Thursday, April 23, 2009

Girls being Boys




The Changeling
Judith Ortiz Cofer

As a young girl
vying for my father's attention,
I invented a game that made him look up
from his reading and shake his head
as if both baffled and amused.

In my brother's closet, I'd change
into his dungarees -- the rough material
molding me into boy shape; hide
my long hair under an army helmet
he'd been given by Father, and emerge
transformed into the legendary ChΓ©
of grown-up talk.

Strutting around the room,
I'd tell of life in the mountains,
of carnage and rivers of blood,
and of manly feasts with rum and music
to celebrate victories para la libertad.
He would listen with a smile
to my tales of battles and brotherhood
until Mother called us to dinner.

She was not amused
by my transformations, sternly forbidding me
from sitting down with them as a man.
She'd order me back to the dark cubicle
that smelled of adventure, to shed
my costume, to braid my hair furiously
with blind hands, and to return invisible,
as myself,
to the real world of her kitchen.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

I am sick of being sick



Pneumonia is so sucky...


My feeble attempt at NPM...sorry to you bibliophiles...currently tracking down a Judith Ortiz poem about crossdressing, as well as a super trashy, drag camp epic Disneyland on Acid...yum




Untitled

Before I awoke
Work was simply work
And stress was simply
Stress, and now that I
Am awake, a bright
Penny in a chipped dish,
The work is settling into
My new skin
My mind a fresh red button.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

fun quizzes....why do we like them so much?





Your inner sex gender: Female
For you, sex is the best possible emotional connection. It's all about making your head spin. You think twice about having sex with a stranger, unless you think romance is in the air. And you choose comfort over novelty. You rather have sex you know you enjoy. This doesn't mean you aren't kinky... just that you choose your kinks rather carefully.
'What is your Inner Sex Gender?' at QuizUniverse.com

Thursday, April 16, 2009

National Poetry Month: Father's Old Blue Cardigan


Sorry for the lag...been stressed out as of late: busy on campus, youngest has pneumonia...it's enough to make a girl tear her hair. And since most of the household management stuff falls into my lap, my nerves have been fricasee as of late...

Anyway off to beautiful words...Trying to celebrate this April Poetry Month Thang by scouring the world for GLBT (mostly T) poems about gender fuckery. This poem encapsulates some of the feelings I had when I began dressing as a young lad...wondering what feelings would arise when I played my mother in her long mirror. Though the author's experience is a sad one, it is another example of the power of empathy that crossdressing can offer.


Father’s Old Blue Cardigan

By Anne Carson


Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.


I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.


I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.


His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.


He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon


but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip


on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers


over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

Monday, April 13, 2009

A sigh



Personally ladies, this spring has been good, but psychically rough. Like it or not I am/was a latent trans woman, like many of my generation, mostly because of socio-political-technological reasons. Transwomen/men today benefit so much from the internet. Not that it is an excuse, but growing up in such a kudzu culture... it took me a while.

Geez, if I were a teenager now, dealing with these same issues, my life would have a different arc.

That's not to say my life to date isn't valid...it is. But everyone else views your lifestyle as a choice, not necessity. You know that ennui, trans people, how there's that fuzzy, gauzy past, our past sexuality, our past identity, past whatever, that exists, that acts as a standard to the growth of the trans personae, the true personae.

Regardless...a friend asked me today "What do you want from this self?" It was an old friend, a straight friend. "What does this voice sound like?" He meant the tone...and all I could say was aggressive, confident, proud.


And I thought about that. And what that meant.

And I hadn't thought about what I wanted, I was just too busy being me for the first time.

I came up with an answer, that may change...




My hobby is mirror.

Lipstick, rouge and heel
peel back my skin and skull cap
and like a goddess spring forth
into my bathroom,
my smoke ring
like a laurel
upon my gigantic pretty head.
From lips smack truth,
pink, or brown, or fuck hot red,

and black, deep pitch, and yes, I suppose

I am a freak
and showed up at the wrong address, the wrong party,
my real body somewhere else
doing whatever manila chore it does when it isn’t with me.
‘cause I mean who wouldn’t
want to be with me?

I be illusion, drum, and wail
give me a scarf I can make seas sick
with my pitch and bob.

And so what? The stork is not a smart bird,
after all, I am not weak, and though my smile
makes you sick, some clown
in a dress, some perv with the nerve,
you say, I am iron, to reforge myself,

to be iron is to destroy stone.







Note: Manila is meant to recall vanilla. Lately my girlie self has been more...aggressive...thus the diva turn in tone towards the end. In my small town I am very aware of how most stones (trans-phobics) react to difference. Down here, from my porch, I better be ready to back it up.

Ciao!

Chloe Prince's new social networking site

Chloe Prince's new social networking site can be accessed here.


Chloe's a doll...been following her transition for a while now and she has a lovely new site. Plus many wonderful pics...

National Poetry Month: Dystopic on 616

Trish Salah is a professor in Toronto, professor/author of gender/trans culture, politics, and literature. She is the author of Wanting in Arabic




dystopic on 616

i need to take a shower. i’m troubled by
increasingly distorted fanfictions, psychotic or melancholy,
with the loss of canon. i keep thinking there is a cure
for being awake that doesn’t involve fairies, pot or poutine.
i need to go to school. i am involved in
a memory relapse; i am particular about insults
i am aware of the i and troubled by it, possible worlds’
inflection, inflecting an i that leans towards
smothering, then purges. to generalize then, gross
conformity haunts narrower days in an inconveniently belated
montreal.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

National Poetry Month: Cinderella



For all of you who love shoes:



Cinderella


You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would dropp it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

Anne Sexton

Saturday, April 11, 2009

National Poetry Month: The Distant Moon

The Distant Moon
by Rafael Campo


I

Admitted to the hospital again.
The second bout of pneumocystis back
In January almost killed him; then,
He'd sworn to us he'd die at home. He baked
Us cookies, which the student wouldn't eat,
Before he left--the kitchen on 5A
Is small, but serviceable and neat.
He told me stories: Richard Gere was gay
And sleeping with a friend if his, and AIDS
Was an elaborate conspiracy
Effected by the government. He stayed
Four months. He lost his sight to CMV.

II

One day, I drew his blood, and while I did
He laughed, and said I was his girlfriend now,
His blood-brother. "Vampire-slut," he cried,
"You'll make me live forever!" Wrinkled brows
Were all I managed in reply. I know
I'm drowning in his blood, his purple blood.
I filled my seven tubes; the warmth was slow
To leave them, pressed inside my palm. I'm sad
Because he doesn't see my face. Because
I can't identify with him. I hate
The fact that he's my age, and that across
My skin he's there, my blood-brother, my mate.

III

He said I was too nice, and after all
If Jodie Foster was a lesbian,
Then doctors could be queer. Residual
Guilts tingled down my spine. "OK, I'm done,"
I said as I withdrew the needle from
His back, and pressed. The CSF was clear;
I never answered him. That spot was framed
In sterile, paper drapes. He was so near
Death, telling him seemed pointless. Then, he died.
Unrecognizable to anyone
But me, he left my needles deep inside
His joking heart. An autopsy was done.

IV

I'd read to him at night. His horoscope,
The New York Times, The Advocate;
Some lines by Richard Howard gave us hope.
A quiet hospital is infinite,
The polished, ice-white floors, the darkened halls
That lead to almost anywhere, to death
Or ghostly, lighted Coke machines. I call
To him one night, at home, asleep. His breath,
I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips
Had touched. I felt as though I'd touched a shrine.
Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse
Of concentration. In a mirror shines

The distant moon.

Friday, April 10, 2009

National Poetry Month: Maxine who was once Max





This poem was written by an aquaintance of mine, a fellow writer and psychology teacher, Scott Whitaker. I saw him read in December and he read this as well as few other gender related poems.

As usual trying to find GLBT realted writers or poems to celebrate National Poetry Month.


MAXINE WHO WAS ONCE MAX

What she has become is a bridge between.
O hormone, O facial cream, dream after dream after dream.
For her it is fingernail, warm belly, shaping with corset
What nature has given her into beauty, rather than the casket
Form she was born into; for the whalebone ship
Sets her bones true. Her heart speeds across
The figure in the mirror, returns and admires
The reflection that has come far from its pallor,
From brickyard and from country songs and docks,
Where she once held herself up to be no more than a fish
Swimming tight circles in a pool beyond touch.
She has given up her name for this. It has taken much.
There is no better feeling than this
Leaving one world and stepping into the next.



You can look at the T-shirt here.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

National Poetry Month: The Toss

Cyrus is a nice man. Twice I met him and he was a courteous fellow. A fine poet. An openly gay poet, his poems appeal to a broad audience, and the poem below is a fine example of his work.


The Toss

Cyrus Cassells


I see a knife-grinder
On his dusty, stationary bicycle,
A black Star of David
Sprayed over a door,
As you urge me
Into the rationed light,
The crumbling pearl-grey
Of the ghetto.
All at once, the Roman spring,
With its galaxy of columns
And daisies,
Becomes the autumn of families
Plummeting from windows,
The desecrated autumn
Your mother tossed you,
Small bundle,
To a passerby.
Like this, you demonstrate
With a parcel.

But what can't be mimed
Is the look they shared,
The look that let you live;
Her toss that had to be
Quick, quick,
Before the cat-pounce Nazis came—
Out the shutters
Into the samaritan's intrepid arms:
Something unerring
Passing through the air
Of an iron universe—

As the knife-grinder pedals and pedals,
You whisper: I know nothing
Of what became of her.

Perhaps she soothed a boy
Born in the Lager,
Listless, mute, whose Lilliputian arm
Bore the tattoo of Auschwitz.
She would have coaxed him
To lift his intransigent eyes,
Knowing you might also be
Somewhere among the living.

And against the jackboot, the demolition,
For as long as she was able, she

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Transgendered Mayor "Stu" to get own reality TV show

Read about it here

A few lines about the mind transitioning


I hope you ladies are bored by my promotion of National Poetry Month. I do feel as a member of a marginalized community that we uphold those who advocate and express the feelings of our united experience. I've hit an energy level wall in terms of finding more TG themed poems. A break is coming up and I'll catch up...

As a semi professional writer I enjoy flexing my mental/imaginative muscles. These few lines are about my mental transitioning in a completely metaphorical/imagistic mode.

BTW Thanks for the comments and email...I appreciate it


Untitled: or a few lines about the mind's gender transition

A song drifts through a far away window.
The washline snaps in the breeze.

How dresses whip and curl like sharp Ps and Bs

and my mother is in the kitchen
and when I’m sure no one is looking
my hips and arms cock
and bend and arc
as if my body were

her hip and curve and hair

or
refracted light
a broken sunbeam shattered by a tall oak
at the edge of field
near a wood where only the birds know
the language.

I didn’t want to play house
but did anyway, and found I loved it as I loved baseball,
and playing family, too
with the dozy girl down the street.


And now I’m the dozy girl down the street
the song blaring now, as if from the next room
and I can see the ladies listening,
and smell the perfume,
the powder and cigarette smoke swirling in galaxies before me
and I swim in the them,
and the dresses
and hose
whip and curl,
whip and curl over my skin

and I am undone, and put back together
and I am both, and all, and nothing.

My body is enlarged by fresh clothes,
my mind as curvy as any soft body

as any soft touch.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Personal notes


For the last twelve days, I have felt an enormous feminine pull, however the feelings were internal, and not focused/worried about on my exterior feminine wiles. Example: it's as if my brain is playing some video game where you get to play the true you, and you get to watch yourself on screen. My poor male image of myself has been supplanted by a feminine one.

Any thoughts?

National Poetry Month: from the Book of Awakenings

Whew! Getting challenging to find good GLBT themed poems for Poem a Day Nat. Poetry Month celebration.

Today's slice of verse should come with a lemon wedge and tea, or a dizzy glass of red wine.

An excerpt from The Book of Awakenings by Michael Mayo

Myself of long ago -
How does he get along
these days, I wonder?



I like it because it's so true for so many trans women.

Ciao! Kisses

Sunday, April 5, 2009

National Poetry Month: Howl


Today to celebrate National Poetry Month is a link to Ginsberg's Howl. Which was the cool rant rave gay sexual political revolution poem of the 1950s, despite the fact the Ginsberg wrote it for a private audience. It's too long to post here. Read it elsewhere.

Ginsberg was interviewed by the Kinsey Foundation, and ushered in a new generation of homosexual artists in the New York, San Francisco, and Colorado scene.

National Poetry Month: The Factory


Because Sunday has forced me to be proto homme, I'm giving my head and heart a girly artsy party.

And because I'm too beat to hunt for TG themed poems...so I'm posting one of my own..written today for Nat Poet Mo...the girls mentioned, if you don't know, are TG

The Factory

How the films unspool and unspool
and fall like wet spaghetti at his feet,
his dainty feet…like they crawled off some Christmas elf
and got stranded on his stumps.

And Candy’s eats the air like a heavy hail coming ‘cross a field
and Joe and Holly and Jackie
crunch pills and silver pies
and everyone waits for a fat silence to spread,

but there is only gossip and pick-up lines
and endless soapy singing,
and thick branches of smoke,
and so many promises

and too many people loving all alone.
Soon the sun will swallow everyone up.
Where did the girls go? Where is the phone?
And who will clean all of this up?

And the parties end like they begin:
phone in the hand of a mirror man,
hot cigarettes on the lips of beautiful,
like wicks on rail yard dynamite sticks.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

National Poetry Month: Exchanging Hats



Exchanging Hats


Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
--oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist

in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps
with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors hanging o'er the ear
so that the golden anchors drag,
--the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.

Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian's feather bonnet,
--perversities may aggravate

the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?

Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can't you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?

Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned-down brim.

Elizabeth Bishop

Friday, April 3, 2009






Yes, not too exciting. Note to interested readers: I will be posting face pics soon! Late June, mid-summer...I say this because my spouse is slowing coming around to giving me consent to express all my girlie self on this here porch...

Until then...


National Poetry Month--I'm going to try to write a poem a day this month. Alas I am already behind. To celebrate words, of course, and to transform, be beautiful, and be free!

Today:
IDK what this says about me, but since I learned of transsexuality when I was a young teen, and having experienced its many waves and purges and denials over the years, I have admired those who undergo a transition. What courage, what heart. O me, oh my, what lonely bones are placed under the moon…


Oh grant me the power to shed all maleness from my skin

--For those who have transitioned


Oh to shed my man
like cocoon shreds
my only wings smoke,
as it curls, curls, curls
towards nowhere,

only the ceiling keeps score.
My notebooks lie before me
and my new dress
like a pair of lips
cups to skin

and flesh’s biggest weakness
is the hole in the center of it’s face
that turns on itself
like the mad,
like the dead

and I want to eat the man
I have shed
and feel his hair
between my teeth
as I gnash, consume, and transform.



Note: takes a dark turn or two, but the TG experience is fraught with darkness, no matter how good you've got it. And I like the power the female has at the end to eat the evidence, to burn up all that was before and rise, rise, rise

National Poetry Month: Wedding Dress

A wonderful lyric--not exactly TG either, but a gender bender...
if only more people were open to playing with gender, and words...this world would be a happier place...

Wedding Dress by Michael Waters

That Halloween I wore your wedding dress,
our children spooked & wouldn’t speak for days.
I’d razored taut calves smooth, teased each blown tress,
then—lipsticked, mascaraed, & self-amazed—
shimmied like a starlet on the dance floor.
I’d never felt so sensual before—
Catholic schoolgirl & neighborhood whore.
In bed, dolled up, undone, we fantasized:
we clutched & fused, torn twins who’d been denied.
You were my shy groom. Love, I was your bride.

Buy the book here.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

National Poetry Month: Homosexuality




According to his lovers, Frank loved to talk on the phone. Always chattering away about beauty, art, love, and gossip. Lots of it.


Homosexuality by Frank O'Hara (gay poet) is fab on many levels. Yes it is about gay cruising, but the line "it is the law of my own voice I shall investigate" is true for any trans person as it is for any gay person as it is for any straight person. And the end is true for anyone...to be wanted



Frank O'Hara "Homosexuality"


So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;

so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment

of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet

will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon."
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.

I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can

in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each

of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up

and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air

crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."

New clothes




Clearance...love it, live it, learn it.

One of my goals in starting this blog was to discuss cheap, cheap, cheap clothes for us trans folk. I mean damn, ain't fashion a bitch on your pocketbook? Especially when a dollar isn't worth a nickel.

Some of you who have been out for longer have this down pat. I, being an emotionally clumsy gender obsessed wrecking ball, have only begun to blossom as a shopper.

And I love it!

With the economy tangled up in its own bra, I vowed to not buy fashionable clothes, bags, and accessories--though I want to...I pine, I perish.

I'm a Target gal, and Wal-mart too, for some things...not for all, dear readers, I have some dignity.

I also started this blog, because I dither on too much. Put me in front of a word processor and I go, go, go. Over the month I'll post cool poems, which may or may not be trans themed.

It is National Poetry Month

and I am a transgendered poet...so I figure I have to punish you with one of my other obsessions...

Oh, clothes. Scheduled for delivery, tomorrow....target close out clothes...two dresses for 25.00 and change (shipping)

Also I snagged a pair of fashion tights (black with grey and silver criss crosses) for a dollar at Dollar Tree...sweet

Issac Mizarhi Allspice Merino Dress

Mossimo Black print v neck smock waist dress