silene-stenophylla

[silene-stenophylla]

also, i keep thinking about that artist who lost an arm and she made self-portraits and of course they depicted herself without an arm, and people were like why do you keep marking art about the loss of your arm, and she was like i don’t. i’m making art about myself and i only have one arm.

while a lot of people write poetry about their own pain, sometimes personal poetry is just a reflection of who they are, and who they are is shaped by traumatic events and other things that you may find upsetting.

[silene-stenophylla]

ALT

[silene-stenophylla]

i do love listmaking…

[silene-stenophylla]

“Why Don’t You Just Move?”

A look at rural queerness and the hardcore scene.

With the recent and still on-going tragedy left in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a lot of light is being shed on southern states that make up Appalachia.

There’s a lot of misconceptions about Appalachia and the southern United States as a whole. There are a lot of good users on this website that have put a lot of effort into combating these harmful stereotypes and clearing up misconceptions.

But there’s more than just Appalachia in the south. There’s a lot of middle ground. Places that aren’t as rural as Appalachia, but places that aren’t as populated as cities like Raleigh, Richmond, Memphis, etc.

Places where people gather surrounded by other agricultural hubs.

There are queer people everywhere. In every culture, every religion, every country, in all of history, we have existed. We cannot and we will not be erased.

A common narrative that’s floated around for many years is “if red states are passing laws that are constructive to the LGBT+ community, then why don’t those people just move?”

So why don’t we just move?

I’m sure you can find a lot of well-written posts on here explaining many reasons why queer people not just in the southern states, but all over the world don’t “just move”, and one reason I’ve seen echoed over and over again is that “we have thriving communities here too”. We exist too.

How does one “be punk”?

It’s a question my mutuals and I get a lot, and a lot of us are tired of hearing it.

What does it mean to be punk?

Is it about the music? The clothes? The politics? Can you be punk if? Is it punk if you? Who? What? Where? When?

One common beginner tip to “being punk” is to find and join the local scene. This can lead to a lot of other questions, though. What is a scene? Where does one find the scene? How does one participate in the scene? Is there a minimum requirement?

Rest assured, literally no one is asking this offline.

A hardcore scene is so much more than just hardcore. A scene is a group of people where music is a common thread that builds the basis of other connections. A hardcore scene isn’t necessarily even hardcore.

“You have to listen to punk music to be punk”. Sure. But here’s the thing. In your local hardcore scene you will find: metal musicians, rappers, and more. You will attend shows with blues music, orchestras, and more.

Sometimes it’s not even music at all! Sometimes there is drag! Sometimes there are movie nights! Sometimes there are group outings!

It’s almost like… it’s just a social construct.

What is the local scene? The local scene is loud music. It’s smoking and drinking. It’s stopping by the corner store and the smoke and vape. It’s carpooling. It’s movie nights. It’s text chains. It’s group chats. It’s he-said-she-said. It’s they said. It’s AMAB enbies. It’s people who don’t care about “passing”. It���s DIY HRT. It’s she was a lesbian until she met him. It’s situationships. It’s hooking up and coming down. It’s bouncing from place to place to meet up with each other. It’s showing up someplace and seeing who’s there and waiting around to see who’s coming. It’s late nights spent partying on the weekends and back to school and work come the weekdays. It’s knowing someone by looks or name even if you haven’t put the two together yet. It’s trading socials. It’s Instagram stories and comments. It’s “DM for Address”. It’s “are you going tonight?” It’s “do you need a ride?” It’s “who else is going?”. It’s going somewhere and asking who’s coming. It’s sitting around on broken chairs and lawn furniture passing around a blunt, sharing a 24 pack of beer that 4 of you ran out to get with money you all pooled together, it’s “should we order pizza?” It’s “I brought donuts”. It’s hanging out in each other’s houses and rooms. It’s respecting the businesses that offer to house you. It’s generational friendships. It’s listening to your friends as they joke about their heritage and talk about their cultures. It’s the dog you pet when you’re sitting on the curb in ripped fishnets taking drunk selfies with your friends. It’s the man playing you the harmonica as you sit outside the THC drink bar on a Saturday night. It’s sitting out in the yard listening to someone play an acoustic set where they talk about the war and poverty and politics while you slowly get high surrounded by your friends. It’s sitting on a dock in the middle of the night fishing listening to emo music huddled together with your friends. It’s autistic people showing each other the bugs they’ve found in the dirt. It’s talking about your disabilities together. It’s shoving your friends in the pit and then holding their hands. It’s seeing the cos guys in their 40s and 50s who tend the bar and work the register calling you by whatever name and pronouns you give them. It’s all of this and so much more, and it cannot be conceptualized by one single fashion style, one single music style, one single belief system. It’s not someone calling you out because you went to Chick-Fil-A and don’t you know that’s bad, it’s not someone telling you that you’re a poser because you like Chappell Roan too or your clothes were bought at Forever 21 not thrifted and DIYed.

Everyone likes to talk about folk punk and other genres that bands like Dayz and Daze have popularized- or according to some, commodified and commercialized- but if you’re going to talk about music like folk punk, you’re going to have to respect the areas that it originated in.

Everyone want’s to talk about “local punk bands” when half the bands you’re seeing don’t even fall under the genre of punk.

Your local scene isn’t always going to be skate parks and thrash music.

Sometimes it’s the mom cooking you and all your queer friends dinner on a Friday night in her kitchen with crosses and a picture frame of her family with the quote “live, laugh, love”.

Sometimes it’s sitting around and listening to men who are old enough to be your grandfather with Vietnam Veteran hats play the blues while a pig roasts in a backyard BBQ, even though you’re in your 20s and you have blue hair and pronouns.

It’s sitting around and listening to your elders talk about how the scene used to be “back in the day”. Talk about the shows they’ve been to, the bands they’ve seen in their prime.

It’s asking what you do for work, where do you live, what brought you down here, what’s your college major?

It’s people. It’s people connecting to people. Regardless of the color of their skin. Regardless of gender or sexuality. It’s people of all ages coming together to listen to music with the idea that what you all have in common is living here and now, hating politicians, and thinking that someone should do something about the shitty state the world is in. It’s not a conglomerate. It’s individuality, and there’s no real wrong way of doing it unless you’re a Trump Supporter or a Nazi, and even then, they still have their own factions of the punk scene that are going to overlap with yours on occasion. The best you can do then is stand up for what you believe in and stay safe.

There are scenes just like mine all over this country. In southern states, in rural areas, in places that other, mainly white queers have “written off”.

So why don’t we just move?

Because this is our scene, and it’s what we make it, and in the heart of the south in the Bible Belt, we’re making it a queer-inclusive space despite what’s happening around us.

[silene-stenophylla]

everything has political content. sorry. theres some guys who get really really angy when you say this but its true

[silene-stenophylla]

[writes about Jesus but it’s actually about being trans] [writes about being trans but it’s actually about Jesus]

[silene-stenophylla]

[6 ways to draw a circle on wikihow]

[silene-stenophylla]

it's like knowing you're going to die.

in the few months leading up, you spend as much time with your family, giving as much love,

as much laughter,

as much care,

and as much warmth as you can.

before everything breaks down, you watch one last sunset, play one last game,

and tell them you love them one last time.

what you will do tomorrow will be irrevocable, and it will be entirely your fault.

but you can't endure staying static any longer.

you will kill their daughter,

and something else will take her place,

and they will never forgive you.

tonight will be the last; you know.

so you will go outside with your siblings

and eat dinner with your parents

and play card games with your grandparents

and hug each and everyone one as tight as you can,

hoping with all of your heart

that they will still view these memories as bittersweet.

[silene-stenophylla]

Jackie Sabbagh, “Having a Great Time Being Transgender in America Lately”

[silene-stenophylla]

Reached out to a biologist to request some info about an extinct species of freshwater shrimp and the email she sent in response was not only lovely and helpful but also kind of poetry to me? People who study invertebrates are actually the most hopeful and compassionate scientists that we have.

[silene-stenophylla]

outgrown

lately i've been feeling like my soul has outgrown my body.

i'm 18 now.

legally, i'm an adult.

emotionally, i'm still a teen.

but physically, i feel

prepubescent.

i've never felt like my body gave me the wrong puberty, perse, in fact i was excited, especially since i was a late bloomer.

and even as time went on, and as i began to despise my chest and my fertility,

i still felt like a girl, and i was excited to become a woman.

but now,

the walls are caving in.

this box is so much smaller than i'd thought

and no matter how much i want to escape,

i do not have the funds to purchase a shovel

and i do not have the autonomy to dig

so i am left gnawing away at the walls in the dark

with a rusty, tiny spoon, barely making a dent.

and i try to scream,

but my voice

is too

small.

[silene-stenophylla]

I go to work (a poem)

I go to work and my coworker tells me

“If I ever saw a trans person in real life I’d kill ‘em”

I go home and testosterone dries sticky on my chest and

Tomorrow I’m goin to a punk show and screaming as if he’d seen it

I scoop a black widow into my hands and cradle her small body to safety

I know she’s heard the same

“If I ever see a spider, I will kill it”

And walking away I see a wasp who’s predominant diet is black widows and I wonder if I should’ve taken her back home

I want to take a lot of girls back home, where I can watch and keep them safe

My work is full of black widow killing wasps and even more brown widows, which may look like they’re in the same boat but they do just the same

Sometimes an ally is just another pair of teeth

A man I don’t know shows up at my work and smiles at me with that smile men wear when they’re going to denounce you

And before I can even feel guilt for that assumption he tells me about how much I don’t know what I’m doing

And how the man before me was better.

He didn’t see what I was doing. He was just walking by. Hardly knew the man before me either but he knew he was a man

And he can’t know I’m one or I’ll end up a widow under someone’s shoe.

When I’m in danger and cannot help it a giant hand I cannot control carries me to my family’s house

Thinking stupidly that it’s put me somewhere safe

And my dad talks on and on about how much he loves Trump

And I see that little man on the TV and hear in a voice that is half his and half my dad’s

“Day ONE in office I will undo all of the Biden era lgbt rights”

And my dads house is a warehouse full of wasps and brown widows

And I crawl home to safety and dream of dogs dying under wheels and of my loved ones meeting my work life and both those images have the same amount of blood.

I have 5 songs stuck in my head at once and it’s 95 degrees and just as damn humid

And I know I heard once that manhood is pain but

I think what they meant to say is that manhood is blood

Cause I’m hearing the words and instead of dreaming of peace I imagine blood covered hands and think “better you than me”

And instead of laughing off another man’s joke like I used to, nowadays I just get angry

And I know the phrase “wolf in sheep’s clothing” the same way I know I’m “a girl playing dress up as a man”

Because the sheep are safe in their majority with their guard dogs and their fields

But the wolf is starving and being hunted and wearing that wool like it’s anything close to a shield

And holding back it’s fangs like they could ever see it as any less of a predator just because it behaves

And I think if I had to kill to keep what I’ve got then maybe I’m more okay with that than I used to be

I think of my friends that I love and of that black widow spider and of smiling strange men

and I know that if manhood is pain even after all this, then womanhood for me is nothing but death

[silene-stenophylla]

please read by Mary Ruefle

[silene-stenophylla]

i wake up thirsty and i think of palestine. i go to the doctor’s office and i think of palestine. a sign in the corner of the waiting room says ‘this is a place of healing, disruptive behavior will not be tolerated’ and i think of palestine. they probably weren’t thinking of bombs and snipers and mass graves in parking lots. i call my parents and i think of palestine. i drive to the grocery store and i think of palestine. i look at the clear blue sky and i think of palestine. i put the dishes away and i think of palestine. i feed my cat and i think of palestine. i listen to music and i think of palestine. i read poetry and i think of palestine. i text my friends and i think of palestine. i think of palestine and i think of palestine and i think of palestine

[silene-stenophylla]

[click images for better quality | poem text under read more]

left to fester / left to feed 4.9.24 | a poem for icarus of the deep green little bird, little bird, why are you so afraid? i see the raw pruning of your plumage. i see the pinions plucked until you bleed. i see no wind, so why won’t your wings stop their shaking? the worms crawl up from the earth. the worms crawl up from the darkness in a hunt for new light. they have tasted delicious things in the dirt but you’re not hungry, only afraid. the fear tickles your feathers, makes the scars across your shoulders burn. somewhere to the north there is a tower made of stone, a window pane, and shattered glass. somewhere to the east there is a lake as cold as death and as blue as resurrection. somewhere beneath you there is a home you dug out with your two taloned hands, newly reborn. somewhere beneath the home, the worms are feasting. somewhere beneath the worms, a garden grows. it is fed with bones and bracken and bits of flesh. the worms that have reached the surface speak in maps and pulsing codes. they speak of everything that swells like eclipses beneath the light. little bird, little bird, what is there to be afraid of? close your eyes. the worms will keep you company. they promise to never tell you what you do not want to hear.

[silene-stenophylla]

[writes about Jesus but it’s actually about being trans] [writes about being trans but it’s actually about Jesus]

[silene-stenophylla]

“Trapped”

Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg

@/lilboyblueish on Instagram

Poem by Keaton St. James (@boykeats)

I/Me/Myself - Will Wood

We Both Laughed In Pleasure by Lou Sullivan

cis people asking cis questions by Silas Denver Melvin (@sweatermuppet)

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote