(no subject)

If I Were A Banned Book

If I were a banned book, I’d be the dirty bits and the heaving breasts and the twisted sheets and the scented oils and the chains and rope and dripping candle wax. I would coax you into multiples, and I would urge you to invite another. I’d be the empty bottle of gin on the kitchen table. I’d promise to call, but never would.

If I were a banned book, I’d tell you to challenge authority and question everything and demand answers. I’d tell you that the 1 percent is nothing without the rest of us labeling the 1 percent the 1 percent. I’d teach you to cook anarchy and embrace diversity and kiss your same-gender lover in public.

If I were a banned book, I’d let you ask me about sex and growing up, and I’d sing the caged-bird songs, and I’d be each of the nobodies who would answer to the name nobody. I’d teach you to sail a raft and swim against tides and dance in towns where dances aren’t danced.

If I were a banned book, I’d be the light on long-past midnight in your attic, and I’d be the cauldron around which dance witches and in which fire burns and toil and trouble doubles.

If I were a banned book, I’d bring flowers to the grave of a mouse and I’d teach you that forever sometimes means forever and sometimes means less than forever but always means what forever will mean to you, then, at that moment.

If I were a banned book, I’d be the secrets you write in your diary and I’d be the lies you write in your diary and I’d be the truths that you wish weren’t truths that you write in your diary.

If I were a banned book, I’d be cupboards and wardrobes and the hidden door under a stairwell in which lives the boy who lived. I’d be beanstalks and magic shoes and godmothers, winged and otherwise. I’d be potion poultice poetry. I’d be words wings wizardry.

If I were a banned book, I’d dance with insects outside of an enormous peach, and I’d race wolves in woods overgrown with ivy and snow. I’d be the substitute teacher who’d let you smoke cigarettes outside. I’d be the comic book hidden behind your history book.

If I were a banned book, I’d urge you to go ask Alice, and wrinkle time, and ride in talking cars. Everyday, I’d crown a new king fly-lord, and everyday would be a good day to say goodbye to something.

 

If I were a banned book, I’d be the Pigman and I’d be a Wallflower and I’d be the story of Sleeping Beauty, written under a penname. I’d kill mockingbirds and I’d talk about the things we talk about when we talk about things like death and love and sex and forever, which, as I already would have taught you, sometimes means less than forever but always mean what forever will mean to you, then, at that moment.

 

" — William Henderson - Nov. 30, 2011

(no subject)

kitty tsui, author, leather woman, and bodybuilder (via gatheringbones) 

(no subject)

[”EF: Could we talk about the direct address to the reader in the footnotes? As an example, in the foreword you write, “Even if I were saying—hypothetically speaking— that this is a code, they will never be able to read it. There are some things you can only see through tears.“ These moments felt like a space of cruising—like winks or nudges—where all these intimate meanings and feelings are subtly negotiated between the text and trans readers. Those parts of the book made us feel really held.

JR: Those lines were like rope ladders thrown into a void, hoping that someone would climb them. It was hard for me not to write a book that contained many kinds of codes or secret tunnels for people. So, direct address was one part of that, but then, also, I didn’t want to do too much of that kind of direct address, because the effect of intimacy was something I was in large part hoping to generate through the structure and movement of the narrative, so that a reader would keep reading and get caught up in plot. On that level I’m very traditional: I think the most libidinal, most intimate thing you can give to a reader is allowing them to get caught up in plot. Maybe this goes back to what I was saying about reading/being-read-to as an S-M dynamic. I’m just trying to be a good top.”]

— a conversation with jordy rosenberg

(no subject)

there's an entire book in me somewhere about how only war metaphors ever felt ... right as far as speaking the language of the very particular pink-red slash of of medical trauma, all the way back to the beginning. Before spoken language was even a thing, this one was stitched into this meatbag piece by piece.

muddy minefields to stumble and be flayed through until it becomes muscle memory, passages like this, the absolute sanctity of taking a long shuddering breath ontop of a long-rusted mutilated disused (discarded!) war-machine of a tank in the middle of a deadly sniper's den of a pasture, the dead-eyed Sight of who march in the dead of the night impossibly broken and racked by pain but with the iron-clad sense that they must go on - if for no other reason than that looping thought (like a broken siren that simply hasn't been shot yet). anything else has long since been burned out.

i don't begin to assume my experiences are the same as those who have been on the other end of a rifle -

but i am grateful that this odd language exists, among those who have faced death.