crooked as corkscrews

When she cannot be sure
which of two lovers it was with whom she felt
this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery
streaking from head to heels, the way the white
flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside
seen from a car across a valley, the car
changing gear, skirting a precipice,
climbing…
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie
talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter
with friends, without worrying
that it’s late, dinner at midnight, her time
spent without counting the change…
When half her bed is covered with books
and no one is kept awake by the reading light
and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon…
Then
self-pity dries up, a joy
untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging
of her body—how to deal
with photographs and the mirror. She feels
so much younger and more beautiful
than she looks. At her happiest
—or even in the midst of
some less than joyful hour, sweating
patiently through a heatwave in the city
or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,
toneless, the sound of fatigue—
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe
in her future as an old woman, a wanderer
seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,
without being watched; not grim nor sad,
an old winedrinking woman, who knows
the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself…
She knows it can’t be:
that’s Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from The Water Babies,
no one can walk the world any more,
a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe
she could get to be tough and wise, some way,
anyway. Now at least
she is past the time of mourning,
now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude.

But eventually, you are cross-legged on your own
sofa, in your own little apartment, eating
a piece of cake topped with sugared peach
and you’re drenched in the wet orange joy of it.

Every time you touch your fingertips
to your soft pale belly, you realise: you are living. What a dream
you could be wishing for in some other, darker, life:
to be here, now.

Bathtub full of tea, cotton bedspread speckled
with a hundred blue flowers, a thrift store ceramic
planter with a sunlit basil plant forming
itself right before your eyes.

You have come so far
to love your little life so much
that you would not trade a single scar.
Love it so much, that the empty side of the bed
is already full.

As Umber taught me, the Quran is teeming with queer possibilities. Now I’m not saying that the Quran is a guidebook to a queer utopia, because, like many religious texts, it has its fair share of hegemonic rules and restrictions. But it is also an extraordinarily poetic work, with a diverse range of thoughts, many of which feel compatible with being queer. Prophet Muhammed once said, ‘Islam began as something strange and will return to being something strange, so give blessings to those who are strange.’ Amen Muhammed! If you replace the world Islam with ‘people’, the sentence could feasibly be the slogan for a queer sex-positive disco in Berlin.

I wanted to put
my mouth on you

and draw out whatever toxin...

—but I understand. There are limits
to love.

I do not want to give birth to myself.
I want to be my arsonist, to set fire

to my own house. I will not love or hate my body.
I said, I will not love or hate my body.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now..."

(I am absent because I am the teller. Only the
tale is real.)

Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours

of the day beautiful

nameless planet. Oh

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.

once, I tried to be somebody
once, we both tried to be good
but then decided to become gods
something always burning
something both dead and not