full moon in scorpio / little shorty somnolence
vibe check:
there’s a somnolence hanging around. checked in and yep, everyone/ a lot of people are sleeping more and when eight o clock hits are like, wow I am so eagerly awaiting and looking forward to sleep. my dreams are deeply plotted and i sink into them with relief, don’t always remember them 20 seconds after waking. the pollen is even more brutal than usual in philly, especially in my neighborhood with all its trees, and my building has a mold problem. yet I’m only half joking when I josh that maybe the government is spraying chemtrails of sedating vapors down on us to make us sleep. kinda like the pax spray on the colonial planet in the serenity movie.
but it’s not that though, it’s that it’s four months in and we’re in an undeclared police state and the brain breaking sudden violence that is an escalation of what’s been here/ coming on for years continues and yet yes we have to go to work.
I’ve been doing this thing where every Sunday I sit down and map out my week ahead, what’s going to be hard, what do I want to do, what are the nights where I’m working late so I have to rebalance the next day by giving myself some time off in the morning, what are the heavy executive function things I need to do early when I have more juice (shoutout to DuiJi13 for this strategy) where’s the pleasure where’s the ritual, where am I going to make sure I see people etc.
last week I was like wow, this is going to be a tough week, let me map out how I’m going to get through it. by the time I got to friday I was like, wow, I did indeed get through it really fucking well, but I needed a two hour nap friday afternoon, comfort food (lemongrass soup from viet nam cafe and tofu rolls) a few hours of the deuce and then 9 hours of sleep and I still felt zonked all day yesterday.
there’s a fugue dream state that’s hit, mixed in with the same old of, yes I did that thing, yes I handled that thing, yes I sat by the river with that friend, is a, is this really happening?/ yes all of it is.
I notice I watch even shows from 2018/2019 as nostalgic relief, another world, shows set in the 70s and 80s as similar. time travel to worlds where there is more touch, less or different viruses, less of a certain kind of active chaos. cognitive respite.
the ICE raid in worcester, my hometown, that made national and international news last week occurred ten minutes from where I grew up and eight minutes from where my cousins went to high school. very proud for everyone in worcester who showed the fuck up and had the bravery to put their bodies in the way of ice officers and try to de-arrest the family targeted, the 16 year old who stood in front of the ICE van and was like why don’t you try it. eta: and by “showed the fuck up” I mean it is heartening that yes people from all over the city and one of our good city councilors, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, came out to intervene and truly serve and protect, but also it was A WHOLE LOT OF REGULAR NEIGHBORS ON EUREKA who were just like what the fuck, this is wrong.
um yeah the crowd was “unruly.” our city doesn’t play around, and we continue to organize. the press conference at the Y was my favorite, this is how we do it. thank you to
, this piece and David Webb for the coverage. please stay in touch about how you can get and stay involved against this bullshit.
The Stacey residency got moved again because three weeks ago I was about to buy the tickets and residents were like, we aren’t worried about crossing the border into Canada, but we are worried about coming back into the states considering that little white ladies from Germany are getting shackled at land crossings right now. Disability is nothing if not nimble and pivoty so when the residents were like anyplace within a day or two’s drive within the u.s. would be good I texted Moya, she put me in touch with folks who run the LOVE building at AMP, we had an email chain and a meeting and third times the charm, the residency will now be happening in Detroit in July in the LOVE building, supported by local loved ones.
respite. five years since her passing, a way of honoring her in a city and place that were significant to her. it was also wild for me to write in my initial email trying to explain who I was, uh, I guess I worked for/ did stuff with the AMC for 11-12 years (2009-2021)? was a true believer, it was a movement home, I got pisssed off and disenchanted when some shit failed badly, stuff that happened there was significant and mattered, it means something to site the residency in a spot where Stacey had community and where we first met offline.
perhaps we all need to stay nimble, pivoty and getting rest as much as we can. we may have little choice in the matter.
being hard to find after a lifetime of finding each other and working to write ourselves into history is a bop and a process.
***
Rest in power jes sacshe aka squirrelofmystery, beautiful freak disabled artist, true weirdo and real human being of toronto. jes had a brain aneursym and unexpectedly died this weekend. I met jes 20 years ago when they were in undergrad in peterborough, over the years we danced together, watched each other, argued. 20 years of history is not nothing.
The thing that’s the worst is people keep dying and you don’t get used to it except you kind of do. It rips you up, it changes you. At first you think you can’t survive it, then you know you can, which is both better and worse. everyone I know is disabled, people are going to keep dying. it’s one a month, in a year it might be more.
I’m different than I was five years ago, we all are. I’m going to keep being different. love to toronto, everyone who loved jes and us all.
uh events and things of note:
I will have new work coming out in both beestung and anomaly magazine’s autistic protest poetry issue which BY THE WAY you should send work in to, deadline is July 1.
the disabled grief portal transformation altar got into Vines fest and will be there in Vancouver Aug 16 and 17
My poem “parliaments on the stoop” originally published in room magazine’s Room 41.3 Queer issue, will be up on their website this month as a feature for Asian/Pacific/Desi month. this is a good reading list from and for the same.
Crips for e Sims for Gaza has an Itch bundle of games, asset packs and zines, like over 200 of them, which you can buy til May 20th. We are raising money because the situation never stopped being dire in Gaza, the ceasefire is over and there’s a total blockade of all food and aid. And once again, what we do matters. We got in a financial hole for a minute, this gets us out of it and continuing to keep eSims on and buy new ones. we got a shout on on PC Gamer?
Authors for eSims, organized by writers and friends Jody Chan and Thea Lim, launched this nice writers auction which is also an e Sims benefit where you can bid on and buy things including but not limited to “manuscript consultation/edits + behind the poem from Jane Shi -a draft of an Eden Robinson novel- signed books from Billy-Ray Belcourt -signed bundle from Danez Smith-chapbook bundle from Rasha Abdulhadi- several naming rights, including a worm in a picture book, which, imo, is the coolest"- Jane. the right to name a worm in a book! I agree. you got til May 18th to bid.
I am selling clothes that no longer suit my aesthetic or gender on poshmark. take a look and make a bid! proceeds will go to paying for a printer that actually works. listing this here may be a terrible choice but fuck it!
hard femme poetics went good/ was wildly successful, watch this space because will be doing it again.
love,
L
Thanks for the shout out it’s been FUCKED up here. Total disaster
so good to hear from you, sendng love