Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Monique. There’s an exclusive, until recently, men-only club near Sonoma, California, called the Bohemian Club. Their motto used to be “spiders, weave not thy web here.” The spiders they’re referring to are women. Members of this club include politicians, university presidents, oil tycoons—basically rich white men who believe they own the world. I envision a world full of spiders, weaving interconnected webs that resist patriarchal forms of supremacy that work so well at keeping us distraught, distracted, and divided. The harm reduction movement is composed of such spiders, the likes of which the founders of the original Bohemian Club never imagined. We are a collective of trans- and cisgender people. We are LGBTQIA+ and straight folks. We are people of all races and all ethnicities. We are pacifists and warriors, anarchists and mainstream-ists, socialists and libertarians—all working toward a more just world. One that is powered by people who have been historically pushed toward society’s margins. The rise of the twenty-first-century social justice warrior isn’t simply a trope created by the alt-right or others desperately clinging to the status quo. We’re working to dismantle the very structures designed to keep us divided—and collectively we are legion. I think about the web of mycelium fungi growing underground that you describe in Emergent Strategy. It can kill a forest several times over, but, in doing so, it builds deeper, richer layers of soil that allow larger trees to grow. Harm reductionists, along with our racial, social, and environmental justice warriors, are both mycelium and tree—interdependent and deeply rooted, paving the way for those who come after us. amb. I deeply believe harm reduction is a crucial concept for pleasure activism … in a nutshell, pleasure activism is learning from what pleases us about how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have. Can you break down how you see harm reduction practices potentially increasing our capacity for pleasure? Monique. We take pleasure in treating people kindly. At the core of harm reduction is unconditional love for people who sometimes have very little love in their lives. For years now, harm reduction practitioners have served as role models for people searching for ways to work with drug users. We use community-centered and people-centered approaches to remind them they are worth more than what the rest of the world tells them, that they are valued, and they don’t have to hide themselves from us. We’re here to help in whatever healthy ways they want us to. We won’t push, but we will support.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We had lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised.But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, ‘When I first knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would see...’ She smiled. I gave the match a shake. ‘Didn’t you know,’ I said then, ‘didn’t you know, that I loved you?’‘I’m not sure,’ she answered; then she sighed. ‘I didn’t like to think of it.’‘Why not?’She shrugged. ‘It seemed easier to be your friend ...’‘But Kitty, that’s just what I thought! And oh! wasn’t it terribly hard! But I thought, that if you knew I liked you as a, as a sweetheart - well, I never heard of such a thing before, did you?’She moved to the glass to work again at the pins in her plait, and now, without turning, she said, ‘It’s true I never cared for any other girl, like I care for you ...’ As she said it I saw her neck and ears grow pink, and felt myself grow weak and warm and silly in response; but I caught a glimpse of something, too, behind her words.‘It has happened before, then,’ I said flatly, ‘with you...’ She grew redder than ever, but would make me no reply; and I fell silent. But the fact was, I loved her too much to want to fret for very long about the other girls she might have kissed before me. ‘When was it,’ I asked next, ‘that you began to think of me like ...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You should see what my tail did, I told her. But it wasn’t the tail I blamed for hurting him. It was me, and Ben knew, and when she stepped back from me, tugging me by the tail so that I walked backward into the house, it was tenderness that tethered me to her, a desire to be crowned by her teeth, queened by them. She pulled me into the doorway, nipped my chin. Held me by the hips so tight I’d find the forensic outline of her fingers there later. I’d place my fingers in the same place and replay the ache that was my name. She kissed me and my bladder almost unzipped itself, eager to empty, to be filled with what she could give me. I reeled the tail up from between my legs and held it between our bellies, both of us grinding hard against it. It hurt, but it was a hurt that harmonized with my hunger, with the hum of my backmost teeth. I could feel her through my tail, the fur frizzing with our friction, and I knew I couldn’t be undaughtered from it. Behind us, on the sofa, Agong was breathing loud as a beehive, though we still didn’t know how to smoke the sickness out of him. Maybe he would never remember our names, never fish our faces out of whatever water he’d dropped us into, but it was safer that way, safer that I couldn’t save him: He was preserved in the brine of his boyhood, before bullets, before he knew what he was capable of killing. When his hands have forgotten how to hold things, to make a fist, to clean a gun or wipe his own ass, we draw faces on all his fingers and say: These are your family, the ones killed in the war, your mother on your thumb and your father on your forefinger, and now they are with you every time you lift your hand, now they are walking on wind, now they can never be taken from you. _ My mother said that when Agong was a boy—I imagined it was so long ago that knees didn’t have the technology to bend—Agong helped the men drill wells into the wetlands and drag the saltwater out in buckets. Dogs and oxen ran into the bog and buckled, their bones broken into song. The deer sank so deep only their antlers jutted out of the ground like velvet saplings.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother said gegu hadn’t worked for Agong because the toes she’d fed him were only marrow: The meat had quit their bones long ago, and only meat could cure a father of his forgetfulness. But my tail was as much meat and tendon as bone. If I severed it, if I fed it to Agong, maybe I could give it a purpose that wasn’t hurt. My tail behaved like a flipper, frantic between my legs, knowing what I wanted of it. I called Ben in the morning, told her: I have something that needs to be cleaved. In the morning the sky was milk, already mourning me. Ben met me in the yard, the 口 breathing at our feet, exhaling moths that flew toward the light inside the house, clattering against the windows, attracted to ache. Turning to me, Ben stroked the skin behind my ears where no light lived. Cleave it from me, I said, sliding the tail out of my waistband. It hummed in my hand, thinner, reshaped by Ama’s fist. I told her how Ama had used it as a leash, how I’d lost the ability to steer it. Ben said there were two definitions of cleave . I said she knew which one I meant. My brother had been right to say my tail was a liability. Having a body is a liability, Ben said. And I like your body. My tail went still. I used to think stillness would save me, the way some animals choose stillness so they won’t be seen as moving prey. I turned around to show her the way it dangled, almost to the floor now, its weight like an anchor. Soon it would drown me and I’d have to evacuate from my body. Standing behind me, Ben pressed her belly against my back. She combed my hair with her fingers, pulled it back from my shoulders. I pretended I was a tree and her hands in my hair were perching birds. I tried to be a place she could stay. What would you be without this tail, she said, reaching down to grasp it. Free, I said, but I knew it wasn’t true. It was my umbilical cord, and I’d never been freer than inside my mother’s belly, Ama’s blood braiding into me. My body multiplied by theirs. Ben nudged her nose into my neck. The 口 squinted at our feet, watching us through hyphen-shaped eyes. You should see what my tail did, I told her. But it wasn’t the tail I blamed for hurting him.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty had given me leave to love her; the world, she said, would never let me be anything to her except her friend.Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and in silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty, and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act the audience thinks it: beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you go too fast - not there, but here - that’s good - that’s better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards, and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it! As Kitty had said, when I had whispered that wearing trousers upon the stage would only make me want to kiss her: ‘What a show that would be!’ But, that was our show; only the crowd never knew it. They looked on, and saw another turn entirely.Well, perhaps there were some who caught glimpses...I have spoken of my admirers. They were girls, for most part - jolly, careless girls, who gathered at the stage door, and begged for photographs, and autographs, and gave us flowers. But for every ten or twenty of such girls, there would be one or two more desperate and more pushing, or more shy and awkward, than the rest; and in them I recognised a certain - something. I could not put a name to it, only knew that it was there, and that it made their interest in me rather special. These girls sent letters - letters, like their stage door manners, full of curious excesses or ellipses; letters that awed, repelled and drew me, all at once. ‘I hope you will forgive my writing to say that you are very handsome,’ wrote one girl; another wrote: ‘Miss King, I am in love with you!’ Someone named Ada King wrote to ask if we were cousins. She said: ‘I do so admire you and Miss Butler, but especially you. Could you I wonder send a photograph? I would like to have a picture of you, beside my bed ...’

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Alana. I love good music, especially really good lyrics. I love to see live music, theater, performance art. I love film. Historically, I love literature, but reading isn’t as accessible to me these days. I love sharing an amazing meal and good conversation with friends. I love sex. I love obsessing about really random things. I love admiring the moon in all its phases. I love making people laugh. amb. This may be too personal, in which case, tell me shut up … but I feel so aware of how Malkia looks at you and sees your beauty and sensuality every single day, allowing everyone else to see you through that lens. It feels like that would be good medicine as your body goes through the challenges of cancer. Is that the case? Alana. Mac makes me feel like a sexy beast, no matter what. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don’t. It reminds me of my humanity as I manage cancer. It helps me have more compassion and love for myself and others. It makes me feel like a superhero, honestly. amb. Have you read Audre Lorde’s cancer writings? She also seemed to share this commitment to pleasure through transition, and I wonder if she has influenced or encouraged you from the ancestral realm? Alana. I read her Cancer Journals a few months after my diagnosis.85 What struck me the most from it was her commitment to doing whatever it would take to continue her life’s work. I honestly found it to be difficult to relate to—I’m someone who has always struggled with understanding my purpose. Part of me hoped that maybe this cancer diagnosis would activate some secret purpose-filled part of me that was sitting dormant, but that hasn’t really happened. What has happened is that I’ve started a blog and am working on a documentary, and I grow my love for Mac every day. So, in a way, I’ve been able to rekindle some creativity that hasn’t had much attention in many, many years. That feels connected to Audre in some way. amb. What do you wish everyone understood about pleasure? Alana. I think we are on earth, in these humanly bodies, to experience pleasure—among other things. I also do believe the saying “everything in moderation,” with the emphasis on the word “everything.” And, finally, I believe in pleasure as a practice. You can fall out of practice, but life is so much better when you’re exercising your pleasure muscles. 83 Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake (New York: Putnam, 1997), 219.84 Mac is Malkia Cyril, director of the Center for Media Justice and lover extraordinaire.85 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980).Care as PleasureLeah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a prolific writer and teacher in the realm of disability justice and care work. Every time we talk she changes something in my foundational sense of myself. When I think of care and pleasure I think of:

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And I was very much raised by a lineage of, a generation of, Black women who came from Georgia, North Carolina sharecroppers, and the Black Seminole Nation. They really embodied truth. They were very much my orators and taught me, very much so, how to love myself. I used to say, “I don’t know if I love myself.” And one of my aunts put me in front of the mirror at age six and seven, and she said, “You are gonna look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I love myself.’ And then you’re going to say ‘I love Black people.’” And at first I resisted, but then I was like, “OK. Let’s do this.” And she was committed to that practice every time I saw her. Until it rolled off the tongue and there was no pause and she could say, “OK, go to the mirror, and love yourself.” And I would, knowingly, lovingly. You feel me? amb. I love that. I literally just told someone to do that today. I told them they need to look at themselves in the mirror and say they love themselves. And do it every day. Cara. These are not small things. They changed my life. And in this quote here, from “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us. Becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly, in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.”38 I based my whole political theatrical process around the question of how to acknowledge erotic power. I did a whole performance around this and the historical oppressive violence against us and the state of Black women. amb. Do you have a copy?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A fence as high as our foreheads split the lot from the sidewalk. Her father was unraveling the fence, rolling it up like a tongue. The land was concave, sunken in the middle, swallowing two trees that stood in the center of it. Ben’s father began the foundation by renting a bulldozer and carved a hole so deep we joked he was digging himself back to China. I walked an hour west on weekends to visit Ben and her family, who moved into a small shed bordering the hole. Ben’s father built the shed in two weeks, complete with a bunk bed for Ben and her brother, a dining table made of exposed plywood, and a drain in the corner for showering. Instead of a sink, they owned a bucket. Instead of a kitchen, they stacked a wall of tinned tuna and Spam, a tapestry of meats. Instead of a toilet, there was a spade by the door for us to dig our own holes. When it stormed, the tin roof chattered like teeth and the walls italicized themselves. Leaks veined the walls and bled rain. When I described it to my mother—bleached walls, a soil floor covered in prayer rugs, plastic-wrapped holes for windows—she said it sounded like a chicken farm, the kind she used to work for in Arkansas. In a past life, Ben’s mother sold one of her ovaries when she was a teenager, after a river molested her city and she needed money to rebuild her house. If Ben and I offered our hands, kneading her mother’s neck for an hour first, she’d let us ask her about it. She’d worm out of her skirt to show us: The scar made her loss legible to us, an indented hyphen three inches to the left of her belly button. Ben stroked the blue scar like a bird, as if she could calm it and coax it into her hands. What Ben wanted was to hold our hurts for us. She once told me a bruise was scratch-and-sniff. She scratched the one on my knee and sniffed it and said, Sweet. Inside the shack, Ben and her brother pretended they lived in a bomb shelter: Outside was a war they could win solely by surviving. When we played together, the bunk bed was our only bunker and every cockroach was a landmine. If I stepped on one, the penalty was death. Ben wore the uniform of a soldier, white pajamas that turned fog-thin with her body heat. I dressed in the uniform of a casualty, a masking- tape X over my heart, a bullet hole penned into my neck. We argued what color it should be: Ben’s brother said red, because of blood. Ben said black, because that’s the color of the hole itself. I wanted to say neither, but I was already dead. Ben’s birdcage was neutral territory.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When I drew it from its wrappings and held it up against me before the glass, I shook my head, quite stricken. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to Kitty, ‘but how can I keep it? It’s far too smart. You must take it back, Kitty. It’s too expensive.’But Kitty, who had watched me handle it with dark and shining eyes, only laughed to see me so uneasy. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘It’s about time you started wearing some decent frocks, instead of those awful old schoolgirlish things you brought with you from home. I have a decent wardrobe - and so should you. Goodness knows we can afford it. And anyway, it can’t go back: it was made just for you, like Cinderella’s slipper, and is too peculiar a size to fit anybody else.’Made just for me? That was even worse! ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘I really cannot. I should never feel comfortable in it ...’‘You must,’ she said. ‘And, besides’ - she fingered the pearl that I had so recently placed about her neck, and looked away - ‘I am doing so well, now. I can’t have my dresser running round in her sister’s hand-me-downs for ever. It ain’t quite the thing, now is it?’ She said it lightly - but all at once I saw the truth of her words. I had my own income now - I had spent two weeks’ wages on her pearl and chain; but I had a Whitstable squeamishness, still, about spending money on myself. Now I blushed to think that she had ever thought me dowdy.And so I kept the dress for Kitty’s sake; and wore it, for the first time, a few nights later. The occasion was a party - an end-of-season party at the Marylebone theatre at which we had spent such a happy month. It was to be a very grand affair. Kitty had a new frock of her own made for it, a lovely, low-necked, short-sleeved gown of China satin, pink as the warm pink heart of a rose-bud. I held it for her to step into, and helped her fasten it; then watched her as she pulled her gloves on - aching all the time with the prettiness of her, for the blush of the silk made her red lips all the redder, her throat more creamy, her eyes and hair all the browner and more rich. She wore no jewellery but the pearl that I had given her, and the brooch that had been Walter’s gift. They didn’t really match - the brooch was of amber.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi. In thinking about burlesque as a liberation practice, I’ve also been thinking about that just because you are taking your clothes off doesn’t mean liberation is a given. In some ways, I feel like burlesque has everything to do with liberation—the stripping down, stripping off, freeing, revealing of bodies or truths, the use of satire and political critique. I feel like the structure offers a lot if you are trying to get free. But, you know, just because I am on vacation doesn’t mean I’m relaxing! The body might be there, but if the mind and heart aren’t there with it, then it may not feel like a freeing, self-loving experience. I feel like what makes it a liberatory practice is a lot in the intention we bring to it. Like in ritual, there are deliberate steps to help induce a state or experience, the structure offers all these gateways, but you have to actually bring your own intention as you walk through it, so just taking your clothes off doesn’t mean you’re going to be liberating yourself if you’re still— Una. Hating the body you’re in, or doing it just to please the audience. Michi. Yes, yes. But, burlesque does offer us these opportunities to practice it, because it’s not like the first time you get on stage and get naked for an audience that it’s just gonna be all easy, breezy “I love myself and I’m at peace with systems of oppression that have made me internalize the hatred in the world” and so on and so forth! Sometimes, even when we are performing sexy self-love liberation, we may not feel that way. But doing the performance will remind us that part of us does feel that way, and by performing it, practicing that love for ourselves and all people, I feel like it can strengthen our ability to get there. Una. And it’s especially vulnerable because it’s our bodies that are up there. Doing burlesque is not like a play we wrote that someone else is performing. We’re up there, embodying the story. Michi. You have mentioned that it’s been a journey to pace yourself and not take your clothes off all at once. People think of burlesque performers as these super sexually comfortable people, but I feel like you taking all of your clothes off at once is in some way being afraid of your own sexiness. Do you want to talk about that? Una. Yeah, it’s like, here, I’m aggressively showing my body before you can reject me. When I was younger and liked people who didn’t like me back, I found that all the power I felt like I had was in being able to confront them, asking them directly “do you like me?” They would be like, “Umm, I don’t even know you to know if I’m into you,” so that wouldn’t go very far.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  2. Denys, influenced by Proclus, describes a celestial hierarchy of immortal intellects—the angels. 3. Unlike the Gnostics, however, Denys’ realm of immortal beings is not governed by a dynamic of fall and return, but rather of illumination and ecstasy: every being remains in its place in the hierarchy, illuminating beings below it, and going out of itself in love toward God above. 4. For Denys, God too is “ecstatic” (i.e., he goes out of himself): for it is the nature of the Good to “diffuse itself.” B. Trinity as Simple Incomprehensible One 1. Denys clearly puts the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One. 2. The simplicity of the One is the explanation of why the Trinity is one God. 3. Denys enthusiastically adopts the Neoplatonist description of the One as “above essences” or “beyond being.” 4. Denys emphasizes (more than Augustine) God’s incomprehensibility. 5. Denys develops the via negativa or apophaticism, the strategy of trying to hint at the nature of God by saying what God is not. IV. Western Christian Neoplatonism: Augustine A. Happiness Is Seeing God 1. While Denys clearly locates the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One, Augustine of Hippo often uses concepts associated with the level of the divine Mind (e.g., intelligibility and Form) to describe God. 2. Thus for Denys, God is like the sun, too bright for us ever to gaze at with our mind’s eye, while Augustine thinks that when our minds are strengthened and made perfect, we will find our happiness in seeing God. 3. The desire for this happiness is charity, the love of God, which lifts us up to God (as inevitably as fire goes up to the heaven). B. God in the Soul’s Inner World 1. In contrast to Denys, for Augustine the angels have no role as mediators of divine light: we find the true light by turning inward (like Plotinus). ©1999 The Teaching Company. 55

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Jodie. Yes, like really—this person is going to help me like that? And be funny and stunning and on it? After that, I remember sharing some stories of our biggest mistakes, over the course of a long night—that created a surge of dignity that we leaned into and rode. Like, wow—we said those things out loud and we didn’t die? We didn’t die. Bringing Dani food when she wasn’t well. I was like, I really love this person and want her to be cared for. And I remember lots of Dani and Jodie chats about work and love—getting the gumption to set and hold standards together and to grieve what was heartbreaking. I was like, wow, she is going all in and healing the fuck out of that. I was honored to witness, and it gave me so much permission. I survived my next break-up because of that. AND WE MANIFESTED A BABY! amb. It feels like we really did pray on that child finding a loving way into the world. And she did. All the right people surround her. AMB. We have a high level of daily interdependence. It feels like the place I go to be my truest self, for emotional support, to learn. What brings you to the woes? Jodie. It’s the place where we are fully seen and held and all of the parts of us are welcomed. We’re here for each other’s greatest longings, desires, and wounds. We know shame’s tricks, and they may work on one of us, but the others will catch it and blast it off and bring compassion and tenderness to that place. This is co-evolution through woeship. amb. Yes, for it me it the first place I go to practice one thousand percent honesty. Like, I am hurt by how someone is treating me, or confused about a work boundary, or I just ate mad ice cream, whatever it is. I would add humility. This is the place where I can be like, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THIS. I know I will receive compassion, care, and also be reminded about what matters to me, what I am trying to accomplish in this lifetime, what makes me feel real joy. And I care so much, and learn so much, from what is moving in your lives.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines. A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama, You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls. My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When the first boy was shot, the rest fell in with him. The army saved bullets this way. Polishing their names on its tongue, the river strung through their skulls and necklaced them. Snakes erased the boys’ bodies, entering through eye sockets to eat the rubymeat of their brains. At night, the river cleaved from its bed and heaved itself onto land, roaming as a snake. The red rain receded to a rumor, but some said the day the river was impregnated with snakes, there was a woman seen on the banks. Some said this woman had no spine, snakes for arms, teeth for eyes, adding details until she was nothing they could name. One night when she was almost nineteen and married to Agong, her second soldierfuck, Ama went down to the banks in the dark to see if it was true, if her snakes were women at night, if the river walked itself. Ama waded in and the river didn’t budge, thick as jelly. Ama waited for the snakes to circle her ankles, the snakes she’d birthed on her own. The moon pimpled the skin of the river. She walked back to the bank and sat in the mud, wondering where the snakes had gone, if they still loved her, if they still missed the color inside her. She closed her eyes and lay on her back, imagining all her ribs were the rungs of a raft. How bright a boat she would be. When she opened her eyes, three moons in the sky. One was whole and the others were halves. She sat up and saw a snake hanging on to her calf by its fangs. Ama wrenched it off. Before she could lie back down, the water tore in two. A body nosed onto the banks, gutting the mud. It was a woman with scales the color of blood, wearing her skin inside-out. She tucked her arms and legs into her body before oaring them out, shoving away the mud with each winging. Ama undressed and curled beside the riverwoman in the mud, soaking in the palm-sweat of night. She lowered her head to the riverwoman’s skin, tilting her tongue into the belly button, lapping out its sour lake of sweat. Ama remembered the river was conceived not by the sea but by a body: It had been pissed down the mountain Papakwaka, cleaving streams into the stone. Ama propped herself above the riverwoman’s ribs. The mud slapped against itself, a sound like farting, and they both laughed. Ama kneeled between the riverwoman’s knees and touched with her tongue the black hair there, gummy with mud and moonmilk.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I have had to ask for help, again and again, becoming porous, transparent, and more human. I had to learn how to say what I want in clear words and contend with the answers to my real longings instead of swallowing bitterness about unmet and unspoken wishes. Each day I am more and more a real person—it turns out this is the only way to move through these years that my projected “perfect” selves, which I created to impress others or protect my heart, simply cannot handle. I remember, daily, that none of this is explained and none of it is promised. I remind myself that even when I turn inward to quietly hermit, I am supported by people who love me and honor my boundaries. I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle. When I reach an edge that feels impossible to go beyond, I laugh, softening any remaining rigidity in myself that makes me think I have control. I confess daily, “Here is where it hurts.” I let the healing come through connection. When I feel like a failure, I look at my plants, at how they wilt and seem to be dying, and then water and sun and my loving words bring them back to vibrancy. I let water move over me, sun change me, love reach me. I root down into the soil and back into my lineage, which reminds me that everything is temporary but nothing disappears, this is how life is. I reach forward and up, shaping a world that feels good for me, for all who look like me, for all who love like me, for all who have yet to realize that love is liberation. I let myself work through anger until all that is left is compassion. I cultivate justice within myself, rooted not in vengeance or righteousness but in love and interdependence. I work hard on answering my calling, listening to the bass notes of my life, following underground rivers to find more room for my whole self. I let my days be spent in love, connection, and creation. I recognize that my sorrow carves out the space for my joy,134 and that both in this lifetime and in the cycles of my lineage there is so much space that has been carved out by sorrow, and I get to fill it up with joy and pleasure. What a pleasure it is, after all, to be a free Black queer woman. To be a human, self-aware. To be of the earth, with such beauty and interconnectedness.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide (I never liked that actress because she has my eyes), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching. _ After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口, its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口, and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud. *1 Ok, what Ama really said here was foreigner, but I think we know she really means white person, white devil, gwailo, baigui, etc. Substitute your own culturally appropriate term here. *2 See the irony yet? *3 Ama really said once a month, but I thought moon would sound more old-timey. *4 Ama used a slur here—I prefer not to write it. *5 What is Ama trying to say about my father? *6 More on this soon! *7 I don’t know what an ordinary hog looks like, so please feel free to imagine this for me. *8 Is this a “that’s what he said” joke? Good one, Ama. *9 I wish I hadn’t just learned the Mandarin word for semen, but here we go. And yes, this story is being told in Mandarin.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Massaging my mother’s feet until she sleeps, I slot my knuckles between her toes, trying to tell when they’ll be tender. At the back of her heels and calves, I know each of her tendons by note. Pluck them into music, play away their pain. She once told me that a tree’s leaves are its ears: A leaf listens to the light. I want many ears growing from my skin, a whole field to listen with. When my mother farts in her sleep, I shape the steam with my hands and release it outside as fog. I remember the story she once told me about how all mountains were once hammered out of mist, and that’s how they move, how they rise and dissolve, returning to the genealogy of the sky. At night, Ben climbs over my mother’s body and nestles her head in my armpit. We kiss until our tongues can’t tell themselves apart. I dream of biting off her nipple, spitting the coin of it back into her palm. Make a wish, I say, while she flings the nipple-coin into her mouth, swallows. We wake together at the same time, our names in each other’s mouths, our heat making glue of the moon, and it means we’ve come true. Halfway through the night, we hear chirping. At first I think it’s the sky raining teeth. Ben crawls out of our tent, one hand extended like the sound is a string she can pull on, lure in. I crawl out after her, my arm slipping down the sleeve of a hole. We are beaded with mosquitos, slapping them off each other’s thighs, our hands bright with the blood we’ve stolen back from their bellies. A laced wing is cleaved to the corner of her mouth and I lean forward, lick it off. We scan the sky and the top of the fence, but both are empty. Ben says, Listen, kneeling to the soil. It’s coming from under. The sound comes from beneath our feet, a symphony of the buried. Needling my toes into the soil, I can almost feel the fester of wings. The key around Ben’s neck is the nearest light and I reach for it. A moon docking in the dark of my throat. Reaching up, Ben plucks a strand of sound from the air, follows it back to the ground where it was planted. I hold the hem of her shirt and she steers me toward the 口 where the chirping is clearest, where the sound is ambering inside our mouths. In the center of the yard, I look up and see where our wet roof is angled just right for the moon to catch it and turn it into a mirror, deflecting dawn for as long as we want.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  RF. Zizi, you speak as if you know better than anyone, that you have the magic of just knowing, that you have the secret of all secrets; you always say “there is a secret inside a secret of a secret,” that you are beyond everything and everyone. We, on the other hand, are trying to practice humility, we want to become nothing, we believe that if humans reach a point where they know they are just a moment in time, then we can all just relax and just be and enjoy our cigarettes. We just want to reach the point where we know and believe that death and birth are the only guarantees, and love, for sure love. Does that get on your nerves? What if we pause and say that without humility one cannot love or maintain love? By love, we mean creating a safe and solid space for the people we care about to be themselves, to allow for a mutual growth for everyone involved, to be extremely sensitive. Zizi. My dear Rocca Family, if you plan on repeating and/or quoting and adhering to the Zizi, please learn your lessons right. Zizi says: The secret is a secret inside a secret, and it can only be truly obtained if you do nothing and everything. Pahleeze. Let me remind you of what Zizi declared cosmically some time ago or never: Everything Zizi says is possibly the truth and also probably a big lie. Zizi never promised to declare fiction from reality. And Zizi continuously as long as Zizi lives will remain true to changing her mind. My dear Rocca Family, those who claim they know are full of BS gone bad. One can, at best, claim to know to the best of their knowledge. We seek. And continue to seek. Until it all goes silent. And Zizi likes you saying: “We, on the other hand, are trying to practice humility, we want to become nothing.” You may have chosen a tough journey. You continue by saying: “We believe that if humans…” Zizi recommends you drop the “believe” notion. How about you suggest, try, attempt (maybe trust) this or that, rather than believe? There is very little space for humility in belief. The pleasure hidden secret like a whisper in the sharp pain of freezing breath venturing into your lungs hiking up the mountain of all beauties. Literally. Or is it breath sharply taken in, gentle like a whisper, sharp like glass, to defrost your lungs in the freezing winters? Does it matter, the difference? The pleasure deep in the pain of witnessing your breath in front of, in the presence of, magic, beauty, ancient nature before and after your birth and your death. As for love: How dare anyone ever claim the life of another? In any shape or form? Via love or hate? Via human trafficking or marriage? The channel does not matter. You hardly own yourself let alone any others. [image file=image_rsrc3M3.jpg] 97. Fucking period.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dani. The parenting stuff is mostly on my mind, but there have been so many times before that as well. Bad breakups that were actually moments of profound transformation waiting to happen. You helped me see the opportunity. Helped me trust that it was all for the good. You’ve helped me get out of jobs that I’d outgrown. Jodie helping me move my entire apartment in a day and a half? With my daughter in tow? Adrienne whisking me off to Mexico to heal and find some pleasure after a heartbreak. I can’t imagine going through my aunt’s illness and subsequent death without you two. There are a lot of ways the woedom has been a lifeline. amb. Jodie moving me out of my apartment in Oakland when I was in total denial. She showed up and somehow organized the entire building and, within an hour, everything was packed, heading somewhere. I struggle with boundaries. My love is oceanic, I want to be everywhere. The woes are a place I can trust to ask, is this a mistake? Well … can I still make this mistake? No? Bet. It really is sisterhood. Dani has seen me through my depressions, through the times when I nearly got trapped in a bad life. Jodie has seen me through so much shame. Both of y’all save me over and over. I am tearing up writing this. But the woes keep me focused on my most excellent life. Jodie. When people ask me what my spiritual practice is, I include woes. This level of interdependence and co-evolution through woedom is a practice that changes you and creates greater possibility. Dani. The woedom gives me what I think a lot of people believe is possible only through romantic relationship: unconditional love and the feeling of being known. amb. Well, I am so grateful y’all were willing to share so vulnerably in this way, I know that’s more my thing. Thank you for the risk, I love y’all so, so, so much.

• From My People (2022)

  You only need a heart full of grace. Really, it is that love and grace for one another that will heal this world.” Many Blacks Wary of “Women’s Liberation” Movement in U.S.The New York Times NOVEMBER 17, 1970 Despite the fact that a black woman, Aileen Hernandez, heads one of the largest “women’s liberation” groups in the country (the National Organization for Women), black women have been conspicuously absent from such groups. And while liberation is being discussed by black women—in workshops, liberation groups, and privately—it is usually in a context different from that of white women. The kind of liberation that black women are talking about raises some of the same questions being posed by the white groups. They include such issues as a guaranteed adequate income, day-care centers controlled and administered by the community they serve, and the role of the woman in relation to her man. The differences are rooted in historical traditions that have placed black women—in terms of work, family life, education, and men—in a relationship quite apart from that of white women. To militant black women—such as Frances Beal, a member of the newly formed Third World Women’s Alliance—the white women’s liberation charge of “sexism” is irrelevant because blackness is more important than maleness. “Often, as a way of escape,” she said in an interview, “black men have turned their hostility toward their women. But this is what we have to understand about him. It is a long, slow, and sometimes painful process for the black man who has been oppressed. But as black women, we have a conciliatory attitude. Firm, but creating together.” Such different perspectives make it all but impossible for some black women to relate to the white “women’s lib” movement. Mrs. Hernandez, as head of the National Organization for Women, which has a membership of roughly ten thousand, said she was dismayed that “people are making a lot of generalizations about the movement and not getting an accurate portrayal. “It is a predominantly white and middle-class movement—which all movements are,” she asserted in a telephone interview from her San Francisco office. “But we feel an identity with all women.” Mrs. Hernandez, former commissioner of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said she felt that “many more young women and many more black and Chicano women” are becoming active in NOW, “particularly in the Southern chapters.” “I find it strange that people are having to make a decision about which to be involved in,” she said. Miss Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women—a coalition of more than twenty-five black women’s groups, representing about four million black women—said that she hoped eventually to have a “dialogue with women’s liberation groups.” But even though she participated as a speaker in the Women’s Liberation Day Program last August, she felt the presence of a wide gulf between them.