chartreusepoetry

[chartreusepoetry]

Chartreuse Poetry is Shutting Down

I have not maintained this blog in some time. There are numerous reasons for this, the largest being that I don’t have enough new original content to keep up a steady pace of sharing poems. I also would like to start keeping new poems offline to increase my submissions at online journals. This is not, however, the end! I am still writing poems and still competing in slams. I have just opened a new website at chartreusepoetry.com where I’ll be posting events, updates, and poems. I even have a shop up where you can buy my most recent chapbook, “Between Silent and Screaming,” or even have a chapbook custom made for you or someone you care about! My next chapbook will be releasing sometime in the next couple months as well, and will be for sale there when it comes out. In the meantime, I am queuing this announcement to reblog a few times a day so you lovely folks know where you can find my work. This blog will likely be deleted within the week. To keep up with my daily shenanigans, you can follow my personal blog at @bigender-ninja-princess. Thank you all for your endless and generous support, and I hope to keep hearing from you!

[chartreusepoetry]

Chartreuse Poetry is Shutting Down

I have not maintained this blog in some time. There are numerous reasons for this, the largest being that I don’t have enough new original content to keep up a steady pace of sharing poems. I also would like to start keeping new poems offline to increase my submissions at online journals. This is not, however, the end! I am still writing poems and still competing in slams. I have just opened a new website at chartreusepoetry.com where I’ll be posting events, updates, and poems. I even have a shop up where you can buy my most recent chapbook, “Between Silent and Screaming,” or even have a chapbook custom made for you or someone you care about! My next chapbook will be releasing sometime in the next couple months as well, and will be for sale there when it comes out. In the meantime, I am queuing this announcement to reblog a few times a day so you lovely folks know where you can find my work. This blog will likely be deleted within the week. To keep up with my daily shenanigans, you can follow my personal blog at @bigender-ninja-princess. Thank you all for your endless and generous support, and I hope to keep hearing from you!

[chartreusepoetry]

Chartreuse Poetry is Shutting Down

I have not maintained this blog in some time. There are numerous reasons for this, the largest being that I don’t have enough new original content to keep up a steady pace of sharing poems. I also would like to start keeping new poems offline to increase my submissions at online journals. This is not, however, the end! I am still writing poems and still competing in slams. I have just opened a new website at chartreusepoetry.com where I’ll be posting events, updates, and poems. I even have a shop up where you can buy my most recent chapbook, “Between Silent and Screaming,” or even have a chapbook custom made for you or someone you care about! My next chapbook will be releasing sometime in the next couple months as well, and will be for sale there when it comes out. In the meantime, I am queuing this announcement to reblog a few times a day so you lovely folks know where you can find my work. This blog will likely be deleted within the week. To keep up with my daily shenanigans, you can follow my personal blog at @bigender-ninja-princess. Thank you all for your endless and generous support, and I hope to keep hearing from you!

[chartreusepoetry]

Chartreuse Poetry is Shutting Down

I have not maintained this blog in some time. There are numerous reasons for this, the largest being that I don’t have enough new original content to keep up a steady pace of sharing poems. I also would like to start keeping new poems offline to increase my submissions at online journals. This is not, however, the end! I am still writing poems and still competing in slams. I have just opened a new website at chartreusepoetry.com where I’ll be posting events, updates, and poems. I even have a shop up where you can buy my most recent chapbook, “Between Silent and Screaming,” or even have a chapbook custom made for you or someone you care about! My next chapbook will be releasing sometime in the next couple months as well, and will be for sale there when it comes out. In the meantime, I am queuing this announcement to reblog a few times a day so you lovely folks know where you can find my work. This blog will likely be deleted within the week. To keep up with my daily shenanigans, you can follow my personal blog at @bigender-ninja-princess. Thank you all for your endless and generous support, and I hope to keep hearing from you!

[chartreusepoetry]

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

Claudia Rankine (via bostonpoetryslam)

[chartreusepoetry]

I’m not here because I want to die. I’m here hoping to remember what it’s like to be held without exploding.

Casandra Faith - “The Lady at the VA Asks if I’ve Ever Considered Suicide”

Performing at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam. Subscribe to Button on YouTube!

(via buttonpoetry)

[chartreusepoetry]

I’m only a teenager. I’m watching Blue is the Warmest Color, or Boys Don’t Cry, or Brokeback Mountain. I’m still in the closet, because my father does not believe in bisexuality, and so I do not believe in myself. From the television, I’m learning that people like me don’t get happy endings, that queer cinema isn’t so much a genre as it is a fashionable body count. Because the straight masses only love us when we’re martyrs, or tragedies, because we’re less sympathetic when we’re not being punished.   Skip to now. Halfway through June of 2016 and seventeen lesbian characters have been killed on mainstream television. Most of them, in brutal, graphic ways and in the wake of dead lesbian number eighteen, my girlfriend texts me to ask if we get to be happy. And I don’t feel safe.   I’m struggling to pay rent and another lesbian dies on television. I get a new job and another lesbian dies on television. I ask my girlfriend to move in and another lesbian dies on television. So how much longer can they calls us beautiful tragedies before they admit we’re a cautionary tale? A warning that women who love women have no right to their own futures? A boogieman to keep queer little girls up at night?   Queer cinema evolved to be reactionary— to challenge the prettily packaged clichés of straight romance, to tell the gritty parts of our stories that straight audiences refused to look at directly, but my existence is not for straight consumption. Now, when heartbroken little kids go looking for someone, anyone, who looks like them, they get to see themselves as blood in the bathtub, secondhand smoke, a teenager in a body bag.   We need the dream of the happy ending. We need the promise of a future. If I wanted to watch queer people being slaughtered en masse, I’d turn on the evening news. What I need is hope.   The other day, I finished this book and the ending was so sugary and unrealistic and horribly cliché, but more than half the main characters were queer and it was just so good to exist, even for a moment, in a world where we were all happy and no one died.

NOT ANOTHER DEAD LESBIAN by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

[chartreusepoetry]

If we both look at the same moon and you still don’t want to call to say goodnight then maybe we’re not looking at the same moon anymore. Maybe the moon has nothing to do with it. Maybe you’re not the same person. Maybe I’m not.

excerpt from “11 Days (Instead Of Calling You)” by Trista Mateer (via tristamateer)

[chartreusepoetry]

you come down from the slaughterhouse, stinking of death and shit - all former traces of gentleness on your face 

vanished.

the petrel never happened, never arrived; died silently in your twisted hands. how fragile,

the neck, you comment, twist-yank 

earth stuffs its throat of it. my wings stick to the sediments, a yearning to be buried. to not get up again. to give up. hoofprints askew, confused.

[chartreusepoetry]

Of course, I think about my work when a black person dies, but I also think about my work when I see black people living. When I am at dinner with a friend and their song comes on, and they start to dance, because they can’t keep that happiness inside. When I’m at the barbershop and a see a young black child getting their first haircut, the wonder in their eyes when they look at their new self in the mirror. The narrative can’t just be ‘we are born black, and then we die.’ I’m so incredibly eager to write into the living space in between.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, interviewed for Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series (via bostonpoetryslam)

[chartreusepoetry]

Aftermath | Kirsten Uhde

When I return to my car in the parking lot,  I expect to find it tipped onto its side in a ditch or curled into the fetal position around a telephone pole or at least to find a dent or a scratch even just a bad parking job - something as askew as my hair and my breathing. My parking job is tidy and precise. The sky above ought to be roiling and dark as my brain, but is instead a perfect, oblivious blue and the hospital, which seemed to loom and glower six hours ago, now only yawns behind me like a well-fed cat, too tired to chase my pattering mouse-heart, at least not for now. It doesn’t take long for the hospital to wither in my rearview, leaving no physical evidence of my last six hours save for a hospital bracelet and the fresh, creeping bruise left by the blood work. My foot does not attack the gas pedal. I do not push my Prius until its engine whines in the sad, simpering way that only a Prius can. My phone crouches in the passenger seat, dead and silent rather than crumbling with rust, an imaginary corrosion I like to think grows from the texts festering in its memory. There is no blood. No scars besides the fast-fading imprints of my teeth where I bit my knuckles to hold back a scream. There is no burnt rubber on my breath. By the evening, the hospital, the parking lot, and the crisis doctors feel like little more than a fever dream as my friend tells me that of those who attempt suicide, very few attempt it twice. And I clutch my not-rusted phone, where behind its dark screen a browser is still open on a webpage explaining what will happen if you check yourself into the hospital for suicidal thoughts. And I almost tell him how far I swerved, how heavenly it felt to push the pedal to the floor  and listen to my car whimper, almost ask him if he smells something burning. But I do not point it out because he did not mention it first, because I am afraid of his normal, afraid of the way normal people scowl at burnt rubber and run when they smell the smoke.

[chartreusepoetry]

[chartreusepoetry]

Ableism in Metaphor

In art, and especially in writing, disability is commonly used as a metaphor. As a poet, I have heard countless instances in which fluent people use ‘stutter’ figuratively in their work. It happens at least once in most readings and shows. A poet says “love stutters when it gets nervous” or “the kid with the stutter like a skipping record” or “the insistent stutter of my longing” or “the kid’s hands forgot how history stutters new names.”

These poets are not referencing dysfluent speech in the same way I do. Rather, they use ‘stutter’ to convey information about a character. Metaphors rely on a shared understanding of a concept, and the lines quoted above only make sense within this context. When a fluent poet says stutter they are referencing the collective understanding that stuttering is indicative of anxiety, dishonesty, incapacity, or inferiority. These analogies persist because stereotypes about dysfluency are so widely shared and firmly held. The writer uses stutter as a metaphor because they know it will concisely and illustratively communicate their intended concept.

This is not limited to dysfluency; other disabled voices and bodies are common objects in writing. Almost every abled writer I know has at some point appropriated the language of disability in their work, referring to surprise as paralyzing, fear as crippling, or blindness as ignorant, or comparing capitalism to cancer.  Employing references to disability as metaphor relies on a collective understanding that disabled bodies are broken, inferior, less valuable, and that they appropriate for use as objects of comparison.

It is important to note that the appropriation of disability occurs by abled writers, who are positively sanctioned for objectifying disabled voices. Disabled speakers writing about themselves and their experiences are less-positively sanctioned. A cliché phrase in poetry slam when facing a particularly challenging competition is “do your cancer poem!”, meaning pull out your best work. Almost never is this a poet who has cancer, but instead a poem about someone else who has died of cancer. This type of cancer poem typically scores very well.

Abled writers who use my voice as a metaphor interpret it differently than I do. They aren’t thinking about dysfluency as an identity at all, because they aren’t thinking about dysfluent people. They are looking to describe a nervous character and they settle on ‘stutter’ or they are writing about an abnormal rhythm and are reminded of the way our speech catches in their ears. Using ‘stutter’ as an analogy separates our speech from our bodies, strips it of meaning and nuance, and reduces it to stereotypical repetitions and elongations.

Even when the use of stuttering is not directly pejorative – when it is compared to something other than a nervous child, or used in an original way – the decoupling of dysfluency from speech and from the person is incredibly problematic. Fluent writers do not understand the social components of dysfluency, the way that dysfluent people relate to our speech, or the ways that they are complicit in perpetuating stereotypes. Their intention has nothing to do with my voice, but their word choice is born out of ableism and speech discrimination. In critiquing writers who appropriate disability, I am challenging the power that abled writers hold over disability narratives. 

Erin Schick, “Ableism in Metaphor,” didistutter.org

[chartreusepoetry]

Hate is a messy thing. You can’t throw it at others without first getting some on yourself.

Honey Sanaa - “You Are What You Eat” (via iamyannababy) Check out the full poem. (via buttonpoetry)

[chartreusepoetry]

Aftermath | Kirsten Uhde

When I return to my car in the parking lot,  I expect to find it tipped onto its side in a ditch or curled into the fetal position around a telephone pole or at least to find a dent or a scratch even just a bad parking job - something as askew as my hair and my breathing. My parking job is tidy and precise. The sky above ought to be roiling and dark as my brain, but is instead a perfect, oblivious blue and the hospital, which seemed to loom and glower six hours ago, now only yawns behind me like a well-fed cat, too tired to chase my pattering mouse-heart, at least not for now. It doesn’t take long for the hospital to wither in my rearview, leaving no physical evidence of my last six hours save for a hospital bracelet and the fresh, creeping bruise left by the blood work. My foot does not attack the gas pedal. I do not push my Prius until its engine whines in the sad, simpering way that only a Prius can. My phone crouches in the passenger seat, dead and silent rather than crumbling with rust, an imaginary corrosion I like to think grows from the texts festering in its memory. There is no blood. No scars besides the fast-fading imprints of my teeth where I bit my knuckles to hold back a scream. There is no burnt rubber on my breath. By the evening, the hospital, the parking lot, and the crisis doctors feel like little more than a fever dream as my friend tells me that of those who attempt suicide, very few attempt it twice. And I clutch my not-rusted phone, where behind its dark screen a browser is still open on a webpage explaining what will happen if you check yourself into the hospital for suicidal thoughts. And I almost tell him how far I swerved, how heavenly it felt to push the pedal to the floor  and listen to my car whimper, almost ask him if he smells something burning. But I do not point it out because he did not mention it first, because I am afraid of his normal, afraid of the way normal people scowl at burnt rubber and run when they smell the smoke.

[chartreusepoetry]

I don’t know how to exist properly in the same space as someone I don’t love anymore.

Trista Mateer, 4/23 (via larmoyante)

[chartreusepoetry]

when i tell you i am a good storyteller, what i’m really saying is: i’m better at writing poems about my girlfriend than i am at talking to her because my relationship is an ongoing conversation i am sometimes too active volcano to initiate, and she is some kind of holy ground i keep pretending cultivation of;

Linette Reeman, If I’m Being Honest…

Read the rest of Linette Reeman’s words here || Bitchtopia.com

(via bitchtopiamag)