JUNE 2025 NEWSLETTER

poetry, queer media analysis, & a healthy amount of diva worship

serving up CD fish in my bathroom in my bathroom mirror

Last week, I attended my first open mic. It felt like a pretty big step for me. I’m trying to take myself seriously as a writer, to treat my creativity as not just worth making for myself, but worth sharing with the world. When you’re writing online, it can feel as if you’re typing into the void. I question whether anyone hears what I’m saying. Whether it’s worth saying at all.

I write because I need to use my voice. I need to put it on paper and have it stare back at me — daring me to challenge it, to identify with it, to live it. But that’s not always enough. I needed something tangible. Byung Chul-Han says that the self can only be found through resistance; through contrast. That when placed in situations that bring friction, the true self emerges through how you contend with that conflict.

I’ve found it much too easy to stay in my comfort zone; never forcing myself to do anything that intimidates me, and then wondering why I feel so deeply unfulfilled. That fear response — anxiety that runs my body dry, leaving limbs trembling and chest vibrating — is something that I’ve instinctively yielded to for much of my life. If I’m too scared to do something, I freeze. It’s kept me in cages that I’ve long since outgrown, too scared of the space outside the bars to reach my hands through them and unlatch the door.

the eight of swords, a visual representation of a mental cage, from the Rider-Waite Tarot

Trembling, I took the stage. My friend that I went with said that he couldn’t see my shaking, but I could feel the whole-body nerves erupting throughout my fragile frame. The entire time that I was up there I stared at my phone. Trying to speak up. Trying to sound convincing enough that my words could be found worthwhile. When I finished and the audience clapped for me, I was filled with a beautiful, bright feeling, even as I dashed back to the safety of my seat.

I talked to the feature artist after the show, a lovely woman who seemed so at home on stage. She cracked jokes and did accents, coming alive through the vulnerability of being seen. She told me that I needed to keep reading my work, that people needed to hear my message, which is the most incredible thing you can be told by someone that does what you want to do.

I want to keep scaring myself. I want to push myself through the fear, and contend against the resistance that meets me. I want to see what version of myself comes out the other end. I want to know the woman I might become, if given the chance.

the audio here is pretty rough, but here’s a video of my big moment! below, you can read the poem for yourself

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Ode to Womanhood

When I was seventeen I chased her down every hall.
Worshipping at the gates of the divine feminine.
Kicking, screaming at the door.
Let me in!

To be granted
just a sliver of her gaze
a nod of approval
I tailed this impossible force
aching for it to tell me
I was a woman.
I found I already was.

Life unbearably moves forward.
Work.
School.
Men.
I walked in my truth
No god to tell me who I was or wasn't.

I have never been able to sit still.
The need for movement pounds in my skull /
a primal urge.
But I am too young to be responsible
I believed she was in me
No longer cried for false gods
No longer treated patches and pills like life support
And I begin to slip.

I noticed my chest first.
The small, yet powerful breasts I'd grown.
Perfect for cupping,
begging to be held,
squeezed,
sucked.
They've shrunk back into my skin
my chest is flattening
my waist is widening

I sit in my car next to a delicate girl
We talk about love and life and capitalism
Deep conversations for intelligent women
All the while I feel
How much larger I am than her

I look at the breasts of my female friends.
I don't stare, but I notice.
What they have that I don't.
What they have that I never will.
I listen to their voices.
Soft. Bright. Radiant.
I ache for my voice to be the same
But it is coarse and cruel
I have done my best to remove the blisters from my skin
To pretend I am a woman
delicate and built for comfort.

My voice reveals the truth.
I am an ox.
I am a work horse.
Built for labor.
Built for suffering.
God was cruel when he made transsexuals.

Maybe I will cut my dick off.
Writhe for hours in agonizing pain
in the hospital bed.
Force rods up my false vagina
to hold open the wound.
I'll have a pussy.
Perhaps then my womanhood will be undeniable.

I've silently judged girls like me.
Watched as they stuff their chests with silicone
Whittle down their ethnic noses to points
I have wept for them
to hate themselves so much.

Now I know the truth.
It is too much to ask a transgender woman to love herself as she is.
The life of a transsexual is one on the margins.
Forever hunting.

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Latest Read: The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin

I confess that I’ve had a hipster-esque aversion to reading N.K. Jemisin for quite some years. When looking for my next read, I find myself immobilized by the knee jerk reaction not to reach for one of her novels, because “she’s already so popular.” I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get the lesson that things are often popular because, get this: “they’re good!” — but it’s yet to truly sink in. However, I give tens when tens are due. N.K. Jemisin is that bitch. A spiritual successor in many ways to my favorite writer, Octavia Butler, Jemisin is perhaps the most critically beloved author of the fantastical in the 21st century, and for good reason.Carrying on Butler’s legacy, Jemisin mainstreamed the marriage between post-colonial literature and sci-fi/fantasy genre fiction, completely shifting the space forever. In terms of awards, she’s decorated, racking in Hugo Awards like it’s her day job, and in terms of bibliography, there’s not really a burnt cookie in the batch.

official book cover!

Probably her most iconic work is the first in her Great Cities duology, “The City We Became,” which I recently got my world rocked by. In this master-class on modernizing the field of sci-fi, Jemisin has done what I thought impossible in the over-saturated genre fiction marketplace. She’s come up with an original idea. We all know that cities are remarkable, condensing people from all walks of life into a hotspot of culture that ripples across the world. These cultural inflection points are anomalies in many ways, always seeming like they’re on the verge of collapse but nevertheless persisting. Like Natasha Lyonne remarked in Russian Doll, it’s a wonder that the big apple hasn’t collapsed in on itself, falling right into the subway catacombs. “The City We Became” takes it a step further, asserting that these epochs of culture are so anomalous that they actually break quantum physics, shattering the space-time continuum and becoming multiversal constants. Cities are sentient entities, championed by their avatars.

New York City, the babbling baby of the batch and the locale where this epic takes place, has six. One for each of the five boroughs, and an additional NYC Prime: a homeless youth who speaks the language of the land. If you couldn’t gather on your own, what with the rat-infested streets and the pungent scent of unwashed ass, it wasn’t an easy birth. An eons-aged enemy called The Woman in White threatens the tender life force of the city, attempting to snuff out this epicenter of culture and institute hegemony: a weaponized sameness that will blip New York out of reality. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is a commentary on the world around us, using fantastical metaphors to dramatize issues that are harder to talk about directly. The City We Became does both. The Woman in White appears in the form of Karens, alt-right men, and dirty cops. Her tools are prejudice, gentrification, and “law and order.” The problems of our world are blown up but also scrutinized, leaving the reader with a clear message. The sameness that the totalitarian right wants only has one conclusion: the total destruction of humanity.

Latest Watch: Call Me By Your Name (2017)

This 2017 indie queer romance was the twinkening: the birth of white boy legend Timothée Chalamet; now ubiquitous. One of Hollywood’s A-List leading men, spurning the kisses of girlfriend Kylie Jenner at tennis matches, and giving speeches about wanting to be one of ‘the greats.’ Before all of this, he was here, nutting into a peach, making dozens of straight girls swoon as his character, Elio (17) was embroiled in a steamy love affair with Oliver (24), portrayed by the fittingly predatory Armie Hammer. The age gap has remained one of the more controversial aspects of the film, leading to outcry from many that the movie was promoting ‘grooming’ (an accusation often levied at gay men). I often find myself fatigued with internet outrage culture’s assumption of malintent when thoughtlessness or incompetence could be far more suitable and accurate explanations. However, in the case of “Call Me By Your Name” specifically, I actually think that there’s more to this element than the accusation of problematic nature and the knee-jerk negation of that claim.

Anyone who’s watched the film can attest to its liminal nature. Taking place over the course of a summer, the story shows the romance between the two males through Elio’s eyes, and through the pivotal moments piecing together the loose story that memory inevitably creates. A dreamy haze has been placed over the lens of the film. It’s just as much about feelings of basking in the sun and swimming in fresh-water rivers and the breeze hitting your face just right as you bike down a hill as it is about forbidden romance and queer desire. It’s about the in-betweens and almosts and never could’ve/never would’ve/never should’ves. When, at the end of the film’s second act, our lovers finally consummate their relationship, Oliver tells Elio, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.” This role reversal is the beating heart of their love affair. Through this blurred line of identity, they are queering the boundaries of intimacy and allowing its liminality to shine.

still from the film, with Chalamet’s Elio awkwardly eyeing the grass, too nervous to make eye contact with the hunk that lays next to him

When Elio, a teenage boy burgeoning with queer desire, looks at Oliver, he isn’t just seeing his lover, but the idea of a gay man. By calling that man by his own name, he is better able to claim the person he might grow to become. Oliver, on the other hand, is engaged to a woman by the end of the film, choosing the safety of heterosexuality over the authenticity of queerness. By calling Elio by his own name, he is looking back with a nostalgic gaze to the boy he once was, and the potential that he once had but has since spurned. These blurred lines are the crux of their attraction to one another. The sameness and the vastness between them, simultaneously named and unnamed. Perhaps that’s the crux of all attraction, the part of you that matches the other, the moment of recognition, paired with the vast difference between. It feels more poignant with two men, though I confess that my own attraction to men comes from this similar queer liminality. The idea that I and the men I date started in the same place, as young boys, but they marched forward into heterosexual manhood, while I played with makeup, grew tits, and ran far, far away from gendered expectations.

Latest Listen: Caroline Polachek

Recently, my close friend Shawn Williams (check out her Substack, Cafe Cinnamon!) released her master’s thesis: Liner Notes on Black Trans Girlhood. In her paper, she outlines a methodology for understanding music consumption as a key aspect of identity formation for trans women. We step into our outward womanhood later in life, and during the process of early transition, slowly collect the pieces of the woman that we can become. Diva worship is a long-standing tradition in queer circles, with stan twitter becoming a common hobby for gays, and “gay music video night” being sacred in queer friend groups. Before transitioning, I was a visibly queer boy, and my girlhood has been, in many ways, filtered through the lenses of the media I’ve consumed. I think that queer studies has an application to straight, cisgender people as well. We all, in some way, shape, or form, take in cultural inputs and integrate them into our identities, whether we realize it or not, and music is perhaps the most intimate.

Unlike film, television, or novels, we don’t go to music to be entertained or challenged, we come to music seeking relaxation, a back-drop to our experiences. Intimacy is a natural byproduct of such a vulnerable intake, and the passive way that music consumption often occurs — we don’t choose to look at it, we naturally hear it — makes its impact within us root deeper. I think if I had to put into words why I choose to listen to the artists that I listen to, I would say that they make me feel seen. That there’s a part of myself, a part that I’m not yet able to articulate, that I find in their sound. That’s why I love Caroline Polachek. Most popularly known for “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” I, a perpetual yearner, have found refuge in her tracks. Her song, “Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth” opens with the spoken lines, “Dear Louise / There are so many things I want / But mainly and like everybody / I want, I want, I-I want to be loved.” Her music carries this great sentimentality blended seamlessly with eroticism. She speaks deeply on feeling while her hyper-pop production emulates the peaks and valleys of pleasure.

In her song “Pang,” the melody flows in and out of intensity, with each Pang! hitting the listener like the crashing of a wave before subsiding; building again into another: Pang! There’s a sharpness to her music that nestles beneath my skin. In “Pretty in Possible,” when she sings the title chorus, her voice seems to flit in and out of audibility, like a gust of wind being silenced against the ceiling before whistling its way down. Last year, I read a Vogue article where a designer talked about his building a new kind of femininity; one that was ‘sharp and strong.’ When I read that, it activated something in me, a longing to embody. Caroline Polachek does, and I believe it’s for that that I find myself so hopelessly drawn to her body of work. The impact of her music’s swells is felt because of the precision she takes to get there. She has mastered the build, the critical tongue, the avian manner with which her music flies from my phone’s speakers. Each time, I am left wanting yet full, lit up in ways that I don’t yet know how to do for myself. In the meantime, I have her.

Polachek, embodying a sharp and strong femininity

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Thank you for reading! Please feel free to comment, share, do all the engagement things. But beyond that, I appreciate you for taking the time to engage with my words. It’s the reason that I do it, and it means the world to me. I love you.