Glitter Tongue is an online collection of love poems by thirty queer and trans poets, launching Valentines Day 2012. It grew out of a collective writing effort among Margaret Rhee, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Tamiko Beyer, Oliver Bendorf, Meg Day, and Ching-In Chen, and then expanded to community. This is the result. We invite you to read on for poetic introductions and then explore the poems collected here.

(Source: thebrownggrrlzproject, via etiquette-etc)

dishabillic:

“Nebraska” by Miles Walser

For years you hid your tampons between mattresses, cut your hair short, lowered your voice, collected ace bandages and baggy clothes. Small town talk stuck to your shoulders, you nervously shuffled around gas stations, never looked men in the eyes. We share unwanted wombs. While mine collects cobwebs, yours lies in a coffin in Nebraska.

This is the state that made you famous, handed movie scripts to Hilary Swank. Your murder was Oscar worthy. We are walking obituaries. Your hate crime headline already carved across my forehead, people look at me and see your delicate hands and absent adam’s apple.

Brother, I’m afraid to use the bathroom… (Walk in, head down, don’t look at another guy.) I’m afraid I’ll be discovered… (Don’t talk, dont stare, don’t piss too quickly.) Some thick armed man will call me a queer, tell me to show him my tits. Suddenly I’m thrown against faucets, spit in my face, workboot gutting my stomach. I see you on the movie screen and wonder if it’s my reflection. I watch them push you into the dirt and drag me into their car as they break our bodies in between our thighs.

Brother, did it hurt when you kissed her goodbye? Did you know you were breaking your promise when you told her you’d come back? Did your parents panic? Buy you a prom dress? Struggle over pronouns at family gatherings? And how long did it take your girlfriend to run her hands along your skin, soft as hers? Did she leave her eyes open?

We are carcasses. Untouched boxes of condoms. We are public secrets, playground jokes, and horror films. We are costumes, stuffing, binding and makeup. We aren’t real men to them. Invisible til we’re screaming. They don’t remember our names until they read them on our tombstones.

They exposed you. Decided you’re better off as splattered ink on newspaper. Used you as a warning for the rest of us. And there are days when it works. Sometimes I forget that sidewalks can be safe. Sometimes I confuse their shooting eyes for the bullet that met yours. Sometimes I imagine the phone call my mother would get. Can almost hear my sobbing friends. Smell the lillies on my casket. Touch my girlfriend’s black dress. But brother, I am trying to be brave.

(via loveandzombies)

blkcowrie:

hope you’ll consider following my poetry/creative writing blog at:

http://blkcowrie.wordpress.com ♥ ~ just scroll to the bottom of the screen and press follow. thx!

(via blkcowrie)

blkcowrie:

Nikky Finney reads “Penguin Mullet Bread” (by KYwriters)

I am not sure how to convey the power of this poetry collection. I can tell you that once I picked up Love Cake, I could not put it down until I finished every poem, even though I sometimes had to read through my tears. Upon finishing, I immediately had to call a femme friend to read her a poem that reminded me of her.

These poems demand that I feel everything more intensely–including grief and rage–but in return, they give me back something I didn’t know I was missing: an expansive sense of possibility. The morning after I read this collection, I woke up from my sleep with a feeling of anticipation, remembering that I had been given an unexpectedly precious gift that I will carry deep inside me. The gift of this poetry collection is nothing less than a roadmap to what liberation can look like for queer people who survive personal and collective trauma.

Describing border crossings that she experiences as a queer working class person of color, Leah Laskshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha gives voice to the involuntary incursions on her body: child abuse, colonialism, racism, and war; as well as her voluntary crossings of boundaries: leaving her family of origin, rediscovering her roots in Sri Lanka, and reclaiming her body. She maintains a tension between oppression and healing throughout, in poems that leave no doubt about her power as a survivor, healer, and activist.

via Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Recipe for a Revolution with Chipped Turquoise Nails: A Review of Love Cake: Poems by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)

The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina.

Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

via Write With Your Spine: A Poet Sings: Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split

1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim (by atomicshogun)

Using the music video format as a subversive tool of engagement and collaboration, artist Anida Yoeu Ali and filmmaker Masahiro Sugano, worked with over 100 diverse volunteers, participants and community members in the Chicagoland area. 

…Central to the video is an unapologetic poem, a response to injustices directed against the Muslim community that reflect both the absurdity and dangers of racially-motivated fears. “1700%” refers to the rate of increase in hate crimes committed against people perceived as Muslim or Arab after 9/11.

(via “Back Up!”: Artist Anida Yoeu Ali - philosufi)

If you haven’t heard about Khmer Muslim artist Anida Yoeu Ali, listen up. The Cambodian-born, Chicago-raised woman is an interdisciplinary artist; she describes herself as a “performance artist, writer, and global agitator.” Ali’s work explores issues related to identity, particularly hybridity and transnationality. …

As part of her work there, she put together a multi-faceted installation called The 1700% Project—the title of which refers to the post-September 11 increase in hate crimes against people perceived to be Arab or Muslim in the US.

The 1700% Project is collaborative, and consists of a poem, a video (below), audio recording, performances, and installation….The whole project is a powerful statement against racial profiling of Muslims and the crimes of hate and violence that accompany the practice. 

More on Ali’s experiences with The 1700% Project at the link.  Additional to her performance work, Ali also keeps a personal blog Atomic Shotgun, on her move to Cambodia and creating a new media lab, Studio Revolt + contributes to anthologies and has a CD out ‘Broken Speak:I was born with two tounges’ [available via her site].

jannalynne:

So there’s this group called The Lost Bois, a queer hip-hop group from DC, that you should definitely check out. Here’s one song, Cartoon Girl, created by B. Steady. Enjoy and make sure to check out some of their other work!

Poem in the beginning is by her partner, Taylor Johnson.

Lovely vid & words.

Art and Soul Tomorrow/Cupcake Cabaret on Friday (as part of Quorum Forum) | Queer Fat Femme

A CAMPUS PRIDE 2009 Hot List artist, Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, educator, and martial artist navigating life as a pin@y-amerikan trans/queer in the U.S. with struggle, resistance, and laughter.

Currently based in NY/NJ, with roots in Chicago, K’s work is the perfect mix of gritty city flex and Midwest open sky grounded in homeland soil. In Mango Tribe and in solo work, K. has featured in colleges and stages nationally and internationally; from the NJ Performing Arts Center to Chicago’s Hot House, The Brooklyn Museum to The Loft in Minneapolis, K’s bold work continues to excite and challenge audiences.

Awesome idea from quorumnyc: a queer skillshare, festival, community building week of events in queers own homes around the city.

One of those things Brisvegas probably lacks the critical mass for [though Tiara’s going with home venue to foster some erotic cabaret too!]

If in NYC, another Cupcake Cabaret hosted by Queer Fat Femme is set for February.

ourcatastrophe:

I always find it really fucking sad when activists and artists who die tragically are remembered more for their death than their life.   Susana Chavez was the activist against the femicide in Juarez who was found dead on jan 6.  I thought Spanish readers might want to read some of Chavez’s poetry.

If you can’t read Spanish…deal.

(via so-treu)

gonegood:

15

Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren’t for Picasso
you’d hardly be remembered at all.
He’s given you an unbelievable shelf-life.
Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life?

I am no moth flitting around his wick.
He might be a genius but he’s also a prick –
Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch,
wasn’t I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch?

Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken geography of it.

(via jeanthesecond-deactivated201201)

awesomegrrrls:

pansexualpride:

fuckyeahlgbt:

gayinnj:

raimyskye:

I’ve watched a lot of poems being performed on stages in front of crowds about being lgbt, but this is the best one.

“Hir”: a poem about a transgender high school student’s everyday struggle

“Quit talking about me like I’m not hir” This was incredible. 

“…her whole body’s painted on”

(via rkb)

Poem, by Desirée Alvarez

Ancients threw the masks down the cenote— the faces smashed first in little ways before the long drop, an eye or an ear broken, a mouth snapped in half. Then, lifted from the well, two thousand years later, still grinning and golden. The loose spooling of two people fast unravels—how we let go of time spent, how heat fades, how a body forgets fully what it knew. I have learned your face as you will never. The third day we met you gave me all your secrets until I held an ocean in a cradle. Now all I ask for is more.