Our Only Allegiance Is to Each Other

With endless gratitude and awe for the world-builders in Trans/Space and those I was honored to create with at Woodland Pattern and the Poetry Project.

When our tenderheart pit-mix of four years became sick with untreatable bone cancer, my partner said two things that I can’t stop thinking about. Well, the dogs get to sleep with us in our bed now. And, I’m thankful for the chance to love something so unknowable—she’s the closest I’ve ever had to living with something so wild.

Like many of us, I’ve become virtually unrecognizable to myself in this last year. The days are days and I live them, as best as I can. But I don’t have the audacity anymore to say that they are mine.

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When I first conceived of Trans/Space, it was to be at least a two-part project for my role as Tucson’s Poet Laureate and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. First, there would be a free series of poetry workshops during fall 2019 using only writing by Trans, Non-binary, and Queer+ folx. I estimated ten or fifteen workshops because I thought the more compelling part of the project would be the second part: recording poems written by T-ENBY-Q+ folx who attended the workshops and then sharing them on the radio and in public bathrooms in Tucson to draw attention to the (legal, rhetorical, and physical) attacks across the US on Trans folx. There were other plans that were cool but seemed, at first, ancillary. The website was intended to be just a landing place for info on workshops and installations and I knew I wanted to get T-ENBY-Q+ books into the hands of community members. Also, I wanted to feed people. So, at each workshop I would offer good food and give away books. I didn’t realize at the outset how much this project would become about nourishment, about a sustained practice of T-ENBY-Q+ folx caring for each other’s bodies, hearts, and minds.

By January 2020, I’d held thirty workshops with over 300 folx across Tucson. Some workshops had participants as old as eighty-two and as young as thirteen. I gave away over 300 books written by T-ENBY-Q+ poets (having bought most of them at the women-owned local bookstore, the rest were donated by small presses). We polished off lots of fruit trays. The website became a living resource linking to poetry books and chapbooks exclusively written by Trans and Non-binary folx. I bought a mic and a projector and we started having live captioning in the workshops. Participants wrote poems that felt like literal fire. It wasn’t that any of this shocked me, it was how clearly my emphasis had been wrong. Almost none of the participants wanted to be recorded. Very few even considered themselves poets, despite the fact that they were writing poems. They didn’t give a damn about publication or publicity. They were happy for cis folx to be educated but they weren’t there for that. Their reason for being a part of Trans/Space was this: they wanted to be with other T-ENBY-Q+ folx in Tucson sharing generous, joyful, compassionate space and time. So, I revised and planned for more, but by March 2020 even that physical space couldn’t be shared. (I hate the word pivot. What to do with all of that white space? It was an enormous break in the line.)

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I’ve been adjunct teaching at various colleges and universities for almost two decades, with one consistent lecturing gig in freshman composition. Unlike many poets, I often loved teaching comp. But when I was laid off early-pandemic (May 2020) along with scores of colleagues from an institution with almost a billion dollars in the emergency fund, I had to get honest about some toxic, capitalist practices in academia and how I had absorbed and was perpetuating those even in my creative (read: all of my) life. The most obvious realization was that I had come to believe my job title/affiliation could tell me who I am and what my life is worth. Even though I made more money on unemployment than I made teaching (this is a whole other essay), I was gutted by the loss of identity, cohort, and what often felt like a shared push toward a relatively clearly defined goal. The more painful realization was that I had become a kind of cop, policing and documenting my own every move for proof that I was valuable to the institution, that I was a good grrrl, that I followed the rules, that I gave myself away enough. What is a CV if not an alibi for not wasting time? I had fully internalized these white supremacist norms of production and documentation so much that I actually relied on them to reflect back to me how good my life was, how much I was “earning” my right to be a part of this world. To whom was I proving that I deserved to be alive?

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For years I’ve taught every student who would listen that the urgency of poetry is not in the publication but in the process; it’s not even on the page but how one takes that page-practice and brings it into life. I still believe this. It comes out of my experience as a Trans person—writing my many bodies (we all have more than one) into existence first and then allowing those silences, simultaneities, dissonances, ruptures, reaches, and jumps to guide me through those same experiences off the page with family, community, god, public space, strangers, my own memory, how I want to know love.

And still, much more dramatically than during my gender transition, the pandemic caused (is causing) my voice to change. Poems have always believed in me and shown me a way to live before I knew how. Often that involved being quiet. But in this last year the page has been empty. Not always willingly, I have been sitting inside a deep (and often terrifying, heavy) silence. This silence, and lack of page or word count, is nothing to be ashamed of. I want a poetics that values, too, long periods of not-writing. Struggle with silence and struggle with words—both are poetry. May writing (or any form of production) never be tied to our self-worth.

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Educating and galvanizing cis folx is, frankly, exhausting (even if necessary) work. Given that during the first four months of 2021 there have been over 100 bills introduced in state legislatures across the country attempting to sever or weaken the rights of Trans and Non-binary folx and already twenty-
three Trans people (most often BIWOC) have been murdered, there will always be the need for poetic infusions in public life—especially those that uplift and center voices that are too often silenced or pushed aside. But not every workshop, or gathering of, or reading by T-ENBY-Q+ folx can or should be about the cis audience. T-ENBY-Q+ folx deserve quiet, contemplative, joyful, intimate, celebratory, and deep time away from the cis/straight gaze. I still hope to fill Tucson’s bathroom spaces with voices from our incredible T-ENBY-Q+ communities, but before and during the pandemic was simply not that time. It’s a quiet practice: living open to what needs to be revised.

Before 2020, I thought of myself as a collaborator. Even (maybe most especially) in the classroom, I’ve always felt that I was making something with my students, for us all. And the same went for writing: even if I was by myself, I knew I wasn’t making anything alone. But since September 2020, I have been experiencing a kind of weekly transcendence beyond collaboration (and into what Donna Haraway might call sympoiesis) with T-ENBY-Q+ folx in and outside of Tucson on Zoom (free and open to all) in a new iteration of Trans/Space. The only poem I know how to write is with my attention right now. I facilitate some but mostly I am following. I arrive. This worlding-with T-ENBY-Q+ folx is different from workshopping or even generating poems (although we may do that too). It’s much more about living the future we deserve in at least a sliver of the world we inhabit now.

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If I can offer one wish, it is that each of us finds the permission we need to root out the lies we live by and say stop.

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When Ashley approached me for this issue, she asked, What has the pandemic changed about your writing life? As someone who had a daily writing practice for over twenty years leading up to the pandemic, it’s tender and important to say: my writing came to a halt. Not writer’s block, whatever that is. I mean that when I tried to write anything other than within the sacred shell of Trans/Space, I felt repulsed. This is, in fact, the first thing I’ve written to share with others in exactly a year. Another transition narrative. I want to say with certainty that I’ve been living the poem but that’s probably too easy. All I know is that I’m alive. Becoming again. This is the gap where I still stand shocked.

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My dying dog is asleep and kicking me as I write this.

I am thinking it is the ability to be still, attending
to any given moment, that is
                                                   poetry. That is wild.