J. Jennifer Espinosa

To the Queer Woman Who Asked Me if I Have a Dick

 Do you have a soul?

Can you entrust your own desires to it?

Why do you need me
to spell things out for your comfort?

I grew up beneath the same boot as you
only I was lodged in its crevices

and you thought this made me a part of it.
I was never rubber, never pressing,

just womanly flesh all gummed up and full of pavement.
I don’t want to talk about the violence anymore.

I don’t owe you an explanation.
No one owes anyone their body.

When I meet another human being, I ask
What do you give yourself to and why?

I fall in love with people who know we don’t know shit.
Everything I adore about women cannot be spoken

because the words have not yet been invented.
I imagine another life, a possibility of healing, of knowing, of listening.

It could appear the day we stop relying upon the materials of this one.
So ask me whatever you wish—I have no desire to police you

J. Jennifer Espinoza

My first love was silence. I built myself from scratch

and no one listened.
This was the best time of my life.
I used to carry the clothes
to the laundry room
and pray for all the fog
in the world to surround me.
I’d let my thoughts 
catch rides
with passing airplanes.
All that womanhood
caught in the roof 
of my mouth
was like honey.
I knew it would never
go bad
so I never said a word 
         about it.

TC Tolbert

  

Beg Approval

Because the only view we have is the one

that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective.

Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective

tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom

at the dinner table; polite conversation;

lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting

a dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected

traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends

the gentle bones. Because your mother was

a seahorse. And to think of her thin is

to empty all the ice from the tea glasses;

to strain the soup by driving it through your hand.

Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic

folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Will and Testament

I want to be buried under timber and rock
like Caeneus was. I’ll be immune to weapons,
even once they find original female, soft
in the wrong places, scarred. Leave me in
a woods somewhere quiet, let my ribs
rattle with the woodpecker’s industry.
Let the heavens fade lilac to orange on
the longest night. I’ll leave you candles.
May raccoons walk their spidery prints all
over the dirt, may berries sprout
magic. I leave you my pleasure and joy
for which I worked so hard. I wish you
lusty longing and rapt attention. Though
the twiggy lean-to off the trail is not my
property to transfer, I hope you find it.
           I offer you my bright dumb
hopes for democracy. May your vote always
be counted. Your body was made
to shift shape. Seek to serve. Come visit me where
pines loop, tell me joy you’re having. Tangible form. Isn’t it amazing
the golden needles dropped,
how they leave a pad
on the ground
for your tent? Grove
awaits. Already
abandoned

my body once—  look what happened after. 

Oliver Baez Bendorf

 

WILL AND TESTAMENT

I want to be buried under timber and rock
like Caeneus was. I’ll be immune to weapons,
even once they find original female, soft
in the wrong places, scarred. Leave me in
a woods somewhere quiet, let my ribs
rattle with the woodpecker’s industry.
Let the heavens fade lilac to orange on
the longest night. I’ll leave you candles.
May raccoons walk their spidery prints all
over the dirt, may berries sprout
magic. I leave you my pleasure and joy
for which I worked so hard. I wish you
lusty longing and rapt attention. Though
the twiggy lean-to off the trail is not my
property to transfer, I hope you find it.
           I offer you my bright dumb
hopes for democracy. May your vote always
be counted. Your body was made
to shift shape. Seek to serve. Come visit me where
pines loop, tell me joy you’re having. Tangible form. Isn’t it amazing
the golden needles dropped,
how they leave a pad
on the ground
for your tent? Grove
awaits. Already
abandoned
my body once—  look what happened after.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Queer Facts About Vegetables

In 1893, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tomato is 

a vegetable (for taxation purposes), even though botanically it fit the definition of a fruit.


I know I am a nightshade,
it says to its own limp vine.
I know how to burst

against teeth
with my juice and seed.
I'm as small

as a thumbnail, no,
I'm as big as the harvest
fucking sun.

I'm fresh blood
on a small curled fist.
I can be a boy, I know,

but never a man.
I can be Sunday gravy
or a pickled green.

This is still the tomato
talking to the vine,
as told to me. 

Oliver Baez Bendorf

 

Field Guide to the Spectral Wilderness  When you arrive, it must be morning. The light must blue over triangles of treeline. There must be fields of corn and there must be coroners mistaking elbow joints for knee bones. There must be a trail through the woods at Possum Hollow and there must be the skull of a possum still lodged inside the trunk of a tree. There must be a tree. There must be the slightest hint of danger. There must be corners neatly tucked. There must be red the color of a puppy’s tongue there must be pleasure whether strapped or stolen and there must be ice there must always always always always be ice. There must be a way to feel our way toward the water and light from this darkness. There must be a fire. There must be a little candle thing that makes the bells go round. There must be a girl, there has always been a girl. There must be a boy, there has always been a boy. There must be a sharps container. There has never been a man but there must now be a man, not because one is needed but because one isn’t. There must be a ghost. They must be hungry. There must be a tiny meal and then there must be the best kind of love. There must be pine needles. There must be papercuts. A punchline. A burial. There must be a way to fall asleep beside the dead coyote and not wake up wearing its fur. There must be a horseman. There must be someone around here who remembers the voice of the girl. It isn’t me but it must be me. There must be daylight. There must be a yellow house. There must be a window. A ladder. A compass. We must have new names. There must be a boy and a girl and we must have new names. There must be a boy and there must be a girl. There must be. There must be. There must be someone looking for us by now. They must wonder where we are.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

 

T4T

BY OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF

And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.

Brother. I think about his XX all the time. It’s like a joke,

that we’ll start dreaming of men once we. My favorite

version is the one where we. We ate citrus on river rock

while others swam out. Stern lady cop found us out-of-

towners naked, our clothes scattered around pine root.

Dampened for days. But he. Inclination surges

through window screen—that wind, you’d think

                        we’d found ourselves in beach town.

If I had the chance, I’d go right to the root of  him.

Shouldn’t I out of anyone feel it with my main medium.

I think there’s something happy and right about us mating.

That night how you. Chest flying. Tonight my house creaks.

Somewhere swings open a gate we all know we all want.

Stefanie Burt

 

Stephen Burt Without Evidence (remarks on reading contemporary poetry and on reading about it) for Michael Scharf

1 Formalist criticism wants to make itself unnecessary; historicist criticism, to make itself indispensable. To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get noticed, explain what makes it typical. One can demonstrate to skeptics the explicit rules which govern a skill, or a game, but not those which govern an art. Skeptics thus suspect art forms of possessing rules which are trade secrets, or rules which are really table manners (Bourdieu). Snobbery in the arts is reverse snobbery. ‘A poem is either worth everything, or worth nothing.’ So say Romantics, equating a life with a poem. Why value the appearance of effort in poetry? Why value apparent (or actual) effortlessness? The first appears to demonstrate the mastery of a craft: the second, to demonstrate that poetry is not a craft at all. ‘I stop somewhere waiting for you’ (Whitman): the poet as teacher, or leader, who promises that we will catch up to him later, and knows that we never will. (Though certain exceptionally confident poets — Ginsberg, for example — would later claim to have done just that.) Writers in difficult, or ‘innovative,’ modes appear more likely than others to make large claims for the (political or intellectual) importance of their art: to justify greater effort on our part, we may require the promise or hope of a correspondingly greater reward. Not song vs. speech but song vs. speech vs. writing. (See John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem.) Medieval manuscript poets say, Chaucer to Skelton cared less for the last of those oppositions, perhaps because less alert to it: harder, therefore, for us — who type and cut and paste and duplicate files — to think in terms appropriate to their craft. The supposed requirement that a poem justify its existence during political or ethical emergencies (and there is always an emergency) is not the same as the demand that poets take action during such emergencies: we could apply the latter demand to carpenters, but not the former to tables or chairs. Poems, as such, defend the private life. What if the ways in which we think (or have been taught to think) about lyric poetry do not depend on our tacit acceptance of a liberal individualism, but instead support (provide evidence for) it? ‘Modern critics... have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact’; ‘to understand codes other than your own is likely to make your judgments better.’ William Empson’s formulation, as he seems to have recognized, places the central ethical work of literature largely in prose fiction (and perhaps in the feature film). Modern poetry, unless it rejects Empson’s liberalism entirely, then gets to answer the question: what else can imaginative writing do? The difference between representing (in poetry) an ethical, political or psychological desideratum and contributing to its achievement. ‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Yeats). But rhetoric and poetry are not distinct; each of us bears ‘others’ in ourselves, and hears or speaks for them in all our quarrels. Paratext as poetic material (Kent Johnson). Not ‘How do we get beyond the name of the poet, the name of the press, the context of discovery, to the actual poem?’ but ‘How can we know if and when we have ever done so?’ ‘If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I, become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres... You have to obtain reputation before you can get a fair hearing for that which would justify your reputation... If a man can’t hit upon any other way of attracting attention, let him dance on his head in the middle of the street; after that he may hope to get consideration for his volume of poems.’ George Gissing’s Jasper Milvain will earn our contempt but is he wrong? ‘Fame, the being known, though in itself one of the most dangerous things to man, is nevertheless the true and appointed air, element, and setting of genius and its works’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins). But ‘Publication is the auction/ Of the mind of man’ (Dickinson).