortunate that I have a lot of love in my life now, and have come from a supportive family. But it took a lot of discipline for me to manifest the romantic love that I have now.

I experienced a string of abusive, tumultuous, and otherwise toxic relationships from my teens to young adulthood, so I decided to take a break from commitment in my early twenties. At the same time I began cutting ties with friends that I felt were mirroring the same behavior as my exes — or, in some cases, remaining complicit to the toxic cycles those people were conducting as I was actively trying to remove myself from all that. My views on relationships were pretty jaded coming out of that initially.

But it forced me to examine how my giving qualities were being displaced to people that didn’t deserve that much of me, and give it back to my craft so that my art could benefit from my need to nurture. In doing that, I learned to give love and strength to parts of myself that I previously mistook as weaknesses. It was another process of reclaiming parts of me that got swept up in external energies.

Once I was able to give that much to my creative drive, it became a force that worked its way into every facet of my life once more. I met the love of my life in art school; we were friends for years before we began dating, and that trek to our current relationship helped serve as additional lessons I needed in understanding unconditional love.

By embodying empathy for one another we can create a larger voice in response to what is considered normalcy.

There were time-appropriate barriers that stalled the beginnings of our relationship, and I reached a point where I knew I was going to be an awful friend to him and others if I kept harboring unhealthy feelings about my attraction to him. I had to deconstruct those feelings that stemmed from ego and fear, and embrace the idea that in order to give love to someone from a genuine place, I had to let go of any expectations for how love should be received.

I learned that to love someone with pure intent is to accept them in every moment as it comes, and that I was fortunate to even have a friendship with someone as genuine as he is. I realized that if I was only able to love him platonically, I would focus all that excess desire for closeness into healthy boundaries for our friendship. I let go of all those ugly feelings, and about two months later our romantic relationship culminated.

Love only wants you to participate if you’re honest, and it’ll open up its channels when it can trust that you are.

KATIE: If you had an intergalactic megaphone and could tell the universe one thing, what would it be?

ARTEMIS:

Assuming that “intergalactic” is affirming reference to my future hope for sky-rocketing off the planet and finding respite in space, my announcement would be: “Message from the Cosmos: Nothing can see you from here!”

Hubris is humanity’s biggest downfall; we regard our human perspective as the pinnacle of existence. I appreciate Carl Sagan’s interpretation of the Universe’s timeline in his Cosmic Calendar method. It linearly maps out the Big Bang to show how minuscule human history actually is among the grand scheme of events that made it possible for us to ever exist.

We’re literally blasting through space at a rate unable to be comprehended by our limited-dimension-perceiving minds; and here we are perpetually berating each other over whose indoctrinated-book is the best, who has the most currency, power, etc.

Humanity could benefit from a healthy dose of existentialism.

The thing about poetry is that it’s kaleidoscopic, protean, malleable. It’s an art form often very open to projection; what one wants to see is often what one might see. Unlike prose — which, arguably, is exponentially more interested in conveying a clear idea or image — poetry is delightfully layered and fractured, inviting interpretation like a beautifully wanton stare.

This is not to imply that the poet doesn’t have a crystalline agenda, a maybe-convoluted but meticulously rendered journey that they’ve honed and polished with the maniacally deft precision of a master watchmaker.

This is all to say that one doesn’t typically get to float their interpretations to the poet-wizard behind the curtain; usually us logo-philic peons are left wandering the shoals of a poet’s brilliant wordscapes, never quite knowing just what they meant.

It’s a blissful ignorance, but an ignorance nonetheless.

But 2018 has already granted me a tremendous gift; I’ve been able to read a tremendous collection of poetry — behold the glory that is July Westhale’s Trailer Trash — and converse with the aforementioned poet-wizard about all my quandaries, all my grief, all my admiration.

When pressed to talk about how this book came about, July insists that “art is very clever — it happens unconsciously, writing does.” She says that she was actually writing a very different collection about historical figures — Virginia Woolf primarily — when she received a fellowship in 2015 at the Vermont Studio Center.

She sat herself down on the floor, fanned the pages and pages of poems around her, and began indexing everything.

Suddenly she realized, “this was not a book about Virginia Woolf, it was a book about ’80s and ’90s Southern California chemical warfare and poverty. I had spent three years on this manuscript before that, but once I realized what it was really about, it took me a month to finish. I knew exactly what to do with it.”

Trailer Trash is distinctly July’s story — a harrowing tale of grief, childhood, and loss. But it’s also about America, God, and poverty; the collection nimbly toggles, with the grace of a feral cat, between the “I” and the Universal. “You want your readers to be asking questions,” July told me.

And we are.

What can poetry do for a memory that prose can’t? For me, I have always been obsessed with rendering the truth as beautifully as I can — meaning there are decided boundaries that I have to operate in. I need those boundaries. With poetry, storytelling seems boundary-less in that, to me, when you are Telling a Story or Describing a Memory you can render it exquisitely in so many ways. How on earth do you decide how to tell it…

JULY:

I would argue that poetry — at least in its inception — was actually the most boundaried art form. The fundamental difference between poetry and prose is the white space.

One of the things about canonical poetry — although it’s primarily old white men — is that it teaches you how to break all the old rules.

This book has a lot of religious existential crisis. I grew up in the southern baptist church tradition. Hymns are written in ballad forms. Rhyme and meter create hypnosis in the body. What I love is understanding rhyme and meter and poetic forms as they traditionally exist…but using radically different content. Write a sonnet about fisting someone — that juxtaposition.

Image has always been my greatest strength and my greatest weakness — my mentor in grad school use to call me a metaphor making machine. It’s poetically useful in that I think a lot about the world in the ways one thing represents something else. But if you just have something that’s made up of images there’s no there there.

The thing about poetry too is that it’s very economical. You have to figure out how to go a long way with very little. Everything is extremely intentional. Words aren’t there by accident.

‘Poets are really amazing liars.’
Click To Tweet

Are you a dogged 3-hour-a-day writer/thinker or do you dash things off on napkins and notebooks as they come to you? Or are you somewhere in the middle…do particular feelings or stories gnaw gnaw gnaw at you to be told? Is poetry a purging?

I do journal a lot…and I do believe in a pretty well-worn path of getting the junk out of your brain. And I go through periods of hyper-productivity — intense reading and then intense writing. I do write a lot. I am prolific. The vast majority might not be good, but that’s not the point.

I will say, I’m a neurotic person — everything has to be just so. Down to the pencil. Right now I am in a period of intense writing. This last year was amazing in terms of publications, but it was so focused on editorial, marketing, tour planning — it didn’t leave a lot of bandwidth to create new stuff. I don’t know what’s coming next. I guess I’ll just start writing now and then I’ll know in a couple years what it will be about…

I’m always curious when folks write memoir — and indeed “Trailer Trash” feels like a deeply personal and familial collection. How much restraint do we “owe” to those in our life that we write about? When are our stories our own to tell?

This is an issue I will have to sit down with when I write memoir. These poems are autobiographical, but they’re still poetic representations of it…they’re still translations of experiences.

Even though I write a lot about people in my life that are living, like my sister…a lot of people I am writing about are not living. Honestly this is a bigass book about my mom. And she’s not living. A lot of these memories exist through the dishonesty of hindsight. I also experience some privilege in that the people in my family don’t really read. They’re just not readers. So there’s a lot of privacy for me — that is both exciting and a bit heartbreaking.

Richard Hugo says in Triggering Town, “you owe your emotions everything and the truth nothing.” You’re not writing a news report. But don’t be an asshole.

Our stories are always our own to tell. Folks who are marginalized already have enough people telling them not to speak or erasing their words. I don’t want to live in a world where people are telling other people not to tell their stories…

I mean, christ, me either, but I still kind of lose sleep about it.

So…how much time does this collection represent? What was the most difficult and wonderful thing about this book of poems? How do you know when you’re “done”?

The whole collection in total took about three years. The most difficult thing about this book was actually the editorial process with the editor — Ann Dernier — who is an amazing women. When the manuscript was accepted she said, “I’m going to work with you”…and she really pushed me in a couple of poems to expand into broader meanings.

A lot of the poems were more finished than others, which is an arbitrary allocation but…the ones she was pushing me to edit were the ones that were the most emotionally difficult for me, which makes sense right? When you’re close to something you can’t write it in the same surgical way — it’s nothing that’s imagined or distanced.

Retelling the story of when I heard my mother had died [in the poem “Dead Mom,” or “How News Travels in a Small Town”] was excruciating for me. I was trying to write a la Szymborska’s poem “Identification.” Ann kept pushing me and pushing me and the result is great, but it’s not a poem I’ll read at readings. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again. It’s the one poem I’ve ever written that feels like too much.

And the best part….?

The best thing about the book for me is that it’s a book about class. Poetry is often considered to be an academic sport. An elitist sport. Something that belongs to people with privilege even though in America we have an amazing canon of poets who write about work. Like Philip Levine. I feel extremely proud and excited that my first full-length collection is all about a very specific kind of wrecked and ravaged agriculture — a kind of poverty that exists in abundance in this country.

What kind of child were you? I know a bit from reading your essays, but did reading play a role in escaping what seems to be a goddamn difficult childhood? I think for myself, escaping, or immersing in books, felt very different than realizing I could write myself. And in truth, writing is the opposite of escaping for me. It’s delving. When did you know you wanted to write? What’s your relationship to words?

I was a strange child. Dreamy and very much in my own head. The white space around me was filled with grief. There was very little I did or could do to alleviate that. I had imaginary horses and I would charge people to ride them. I was six. My [adoptive] mother made me give the money back but…I think there was an aura around orphans which was driven by the media at the time. A lot of the mainstream characters in ’80s and ’90s literature were orphans…which isn’t so anymore.

No one wants to hang out with [orphans]…but they’re also powerful. My mother died in 1991. Time marches forward. I was like one of those plants that grows around the cement instead of smashing through it.

I got my love of reading from my birth mom…I think that because I had a really rough childhood, especially my early childhood, I was expected to be an adult a lot of the time — the adults were not doing a great job of being adults. Reading was absolutely an escape.

Reading became a thing that was mine — it was a hangover from my life with my birth mom that I brought to California with me.

I would love to talk about specific moments and themes in some of the poems themselves…

The opening poem — “Ars Poetica” — is just gut-wrenching…it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

It feels so beautifully loaded, all wrapped up in this gauze of the Fairytale. Love has betrayal baked into its guts I suppose. I also feel as though one self is murdering another self? Which is perhaps something we all do, but maybe without that seemingly cruel level of calm. How much do you think about the first poem setting the tone for the entire book?

Excerpt from “Ars Poetica”

One would like to see oneself walking through the forest as two girls/ along a creek, the golden carp under the ice like blurred poppies.
The tall, hooded girl will extend a basket, offering bread and water, a kindly/ face and a thick cloak…

We can assume systemically — not anecdotally — that all choices in a book are intentional. This is a kind of poetry manifesto. The poem is about two girls walking in the woods. They both share some of the same resources — it’s a beautiful setting, and then…that’s the way the poetry process works. Things work until they don’t.

I guess that writing and brutality go hand in hand in ways that we don’t want to admit. This poem is almost like a legend — it’s not a disclaimer and it’s not apologizing, but it’s a way to read this book.

Excerpt from “Tomato”

… “Once I was a hothouse gone to seed
in a trailer park in Blythe, the sky
vermillion in airlessness, in suffocating
sunsets of dust and pesticides,
our food dead and gone. The dinner table
was the color of a beetle trapped in sap.”

Can you talk a bit about the evolving role of religion and faith in your life…there is a tremendous amount of religious wrestling and imagery in this collection.

Excerpt from “Crop Dusters”

…Our melon fields have been blessed by the Lord.
We and our canals are filth waiting to be turned to loaves.

The role of religion is one that is complicated, but complicated in the same way that it’s complicated for anyone who is raised religiously. I feel grateful to the church for rhyme and meter and reverence and music and sound.

I’m not a religious person myself, but I think the presence of it in this book is actually more about the ways in which religion and poverty go hand in hand. We live in Christian country and many poor agricultural rural parts of this country are extremely religious.

In rurality, everything is amplified.

Violence in these rural plains settings — like the brutality and anguish of the murder of Brandon Teena [the young trans man who inspired the film Boys Don’t Cry] in Nebraska — affect us in a way that it wouldn’t have set against the skyscrapers in New York City. We assume there will be violence in a city. It’s not that we’re desensitized…but. We have a false sense of security.

I am trying to parallel this idea of faith and whatever God is…and say it’s more resonant and more omnipotent in rural places because of the amount of actual space that faith can take up. But also in the fact that rural places mean poverty and poverty comes with an assumed sense of devote-ness. The world isn’t giving you anything…so that must be the lord’s way.

I want to show how religion and poverty inform and touch upon one another in a way that is so starkly American.

This poem feels like a kind of forgiveness, which again, feels like a return to a kind of faith, to a kind of religiosity. This idea of people formally and publicly receiving forgiveness for their sins…

Excerpt from “Saguaros”

Blythe rises in welts.
It pinches California and my mother,
the menstruating horizon between the two….

For truth, I say I remember
this mother, the mother of my nights
bringing home a jackrabbit,
pulling a tooth trap from its pelage to slit
the pregnant belly, knowing
the body to be a stasis and the desert a hell,
and the knife the only bridge between the two.

This entire book takes place in the desert. If we’re talking about the ways that landscape can highlight emotion…the desert is a place where you live or die. You better be prepared to inhabit this entirely uninhabitable place for humans.

And that’s a helluva thing to be brought into. But I still feel at home in the desert.

The desert is really volatile. It can change temperatures radically in just a few hours. It can be completely clear and full of light…and then suddenly pouring. Nobody does thunderstorms like the desert.

When insects sing in the desert it takes up everything. Frogs and crickets and coyote in the desert — just the sheer volume of it. There is so much out there that is able to yell that you haven’t seen! It’s not insignificant that the relationship between the speaker and mother is all about survival.

The odds are against your survival.

This collection is chock full of menses and menstruation. Why/how does all this uteral lining play such a poignant role in this collection? How does it — besides literally — dovetail with motherhood? With your own potentiality as Mother?

Excerpt from “Etiquette”

My granddaddy is a man of God.
He drove a busted truck, the color
of menses, through Death Valley.

As for menstruation…I think that these are visceral things we’re talking about and they deserve something visceral. There is unrealized potential in periods.

My mother was bedridden the entire 9 months and gave birth alone. It’s incredible to me. She wasn’t with my stepdad and my family didn’t even know that she was pregnant. She was very estranged from my maternal family. They were very WASPy and didn’t talk about things and I have the feeling that my mother was someone who DID talk about things…

Men. Holy moly. WHAT DO WE SAY ABOUT THE MEN IN OUR LIFE DEAR JULY. But this poem felt tender to me. It also felt like a kind of forgiveness in the way he was willing to try and make Blythe, California beautiful when you both knew full well it was a lie…

Excerpt from ‘Wake’

The Colorado River is getting big
in the britches, stepping on Blythe
like that. All wild goose and border.
Some country, hey kiddo?
The lie uplifts us. Our cotton
hasn’t been watered all year, and our towns
are blossoms of mosquitos.

I like American literature a good deal because of its spareness. The things we can say about it and the country in the voice of the public…the poems come out kind of plain, but that feels intuitive.

You are driving along…then suddenly the water is up to your door handle. You can’t do anything else. You just wait. You go to this place that is exceptionally dry — in front and behind, you think you see water. A flash flood waiting to wash you out.

We were trying so hard not to talk about it. About her.

So many of these poems tackle poverty and the potent (non)presence of food. I loved this powerful and tangled conflation of momentarily communing with God, accepting one’s fate while also ascending/transcending your being somehow…

Excerpt from “Cootie Catcher”

We ate the carp, carp is poor
folks’ food. We take communion
regularly. This is no different.

Riddle me this world. If God is the main farmer here…and he’s heading up agricultural production, which in turn is the machine that creates food…I guess then we turn that food back into his body and we eat it? But in this idea that the meek/poor inherit the earth…we end up eating ourselves.

My uncle was found dead where we went fishing. I became obsessed with this idea of something that seems harmless, but isn’t. We ate fish from those canals all the time…there is a cyclical nature of depending on God for food. Which may or not may come, but when it does we turn it into communion….

Memory, memory, memory. How deceptive, how haunting, how lovely and terrible it is to hold all of these stories behind our eyelids…

I often look at young beautiful photographs of my parents, and think, why why why couldn’t I have known you then? Look! You’re joyous. You’re light, buoyant — you are yet to be what I know you will become. The photographs just about break my fucking heart.

How much did you talk to family, look at photographs, revisit your old haunts to be haunted in writing this book….?

Excerpt from “Meditation on a Lost Photo Booth Picture”

…Though I am not there, I feel the center/ of there, of theirs. As if they knew,
preemptively, that they would not be able/ to see me in this unfamiliar place, at the desk of
my life,/ and thought to take this picture so that they, too, might participate. I know this/ is
self-indulgent. I know this is arrogant. I know/ these are stories I tell myself as I fall asleep,
fearing death or impermanence./…

In 2012 I gained access to this storage unit that had all of my mom’s belongings in it…when she died in 1999, my grieving stepdad just put all her things in there and locked it up.

I went out there during Thanksgiving 2012 and went through all these belongings and it was a profound experience of agony for me. Having lost her at such a young age there were so many ways in which I didn’t feel like I knew her. And in this way, I got to know — acutely — everything I had lost in losing her. It was devastating, but also an amazing gift. I had baby pictures. My mother was also a writer — she wrote me letters. And photos. And these things of her — I didn’t get too much but what I did get are my most prized possessions.

I had complex PTSD from childhood trauma…this book was written with the research of memory and experience. People in my family don’t know what happened — she was so estranged at the time.

I was looking at a photo when I wrote that poem.

Even though these poems are based in autobiography, they are actually about things much larger than me. My hope is that people who have been othered or don’t have class privilege or find a lot of solace in poetry or songs or hymns…people who have experienced trauma or not…that wide gamut of people will find themselves reflected in the work.

Ultimately it’s a book about triumph. It’s not a book about grief. It’s about the ways in which people triumph in the the things they are asked to do. By God. Or by society. In thinking about it, this isn’t so much my memoir or my story but one way of thinking about these very complex identity questions in relation to the impoverished American landscape.

What’s next on your radar…what are you keen to write or do next?

A book of micro essays, something similar to Ann Carson’s Short Talks.
I think people poo-poo prose poems…not out-loud, but…

Why is that you think?

I think because there’s this erroneous idea that it doesn’t make use of the one thing that poetry has uniquely going for it — i.e. white space. Efficiency. If you’re talking about prose poetry, how are you delineating — literally — between prose and poetry. The answer is, you don’t have to.

It’s nearly impossible not to think about time—the hurtling of our bodies and planet through the inky-blank cosmos across the strange continuum that demarcates our mortal coils, our very consciousness as a species—when The Holidays roll around each year.

It’s a heavy season.

(Listen to Establishment cofounder Katie Tandy read her story.)

Even a hard-boiled atheist like me who has managed to largely relegate Christmas to brimming glasses of Pimm’s Cup, roaring fires, velvet dresses, and too many pigs in a blanket with dijon mustard, can’t help but enter a kind of personal reckoning with the immediate year of yore.

There is an uncanny feeling that washes over me when I hear Bing Crosby start to warble. I feel my boundaries grow faint, and suddenly I am 4, 10, 15, 25; I am also 34. I am here, right now, and so too are all the ghosts of each Christmas.

Some of those ghosts are mischievous and rattle the windows and hide my jewelry. Some are lovelorn and pet my head while I sleep; I can smell their tears. They smell like old copper.

Some are rageful and like to push me around. They like to splash white wine into cut-glass goblets and howl. But each time I whip my body about to confront the shove that sent me sprawling, there is nothing there but my thumping heart and I feel foolish.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed and Virginia Slims and they love to turn the music too loud and help decorate the house. They’re partial toward anything sparkly and always want to eat beef bourguignon for Christmas dinner. They wrap all my presents with too many ribbons and always hide the tape so cleverly that it breaks your heart to tear into a parcel that perfect.

Some of the best ghosts hang my stocking on the mantle with two thumbtacks because it’s so heavy with trinkets; they lend me their scarf when they want to play bocci in the waning light of dusk on the lawn.

Christmas ghosts complicate my time. They remind me that things are not linear; time is tangled, circuitous; you can — like Meg from A Wrinkle In Time — travel to any point in your life and wander around a while.

I think some people use journals or therapy to do these kinds of travels.

Me? I use ghosts and things.

I use a kind of inverted psychometry. Whereas regular psychometry allows someone to hold an object and understand who made it, where it’s been, and all the people’s lives it’s passed through, I am able to imbue objects with meaning, with memories, with ghosts.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed.
Click To Tweet

People tease me about being a packrat — my collection of things is extraordinary and dusty and heavy and takes over a lot of surface area and is seemingly eccentric. Does someone NEED a sixth full-length black dress from this coastal thrift shop? Well, yes, I do. Because when I take it out of the closet I remember that that was Valentine’s Day two years ago and I’d gone backpacking and camping with a dear friend who rolled her ankle as she burst into, “Giants in the Sky — there are big terrible giants!” from Into The Woods and I almost shit myself laughing, but also felt terrible because she was limping pretty badly.

We found that dress together when we finally got back into town, into Pescadero, and we were just in total lady-love and I was reminded, which I needed desperately, that female friendships are imperative to my joy.

What people don’t understand is that with every object, I’m building a memory palace. This is more than being sentimental. I’m building a time machine.

I love the coupled foreverness and ephemerality of things. Things from antique shops, flea markets, tag sales, and second-hand shops that are filled with other people’s sweat and tears and laughter and life-dust.

And then I fill them with my own.

I am, incidentally, dating a wonderful Jewish man — Jake! — from Marblehead, Massachusetts; he says I’m teaching him to Christmas this year.

We’ve rented a small cabin-y house in Guerneville, California, for December and January. It’s in a redwood grove, so regardless of what temperature it actually is in town, it’s 35 degrees and shadowy as hell at our place; you can always see your breath. It’s a ghosty place.

Anyway. I was, as a packrat, very excited of course to decorate for Christmas and because we didn’t have any ornaments or doo-das or anything, we had to go to Goodwill to get some — obviously — so my spooky, packrat, ghost-loving being was just beside itself with the sheer possibility of the psychometry that awaited me within these fluorescently-lit walls.

I strolled the aisles tsking tsking and gasping and snatching things and holding them to the light, considering their potential for Christmas joy. “Find all the string lights you can,” I said, jabbing my finger to an adjacent aisle. “Even colored ones?” he asked suspiciously, not wanting to waste time or go too far astray from the very discernible path comprised of Christmas fervor fever-dreams.

We are nesting; we are playing house the only way I know how.

“Just how kitschy is too kitschy?” I point to a foot-tall gilded Santa. Jake eyes it warily, but he’s smiling. “It’s…pretty amazing.”

“Plus. It’s kind of an homage to Guerneville right?! He looks just like a fabulous bear!” (Guerneville is known for its very robust gay scene.)

“I don’t know…” he says and wanders off to take another lap. “Look for Christmas balls too!” I holler to his back. “And ribbon! Oh, and wrapping paper maybe!”

Some of my Christmas ghosts are traipsing behind me. They’re burning my fingers with hot glue guns as I make wreaths with my mother; they’re ripping open the orange Stouffer’s box of Welsh Rarebit with my dead grandmother so they can make the cheese fondue.

I find a box of wired gold leaves — Jake loves those — and a box of green sparkling Christmas tree candles complete with stars on top. They’re so ugly and beautiful. He doesn’t love those, but he gets it. They’re ugly-beautiful and that’s an aesthetic I’ve marked much of my life by.

Then he inquires about a…“Christmas tree skirt?”, a phrase he stammers out like a foreign vocabulary word from tenth grade. “Yes, yes! You’re right. We def-need a skirt. You pile all the presents on it!”

He’s starting to feel weary from the lights; I feel that this Christmas elf’s spirit is waning. “Let’s check the fabric section and then we can go I promise!”

He finds a red plaid blanket woven with gold threads. It’s perfect. A good-bad 1950s-esque vibe. We stuff it into our basket and make our way to check-out where even the curmudgeonly woman can’t deny my stupid joy about these stupid glass balls and tacky gem-stone stars.

We pick up champagne from the gas station and I get to decorating the minute I get home; I make a bagillion hooks from wire for all the balls and start to cry when Bing belts out, “the child, the child, sleeping in the night, he will bring us goodness and liiiiiiiiight!”

We’re headed south for actual Christmas though. My brother has just bought a house in Montecito and they’ve just moved in; we’re leaving on the 22nd to road-trip to Southern California and have a poolside Christmas after our perfectly spooky, cold, couple-cozy pre-festivities in the forest.

…and then the fires get bad in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Footage starts rolling in that is haunting, harrowing; orange flames lick trees and houses and destroy lives.

The fires have consumed more than 230,000 acres and 1,000 structures.

The air was growing blacker and as the fires drew closer, my brother grew ashen, reticent, frightened. He was desperately trying to shift his paradigm — “Things are just things ya know? It’s really putting things into perspective” — but his voice belied his heartbreak and the grindings of his mind as he imagined losing all his possessions.

He’s like me. His objects are magical to him. They conjure. They carry his boyhood and his adventures and his sense of self. His possessions, his home, are a kind of museum that he visits on the daily. He could tell you about every matchbox car, every pair of sunglasses and sneakers, every salt-shaker and Scout ad he owns. He has two back-up hard-drives of his photographs that I venture have been collected and sorted, as expected of the curator he is, for the past 20 years.

The idea of him losing his memory palace — a place also poised to be the place where his children would truly call home — broke my fucking heart.

He finally called me yesterday and said he was going to join his wife and son who had fled to Florida a week ago; he was still holding out hope that the fires would subside, the smoke would dissipate, and we could all be together.

It was not to be.

“I got the two things out of the house that were haunting me though, Katie. Mike’s guitar amp and grandpa’s World War II camera.”

Our grandpa — Russell Haviland Tandy — was my father’s father and taught us both the art of storytelling — there is, perhaps, no greater joy than a well-told yarn. There are few people on this earth that can capture the room the way he could, swilling a stinger. (That’s a lethal drink he loved made up of brandy and creme de menthe).

I doubt the camera works — although knowing my brother he’s taken it to every local shop to see if it could be fixed — but this is an Object, regardless of its functionality, that is not to be trifled with. My grandfather — Hula, his friends called him — filled that camera with photographs from the war; he filled it with tiny slivers of his life rendered in 3–1/2 by 5 prints (Kodak called this the 3R size). And now my brother has filled it with all kinds of memories and feelings that I can’t begin to glean or understand. But my ghosts see the ghosts of my brothers’ and they’re madly waving hello.

As for the guitar amp, my uncle recently died — he left behind his daughter who is just 30 years old. They were very close — exceptionally close; her loss is the most profound. I imagine it will be a kind of bifurcating life-gash; there was my life before my father died, and my life after.

Michael was a music lover and talented guitarist. He showed my brother The Wall by Pink Floyd at an utterly inappropriate age; he showed him the power and the glory that is Rock ‘n Roll. Is there any greater joy?

My Object of Michael’s is an admittedly pretty ugly tapestry woven from wool — it depicts a gathering of musicians all gathered in a circle playing together rendered in a pseudo cubist style. As long as I can remember, it hung in his music room; it is filled with the tuning of guitars, of his growling voice….“paranoia strikes deep, into your life it may creep…” as well as his more gentle croonings, “All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown…the moon rose through the nighttime till the daybreak comes around…”

It’s filled with him urging me to, sing, Katie! Man, you’ve got a great voice. (I was never going to be a guitarist.) Is there any greater joy?

This Christmas I am turning to my ghosts to help me celebrate. I am turning to the past and I am turning to the future.

I was recently at a house party for Halloween; I incidentally had not gotten the memo from the friend who invited me that it was a space-magick theme or some such nonsense and I showed up as…Ursula; my dear friend was dressed as Bill Lumbergh, his center-part glistening beneath ’80s power-glasses.

We were not on theme; in fact we were sorely out of place. “Adventure Time” princesses sashayed; steam-punk cowboys swaggered about in velvet, leather, and goggles. We knew one person between us and after smiling and waving hello at our entrance that rivaled some of my more traumatic school dances — I had caught a tentacle in my spoke, tripping and dropping my bike when I walked into their yard — we found ourselves talking to each other in the corner of their porch.

I was nervously smoking spliff after spliff and sipping champagne from a solo cup. “We gotta get in there,” I said. “We gotta mingle.”

He winced, looking around. “Yeah, I mean, everyone is cool,” he said. “We should just go in and do a lap.”

“I just want to talk to you,” I moaned. “But we’re at a party right? We gotta…party?”

So we wandered in. We did our lap. And before I knew it I was happily drunk, drinking whiskey, and chatting with the human equivalent of a pitbull-meatball — a hulking, thick man with a Bic-ed head. He was dressed as, perhaps, an intergalactic monk?

In truth, I don’t know how we got onto the topic. No one believes me, but I really don’t. But we started talking about butt stuff. Straight cis men butt stuff.

And suddenly I heard myself say, “Oh man, my dear friend is a straight guy and he’s very intrigued by his asshole, but he can’t just, like, set himself free. He is so hung up on it. I feel like he’s got all this….” I waved my arm around, “maybe, homophobic shit around his own ass? And it’s just so sad because, like, ass stuff is the best!”

My new companion’s face lit up. Like Christmas.

The glorious prostate is a walnut-sized gland; you’ll find it between the bladder and the penis, just in front of the rectum.

The urethra, which carries urine and semen alike, runs through the center of this flesh-nugget. The prostate secretes a fluid that nourishes and protects sperm — father’s milk amiright?! — in addition to squeezing this fluid into the urethra when ejaculating.

It weighs about 20 grams.

The word “prostate” is taken from the Greek expression meaning “one who stands before,” describing the position of the prostate gland.

Most importantly, perhaps, you can also “milk” the prostate, massaging it with your finger until the man’s mind explodes in the most dizzying orgasms of his life. Or so I hear.

My dear pal, let’s call him Bernard (which incidentally was the name of my feral orange cat in Brooklyn), is conflicted. He’s a tender man; he’s not afraid to cry, and is eager to talk about his feelings. To process. He is generous of heart and spirit…

and he’s got a girlfriend very keen to explore his butthole.

“You gotta get your friend onboard,” my new friend half-yells, his eyes glittering. “The prostate is amazing, man, just amazing.”

“Yeah!” I said laughing. “I’m with you. I tell him all the time he should try and examine why he can’t just accept the physical pleasure of his own body…especially as his lady is butt-drunk in love.” I took a sip of whiskey and shrugged. “But yeah. You can bring a horse to water, but ya can’t make him drink. It’s pretty complicated I think.”

I thought we had covered it. I thought we had sufficiently shared a mutual sadness around the fraught-ness of straight cis men’s buttholes. But no.

Like a bad sitcom, I see Bernard’s head peek over the crowd. “Hi!” he yells and weaves his way over to me.

“This him?” this meatball asks.

I feel my face growing very very hot. But I’m also drunk and thinking to myself, maybe this will be good. I also don’t want to lie and pretend I wasn’t just talking about this. Just be cool. Be casual. We’re fine. This is all fine.

In her Guernica essay, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“Feminism needs men. For one thing, the men who hate and despise women will be changed, if they change, by a culture in which doing horrible things to, or saying horrible things about, women will undermine rather than enhance a man’s standing with other men. There are infinite varieties of men or at least about 3.5 billion different ones living on Earth now, Klansmen and human rights activists, drag queens and duck hunters…

[So much masculinity] is predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don’t subscribe but that affects us all. It’s also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.”

It’s a long, complicated, and nuanced essay, as is Solnit’s way, but in short, I agree that feminism needs men. One cannot identify a Problem, remove responsibility from the Problem, strip it from the Solution entirely, and believe change will occur. If men don’t believe they’re part of the problem — by deed or mere privilege — then they remain a potent obstacle to equality. The key, for me, is getting everyone on board to recognize the widespread fuckery of all shapes, sizes, and creeds, and swinging a hammer at the piece you’re occupying.

What gets slippery and exponentially more confusing for me is when men, identifying as feminists, are in actuality perpetuating the same dangerous shit — often unbeknownst to them — all wrapped up in the “right” rhetoric and bright smiles.

“This, indeed, is him!” I smile into Bernard’s face and give him a Christian-style side hug. Act like you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong!

“You were talking about me?” he says, all innocent curiosity.

“Oh yeah man. We’re talking about the prostate man. Male anal!” the meatball says, turning to face Bernard squarely in the face.

I choke-laugh on my whiskey. I’m trying to stuff my entire head in the cup. Maybe he can’t see my face in here.

“Dude you gotta let your shit go man,” yells meatball. “I let my girl get in there and I’m hands-free man. I’m coming and coming like a firehose — I’m flaccid but it’s pouring out of me. Hands free! It’s the most intense shit of my life.”

I am delighted. I am horrified. It’s better and worse than I could have ever imagined.

“Did you pay this gentleman for this rant?” Bernard laughs, incredulous. “You should trademark that phrase man, ‘hands-free coming.’ It’s good.”

“You laugh dude, but do you know the kind of vulnerability it takes to take it in the ass from a woman? Do you understand the inverse of the power-play that happens?”

“I think I do … yes.” Bernard stutters.

“It’s intense. Now she’s in control. You think your girl likes it when you’re just pounding away” — he slams his fist into his palm again and again and again — “no she doesn’t! You’re just BAM BAM BAM and she’s lying there like…”

I raise my hand. “I like being pounded. It’s really not that simple. One doesn’t really have much to do with the other necessarily. Rough sex can be consensual and amazing! I hear you that …”

He interrupts me to slap a friend’s arm who’s at the makeshift bar to get his attention.

“Yo, Miles! You feel me right? You know the pleasures of the ass, right? Tell this guy!”

“I mean, I really do like it,” Bernard insists. “I do! And I do it. It’s just a little hard for me and I don’t really like being pegged.”

“Pssssh. C’mon man,” the meatball scoffs. “You can be a man and wanna get pegged.”

“I…didn’t say you couldn’t…I just, don’t like it myself,” says Bernard.

“Ya gotta get over it; you’re depriving yourself man!” Meatball grips Bernard’s shoulders like a father sending his son to war. “Let her get in there man, you won’t regret it.”

“…I…have…and I don’t regret it. I wear it like a badge of honor! And I’m thankful because I think it did make me vulnerable — it’s really different when your partner is looking down at you and realize how little control you have…and I get it. Some people get off on that lack of control …but I don’t?”

Meatball snickers and swaggers away shaking his head.

I stood there—stunned. It was a complicated treatise on the strange and far-reaching tentacles of toxic masculinity.

Here I was, maybe betraying my dear friend’s confidences because, fuck it. Women never get to talk about fucking; they never get to take aim at men’s hangups around sex or discuss their own pleasure without being accused of being “too much,” self-destructive, promiscuous, craving attention, falling prey to the very trappings they’re trying to escape.

Maybe I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral — I’m a girl who “gets it,” ya know?!

But there was also genuine confusion and sadness for Bernard. There was a real desire, a genuine belief that I might be able to use this stranger-man to get through to my friend-man. As Solnit says, I realized I wanted to enhance Bernard’s standing through the exposure to another man’s supposed feminism.

I thought another man could get through in a way I never could.

I thought that Bernard’s ass-pleasure was suffering at the hands of toxic masculinity. Being vulnerable is important to being human! Being penetrated is a potent symbol of that vulnerability! Let your body conquer the shitty steepings of your mind! Set yourself free!

But instead I exposed him to an even stranger brand of toxic masculinity. A man who thought himself enlightened because he had embraced the physicality of being penetrated—because he had had a singular thought about what that meant in terms of his own vulnerability.

I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral.

But all he was doing with his supposed revelations on physical and emotional pleasure was using it as a tool to glean more power. To insist he was more enlightened. A better, stronger, more powerful man than other men. He was using his supposed newfound softness to make another man feel small, ashamed, un-evolved.

It was the same awful, aggressive shit. I’ll show you what a real man is.

I felt I could hear the gears turning in Bernard’s head.

Maybe I am shut-down. Maybe I am a weak man. Maybe I am homophobic and kind of pathetic and caught up in a narrative I thought I was working against.

It was a really twisted piece of alchemy, let me tell you.

We laughed, and I hugged Bernard tight. I told him he was exponentially more evolved than that shitty blowhard — even if he couldn’t come “hands free” and maybe didn’t want to, and maybe never would.

But inside? I felt awful. I thought about the brown and pink puckerings of Bernard’s orifice — that little starburst-ed sphincter that sits at the crux of so much.

I wanted to give it a kiss and say, we’re all in this together. I know you’re trying and it hurts a lot. Take all the time you need. But keep trying. Because we need you.

*This story was published with Bernard’s consent

Is monogamy a choice or a societal steeping? Is it romantic, a sacrifice, an expression of devotion, glorified claustrophobia, Puritanical backwash, or some good old fashioned cultural evolution? Or…something different altogether?

I think many folks (myself included) intellectually understand how fraught monogamy is—one person satiating every sexual desire for 50+ years?!—but in the more reptilian facets of our brains we can’t handle the sickening jealously of even thinking about sharing the person we love.

It feels too messy, too complicated; it can feel like desiring more than one person is greedy or predicated on that person not being “enough.”

While it would seem that poly folks have seemingly banished the green-eyed monster—after all, who would voluntarily subject themselves to that sensation?—it’s actually, like so many theories in life, exponentially more complicated than that. Poly folks aren’t impervious to jealousy, but instead engage with it as yet another emotion to wrangle, another salient data point in how they’re relating to the world, themselves, and intimacy in their lives.

The Est. asked four poly folks to talk about their relationship with jealousy, the beauty of shared romantic love, and what they’ve learned along the way.

Holly Francis on the fostering of implicit trust:

To love and be loved: This is the fundamental state most yearn for. Humanity has long been looking to prophecy, divination, and the essence of the human experience to figure out how to live the very best life. For some, the answer comes in the form of polyamory and the practice of ethical non-monogamy; but how do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?

A common theme in polyamory — especially for those newly embracing the lifestyle — is how to quash seemingly rebellious feelings of anger at betrayal and fear of being cast aside. Trying to hide insecurities works most effectively in settings where those insecurities are never challenged, but the dynamic interplay between jealousy and successfully navigating polyamory isn’t one of those settings. Challenging the status quo handed down in the form of monogamy and navigating the emotional upheaval of a standard way of life requires immense trust, communication, ownership, and respect.

The secret? Polyamorous people can, and do, get jealous. Rather than being a negative trait, though, it can be the impetus for introspection and the critical examination of how to more effectively deal with challenges. Jealousy lets us know when something needs to be addressed, and it rather frequently seems to come back to a fear of neglect or abandonment. As with any relationship, learning and growing with one partner can be difficult — in a relationship with multiple partners and multiple considerations it can feel impossible.

Trusting your partners have your best interests at heart, fostering effective communication that addresses concerns before they spiral out of control, taking ownership of one’s own feelings and actions, and respecting the choices and limitations of others are among the standards of success in polyamory.

“Well, it’s just not for me. I could never do that.”

And that’s fine. One of the best parts of poly, for me, is that no one is trying to force their approach to relationships on others — it’s a matter of basic respect. Exploring the reason why you “could never do that,” however, is vital to the idea of personal ownership. In the searching for an answer to the question of why jealousy is so uncomfortable and the idea of sharing is so abhorrent, many people start finding the idea of polyamory more relatable. These questions don’t have to be asked within the confines of a monogamous relationship, but in any search for love and how to be loved.

How do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?
Click To Tweet

Jealousy is indeed an often green-eyed monster that turns some into a nervous or even aggressive wreck. It’s uncomfortable and it brings up feelings we’d rather not deal with. If you don’t trust your partner around others, but you posit that you trust them, the reality is that you don’t actually trust them to be in control of themselves when presented with opportunity. Perhaps you’ve been hurt in the past, and can’t tolerate your significant other speaking with exes and thus try and limit their autonomy — you become sick to the core at the thought of sharing your partner with others and so you do not. You tell yourself you can’t. But what happens to your relationship when you remove the limitations you never even created to begin with and place real, implicit trust in your partner?

Allison Elliot on odious comparisons:

Having multiple relationships means navigating a host of feelings — feeling both good and bad. For me the link between compersion — the feeling of happiness for your partner’s relationship with another person — and jealousy, is all about comparison.

Compersion happens naturally for me at the beginning of my relationship with a new partner. I admire the love that that person has with their other partner (or partners) and feel genuinely happy that that love exists in their life.

As the relationship progresses, however, I begin to compare my relationship with my partner to their relationship with their other partner. What once made me happy suddenly makes me feel like my partner and I don’t go to the movies enough, they don’t text me enough, or they text too much during ourdates — every difference I perceive in my relationship versus their other relationships becomes a potential problem, and I grow jealous.

“Enough” becomes this inexact measuring stick I begin using to gauge my emotions in an effort to make the good in my relationship equal to the good of the other relationships that I’m perceiving.

While comparisons can be odious, I’ve realized that these comparisons can lead to positive outcomes; for example, feeling jealous after my partner goes to the movies with their other partner has lead to me simply realizing that I just want to go to the movies with my partner. The feeling doesn’t actually extend beyond that.

Comparison-caused jealousy grows particularly difficult when my self-esteem isn’t as intact as I’d like it to be or my relationship with my partner is struggling. If my partner wasn’t feeling up for sex during our last date, but they had sex with another partner days later, my brain makes leaps — it makes connections and conclusions before I can take a breath.

My brain tells me my partner had sex with someone else because of my flaws, because our relationship is rocky or not as good as the others in their life. I force myself to reiterate, again and again — “their sex is not about me” — to try and dispel all the dangerous and damaging conclusions my brain is trying to draw from that sequence of events. I remind myself of the bottom line: Comparison is unfair, unhelpful, and unhealthy. It’s also bullshit, obviously, because “their sex is not about me” is absolutely true.

Also, their relationship isn’t about me either, which makes even a seemingly positive concept like compersion exponentially more complicated. Because compersion allows an individual to mentally insert themselves into a dynamic they are actually not a part of, good feelings can quickly give way to bad ones. And at that point, thinking about yourself in the context of other peoples’ relationships becomes unreasonably self-centered.

While not all polyamorous people experience these emotions, I think the trick to all of this is conceiving of your relationship with your partner as though it were on its own — is it good alone, without comparison?

Zephyr Schott on undermining the patriarchy:

Eight years ago I told one of my closest friends I felt a tremendous amount of bottled-up affection for the people in my life who wanted to be closer to me; I told them I wished I could clone myself so that I could give all of them the care and appreciation they wanted from me. I was in the middle of a four-year monogamous relationship at the time and the thought of anything outside of that familiar and exclusive relationship structure had not even occurred to me.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person. I was steadfastly loyal to all my monogamous partners for years and felt pangs of jealousy when my ex-girlfriend flirted with other people, when my high school ex-boyfriend went to prom with someone else while I was sick and stuck at home. I also felt that my jealousy was unwarranted and never brought it up with either partner. But looking back my real mistake was not discussing those feelings openly with them and stewing in my insecurities instead.

A couple of years later I found myself in a new relationship with someone incredibly jealous. He would check my text messages and even my receipts to make sure that my conversations were not too friendly and to check that I was being honest about my location at any given time. Yet the main feedback I got about this relationship from my friends and family was that they were so happy to see me with someone who cared about me so much. I was miserable, confused — I felt trapped and isolated.

After we broke up I joined a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and started to date someone I liked and trusted a lot — they were also poly and preparing to move to the other side of the country after graduating from university. I’ll admit that having felt trapped in my last relationship, having the upcoming physical distance gave me a sense of safety.

Knowing that I was new to a nonmonogamous relationship structure, this partner was extremely caring and conscientious about checking in with my feelings. At first I did feel uncomfortable and jealous, but I largely tend to approach even the most personal experiences from an anthropological and rational perspective. Rationally, the philosophy behind ethical non-monogamy made a lot of sense to me and I recognized monogamy as being the kind of authoritative and hierarchical construct that I am generally opposed to.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person.
Click To Tweet

When my emotions did not match up with my thoughts I started asking myself what I was afraid of and why exactly I was feeling these pangs of jealousy. What were those feelings grounded in and were my assumptions based on empirical evidence or enculturation? I talked to my partner about my feelings and slowly became friends with some of the people he was involved with, which was really helpful. I started to realize that going on dates with and sleeping with other people did not reduce his feelings for me; I began to realize that jealousy was an unnecessary and even a counterproductive emotion. I realized I could just feel happy that someone I cared for was happy.

I started to experience a paradigm shift and my emotions started to align with my rational thoughts. He seemed surprised at how content I was to just sleep with him and let him have multiple partners of different genders as long as he was safe about it. He was a bit concerned that I wasn’t dating or sleeping with anyone else, but I explained this was just due to the simple fact that there weren’t other people who I felt like dating at the time.

And while I’m not impervious to pangs of jealousy, every time I feel it, I ask myself why and it almost always results from some kind of internalized insecurity. But the more I communicate openly and critically reflect on my emotions, the more natural poly relationship dynamics have become for me, the more I feel that I am living in alignment with my values of autonomy, consent, open and honest communication, and in opposition to property or hierarchy.

Molly Stratton on the dangers of the lizard brain:

I don’t get blindsided by jealousy very often, but one of my most intense pangs to date was in response to one of my partners telling me he’d been reading science-fiction short stories aloud to his primary. But even then, the sensation was pretty short-lived — I couldn’t help laughing at myself: This is what sets me off?

I used to think practicing polyamory would somehow make me a more empathetic person, but experience has shown me again and again that I can still be just as confused and anxious while poly as I am in any other relationship configuration. I just happen to be unbothered about “normal” relationship jealousies — like who sleeps with who and how often — and honestly? I still don’t have a good theory as to why.

Perhaps it’s because I was lucky enough to fall into a close-knit group of friends before we started boinking each other, and watching two people I’ve already known for six years engage in PDA is as jealousy-inducing as knowing that they snore or that they’re allergic to apricots. Or maybe it’s simply that my personality is so intensely nerdy that it isn’t sex but the (in my experience) much rarer shared interest in Golden Age sci-fi which trips my jealousy meter.

Other times, I think of my lack of jealousy as a sort of queer survival mechanism. I’m an only child from a tiny family, with no desire to marry or have children of my own. But I’m happiest when my support networks are as wide and tribe-like as possible, and a lack of jealousy makes that easier to sustain. Poly people don’t actually all sleep with each other all the time, but the fact that it’s a possibility can ironically help us relax and see each other as people, rather than competition for affection. (I knew I had “made it”, relationship-wise, when I found myself not only having regular dates with my partner, but regularly playing Zelda with his wife.)

Interestingly enough, when people talk about jealously creeping in, I find myself thinking not of my romantic relationships, but of my friendships. When my longest-running fandom friend confirmed that she had, in fact, been talking to a Tumblr mutual longer than she had me, my lizard brain immediately wondered if the other person was somehow “better.” When my best friend moved an hour away, I felt as intensely about it as I had as a lonely grade-schooler. And every time I plan a party, I have to stop myself from speculating on how the number of guests reflects my likeability as a person.

Maybe it’s because (irrationally), I see romantic relationships as something people will move mountains for, whereas a friendship can be derailed by a busy schedule, a new job, or simply discovering you don’t have the same fandoms in common anymore.

New Film, ’D.I.Y’, Celebrates Commitment, Wedding Coiffures, And Queer Love

What does marriage mean when you’re gender fluid and loathe the patriarchy?

Sometimes love is pegging.

Marriage is a fucking doozy. Those two syllables carry with them a positively dizzying array of socio-cultural conundrums; marriage sits at the red-hot heart of our, ahem, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (some reports place the value of the U.S. “wedding industry”—otherwise known at the wedding industrial complex—at $55 billion). And things are only getting weirder—just look to the emergence of WedTech if you want to feel sad/confused for a while.

It’s a system that has not only held up the straight, cis, white, thin, and beautiful as the potent ideal of love, but has actively shunned those outside of these parameters. Weddings are, in short, a painful reminder of the sanctioned discrimination that runs rampant in our country, tangling gender, class, identity, and sexuality in a morass of white lace and marzipan flowers.

But, and I write this whole-heartedly, weddings are also a potent symbol of commitment — physically, emotionally, legally, and otherwise — and I deeply respect those humans who want to take the plunge.

So we find ourselves—torn. We are where we are. Society still showers the legal union with a heaping host of benefits, and people still want a killer party with all their favorite people honoring their brimming love-cups and dogged devotion to making someone’s life happy as hell . . . even as the oppressive shadow of Marriage looms large.

I believe the reappropriation of this historically fraught ritual is a powerful thing—and the heart wants what it wants. But it’s also so goddamned complicated and I see so few stories trying to explore it . . .

Which is why I was genuinely thrilled to learn about D.I.Y.—a film about a gender-fluid couple deftly wrestling with their pending nuptials and what the hell it all means in this day and age.

Written by actors and dear friends Sarah McCarron and Yuval Boim (who, incidentally, are both gay), D.I.Y. is one of a handful of films vying for a chance to pitch the Duplass Brothers, the actor-writer-director-producer team behind Safety Not Guaranteed, The Skeleton Twins, and most recently Room 104 on HBO.

The Duplass Brothers partnered with Seed&Spark—a crowdfunding and streaming platform dedicated to championing diverse storytelling in film and TV—on the Hometown Heroes contest. The top 10 projects that reach their green light and have the most support by October 13 will get to pitch The Duplass Brothers and win up to $25,000 in cold, hard production cash.

Making Room For Diverse Voices With The Duplass Brothers

The Establishment got a chance to pick the bawdy and brilliant minds behind D.I.Y., a film that has been two years in the making and is gunning to wrap up by spring 2018. Here’s what they had to say about queer love, authentic storytelling, and why humor can lance psychological blisters.

Why center the story around marriage? Why is this issue at the red-hot center of race, class, gender, and our collective societal understanding of love…?

Yuval Boim:

D.I.Y. is a film about love. It’s about two humans hellbent on protecting their love from oppressive social norms and defining for themselves what it means to be committed to one another.

Marriage is something with which almost everyone interfaces, whether they are married or not. We are living at a time when we are watching our institutions lose their meaning—including the office of the presidency—which is both terrifying and threatening. But it’s really important and healthy that institutions change, evolve, and grow to serve as wider swath of humanity. Certainly the passage of Marriage Equality — which so many traditionalists view as threatening — is a massively important evolution in civil rights.

How do we define and forge for ourselves the meaning of the institutions governing our intimate relationships?

We’ve known so many couples whose relationship has not survived the process of getting married. As a point of inquiry, it’s valuable to investigate why? It might be that marriage is a flawed oppressive tool of the state and failure to survive it is a sign of health. Or it might be that conflating marriage with an idealized myth of eternal romantic love is a set up.

We are interested in what real love looks like — the gritty day to day process of discovering each other anew each day — secrets, neuroses, warts, and all — and recommitting to that love.

Sarah McCarron:

In film history, especially in the classic rom-com narrative, the notion of “marriage” or “getting married” is often an endgame — a kind of prize hung out as a symbol of resolution, a restoration of order, or a marker of success. We hear the wedding bells . . . and the story is over! All have survived!

D.I.Y. is an inverted rom-com. Through this trope, we wanted to smash this notion that the wedding is the end—or worse—that it is evidence of having won something. What happens when two individuals attempt to plan their most perfect, unique, personalized wedding ceremony, but come to realize they have very different notions of what marriage even is or should be? How does a relationship predicated on love survive the institution of marriage?

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Linking marriage to love is actually a recent thing we humans have started to do! For most of its history, marriage has had nothing to do with love. Marriage is an ancient social, economic, and often religious rite — and it is still the primary way to transfer wealth. Marriage is also culturally universal — which is amazing to consider, and indicative of marriage’s function as a tool of the state. As contemporary couples invoke marriage as a way of forging a life together predicated on love, we simultaneously invoke these huge deep cultural, economic, and political forces that have sway — consciously or unconsciously — on a couple’s domestic life together.

We really wanted to Josh and Matilda’s invocation of the institution of marriage to examine the ways it also “legitimizes” their love, and how they become unwittingly entrenched in a chess game of alliances across a chasm of the class divide. (That they weren’t even aware existed between them.)

Marriage is culturally universal — which indicative of marriage’s function as a tool of the state.

What is the role of humor in this film? What can humor do to serve the story or lance psychological blisters around “serious” issues that you’re tackling in ways that more classic “drama” cannot?

Yuval:

It was very clear for us from the beginning that this was a comedy. Talking about class and gender and social justice can sound heavy. But when you have characters painting themselves into corners in the name of these things, and doing stupid, painful things to each other, we laugh because we recognize ourselves in their actions. It helps to break down barriers. People can enjoy it on the surface, because there’s physical comedy and funny dialogue. But hopefully, if we do our job well, the motor underneath—the societal machine that the characters are trapped in—gets revealed.

Sarah:

My great uncle (who was a radical rabbi and renowned orator) always used to say “if you want people to hear the truth, first you have to make them laugh.” I’m not insinuating this film has some claim staked on the truth — but we are as writers interested in investigating truths.

If we can laugh at the rituals, roles, and institutions we hold precious, we prevent them from having too much power over us. The most threatening force to a genuine oppressor is getting laughed at. Josh and Matilda are clowns and clowns have a long history dramatically as truth-tellers. Fools, jesters, mischief makers disrupt the status quo.

Because they believe in themselves with such conviction, they’re blinded to the punches thrown at them and able to continually keep getting up and recommitting to love. If they didn’t, it would be a tragedy. In many ways, clown and tragedy are inverted versions of the same dynamic — willful humans determined to make it. The power of laughter, though, is profound in its capacity to make it safe for audiences to contemplate and reflect on what they’ve recognized. Laughing is a truth-teller.

We don’t laugh unless something hits a chord of truth. And in the laughter something opens up — perhaps a new possibility for how things could be.

Clowns have a long history as truth-tellers.

Do you believe art can serve as a vehicle of societal change?

Sarah:

Absolutely. This conviction could be naive and idealistic if we define societal change vaguely as “making the world a better place.” And the reality is art can be super elitist and prove itself insufficient in the face of the challenges experienced by the least advantaged in our culture.

But, societies are comprised of individuals, and in the intimacy between art and receivers of art, minds and hearts can open. Art’s power to reflect the reality of personal circumstances and awaken individuals to a call to action is profound. If/when I start to feel cynical, I lean on one driver: Fascists hate art.

Look at Pussy Riot. Look at Ai Weiwei. If art did not serve as a vehicle for societal change, the powers that be would never be threatened by artists such as these.

When I start to feel cynical, I lean on one driver—fascists hate art.

Yuval:

Art creates spaces. Literal and aesthetic. These can be spaces that allow us to feel included and represented, and thus feel safe. Or these can be — just as important — spaces to question the establishment, in perhaps more radical ways.

How do your personal identities intersect with the portrayal of this gender-fluid couple? What are your thoughts on authenticity with the writers behind certain stories? Is fiction “better” if those creating it have lived the experiences they’re portraying?

Yuval:

I identify as a gay man. So personally this aspect of my character is not so autobiographical. But for me, the process of writing and acting is about empathy. About projecting myself out of the limitations of my own self, and expanding my capacity to connect with others.

Sarah:

I am married to a woman, but I have had sexually fluid relationships my whole life. I relate very much to Matilda’s position of finding someone she wants to commit her life to, which doesn’t necessarily mean it negates any other identities or precludes sexual fluidity.

This is a story about a couple who happen to be a man and a woman — though they could easily be with a partner of the same sex. So what becomes important is their personal dynamic — and thus the gender roles are really illuminated. Neither fall into either prescribed gender role. Matilda fucks Josh from behind with a strap-on, and they both love it. No explanation required. Needs are met. It’s funny we’ve had folks be confused, asking “wait are they gay?” and wanting to put the characters in that box. Why is it that just because a man might like to have sex in his ass, he needs to be gay?

Any good writing should be a prism that includes multiple perspectives on the theme. If a writer is only allowed to write from their experience or perspective, the writing’s capacity is limited in its potential to illuminate the limitations of all of our perspectives. This is why I love to write in collaboration — and why we are interviewing real people. To serve as a digestive aid to funnel the varying views of marriage into the script in a way that allows them all to be represented. In great writing, everyone is right. And everyone is limited. The writing itself illuminates the whole.

Sarah, you say that: “Getting the right to marry could be viewed as a a way for folks to assimilate into an oppressive and dominating patriarchal culture.” I have many queer friends who feel this way. It’s like, “Why the hell do I want to fight to be part of system that systematically rejected me and my love of another human…?!” It’s decidedly complicated as hell, but I’m curious why you made the decision to get married yourself as a gay woman…!

Sarah:

What happened was, Elysa proposed. We definitely saw it as an oppressive institution, and I have very few models of a healthy marriage as compared to the number of marriages that prove the institution to be a set-up. But also it opened up this huge YES in my body. What was I saying yes to? An inquiry for the ages. I was saying yes to HER. Saying yes to being of service to our relationship for the long haul. To fostering her growth alongside mine, to loving every part of her, and to creating a safe secure commitment through which we could struggle into our best selfs and accept all the ways in which we fall short. Like a tomato plant stake. You know those cylindrical cages that prevent tomatoes from getting really big and out of control? I feel like that’s what I was saying yes too. A structure we could plant our tomato in for optimal health.

Any good writing should be a prism that includes multiple perspectives on the theme.

Yuval, your character is a bit meta in that he is studying gender and the nature of marriage within the film. And then the film actually features real interviews. Can you talk a bit about your decision to include these “documentary” elements — also, did you learn anything surprising from these conversations?

Yuval:

The idea to include interviews with real people first came to us when we were shooting at Steve and Ruth Reiman’s house in Joshua Tree. We were so inspired by the story of their marriage, that we wrote them into a scene. Then we thought, wow, we could invite other people to share their story, and that could shape the narrative of the film.

Narratives can and do organically emerge from the actual bodies in the room, and we see our work as a dialogue. An investigation which creates a conversation.

We were interviewing a couple who has been committed for 14 years and don’t believe in traditional marriage. They talked about the judgment they receive from friends and family, and I was so moved I started crying in the interview. We were also taken aback by people’s desire to share their stories. Many of the couples we interviewed, some of which were strangers, traveled from out of town to come speak with us, because they felt they finally had a platform in which to tell their story.

And that was like, wow. We are doing something that is touching a nerve.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

Last night I was laying beside my very lovely partner human, having a mild if ardent spin-out that revolved around my body generally feeling like it was a taut sack alternatively filled with broken glass or gravel. Which is to say, falling apart.

Currently I have a strained right hip flexor; an achilles tendon “problem”; a torn rotator cuff; a mysterious foot ailment that has been (mis)diagnosed five or six times as “maybe gout,” which leaves my left big toe swollen, and my gait limping; and a lingering jaw problem, which is, admittedly, an old sex injury that has never healed.

I am 33. I drink too much beer and like to smoke spliffs at parties, but all in all? I should feel great. I do all the things. I exercise and eat vegetables and get enough sleep and good god why is this happening?!

And while the feeling of one’s body existing in a near constant state of some kind of pain is a special kind of madness — what on fucking earth will it feel like to get out of bed at 85?! — what I realized is that the hot crux of my fear was losing the joy of my body.

Losing the power that it affords me.

My boyfriend and I have shed a lot of tears around our (maybe) sexual (in)compatibility; to make many painful conversations decidedly shorter with less Sufjan Stevens playing in the background, I’m “ravenous” and he’s “normal.”

I want him obsessed with my flesh; he wants me to trust that love is predicated on so much more than our exchange of fluids and feverish words.

I — maybe in a very self-damaging way (like the tootsie roll pop owls says, “the world may never know”) — have learned to derive so much meaning from my bodily self, I’m loathe to think what is left of me without it.

A husk? A naked stem bereft of its fluff? And all who pass no longer make a wish on me.

There is but a rattling of naked stalks together.

My pussy is like petals. Layer upon layer of pinks, burgundies, fuchsia, beiges; ruffled, it swells with its own rain.

My fingers are stamen—straining outward, beckoning. Or maybe it’s my hair—my glorious tuft of warm rough hair—is the stamen, its filaments waving madly, sending my botanical semen, my vaginal inflorescence, wafting upon the wind. The air is pregnant with possibility.

And good god my stigma, my shining bulb of cloistered bliss. Tiny and gleaming like a wet polished pebble, my clitoris lies dormant—underground, underflesh—patiently throbbing in pink-hued darkness until Spring, the stroke, stroke, stroke of fingers and tongues that let it know it’s time to bloom again.

I’ve always been partial towards thistles. Covered in cruel thorns, they warn you not to touch them, at least not without a tremendous amount of care. But oh my, have you touched the hot purple hairs within their centers? Like florescent silk.

One variety—cirsium vulgare—found throughout North America, Western Asia, and all of Europe (it’s also Scotland’s national flower!) is often considered invasive . . .

But they’re dogged creatures—capable of penetrating even the most compacted, rocky, ill-fated, and barren soils—and get this: Once the plant dies, the big fleshy root decomposes and leaves behind a sizable space for air and water to travel deeper into the soil. Its death makes it possible for other things to grow.

It was with this 400-metaphor treatise rattling around my brain that I stumbled across Heidy Steidlmayer’s poem “Thistles”:

Stand as clocks fully struck
In fields of fading lowers —
When the fires of summer come
They will gather up the hours
Of rains past, frost endured
And famished stalks in full gale
That begin their telling stories once
All forms of telling fail

Thistles as bodies. Plants as bodies.

Do our bodies not tell our tales long before our mouths ever need to open?

The girl rubbing her neck incessantly, fingers grinding into an invisible knot that send waves of sharp pain behind her eyes. She is anxious. Lost in her own discomfort.

The man is limping, wincing, his sock filling with blood. He is struck by how warm his own insides feel against his ankle.

The erection pressing, pressing, pressing against its cloth confines; he has but heard her keys in the door, her shoes slap slap slapping on the linoleum, but his blood is already rushing to meet her.

The sweat on the lip of a girl well-fucked. When she smiles, it runs into the corners of her mouth and she can taste her too; her mouth is slick with pleasure.

The yellowed eyes of sickness, the pallid face of exhaustion, the bucking hips of desire, the cracking knuckles of worry; the body tells tales innumerable.

When words fail, the body knows.

Perhaps what the body knows best is its own limitations; give or take, you get about three decades before things begin to deteriorate, to slow down, to fade like a blossom bleached in the sun—and rot. (I say these these things as an able-bodied human with no disabilities; I am in possession of a corporeal self that grants me tremendous privilege, but even so, the tick-tick-ticking of the Body’s expiration is a harrowing sound.)

The body knows it’s a burden; it’s designed to fail.

Iris Marion Young writes in her book of essays:

The body is the first locus of intentionality, as pure presence to the world and openness upon its possibilities…there is a world for a subject just insofar as the body has capacities by which it can approach grasp, and appropriate its surroundings in the direction of its intentions…

Rather than simply beginning in immanence [self-pervading and sustaining], feminine bodily existence remains in immanence, or, better, is overlaid with immanence, even as it moves out toward the world in motions of grasping, manipulating, and so on.

Consequently she lives her body as a burden, which must be dragged and prodded along at the same time protected…it is an inhibited intentionality…

Young argues that women are trapped between the soaring possibility of their own bodies—the incredible power (literally and metaphysically) of their actual anatomy—and the crushing limitations that society puts on feminine bodies.

Be small. Smell sweet. Be graceful. Be lighter! Brighter! Be quiet. Be smiling! Be consumable. (But don’t satiate any hunger of your own.) Be clean. Be shiny. Be patient. Be thankful.

And do not—my mind bellows at my body—become sexually inconsequential.

Do not relinquish this power like a wilting flower.

I want to talk about the silence of plants. And the joy of my sounds.
When you snap a branch, when you cut a rose, when you trample a bush or scatter a dandelion with a laughing breath, don’t you pity their silence? Don’t you wish they could bellow back at you?

My body is like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins; it’s a preposterous cacophony rumbling down the street and into your arms. It will tell you I’ll be there soon—you’ll hear me singing a block away.

It sighs, delighted at what’s in store. It lows like a hungry calf and moans like an amorous cat; it whimpers, it wetly whistles, it screams and howls and growls; it makes incredible sounds.

And he holds his knuckly hand over my mouth so the neighbors don’t hear my noises—our spectacularly strange and perfect noises—because “Forever — is composed of Nows,” Emily Dickinson wrote, and right now is just ours.

And right now? My body is singing its sex into oblivion.

Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex:

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice … In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

The younger our body, the more Natural it is, the less it “needs” blush or Spanx or a satin stiletto to achieve desirability. But in order to maintain that semblance of Naturalness, the more blush It needs—what ruddy cheeks she has!—the further the feminine body falls from actual Naturnalness.

For what is more natural than the body failing? Grow gentle. Fail, it whispers. Let your leaves drop and head grow heavy; do not live to be touched, for your petals were just the beginning—do not be so selfish. Your roots and rot will feed countless others and surely that is the most a body could ever ask for.

In this 1932 commercial one lucky dame gets to be the Queen of a Gas Machine. (And the recipient of manifold gropings!)

Why hello there!

On this fine fine Friday I offer you a deeply offensive cartoon commercial, hailing from the steamingly sexist bowels of 1932.

There’s Peeping Toms — one of which is a clock! — casual break and entry, oh-so-cheeky gropings under duress, a fist fight, euphemistic candy licking, and a good ol’ fashioned damsel-in-distress rescue. (Although to the cartoon writer’s credit, at least our heroine gets to hurl a few insults and glass objects at her tormenter. . .)

The best part of all? All this tumultuous romance is merely a foil for Oldsmobile! Naturally. Oh, and there’s a sing-along too.

Anyway, here’s hoping that however you get the fuck down on Friday — or don’t! — you’ll find yourself the Queen of a Gas Machine one way or another.