inkskinned:

i sat down to make a funny post about the ways i’ve had my work stolen. most of the stories are funny, too.

i don’t really mind if you crack open the little meal of my words and eat it alive at the dinner table. all art should be enjoyed until it frays or combusts or collapses. it should move into you, and you should make it your own.

i only really intervene if someone is taking credit for my work - taking my name off it, or acting as if they wrote it. i usually send a gentle, calm message. what if someone made an actual mistake. and after all, i don’t really enjoy “the limelight”. i hope you’ll forgive the dramatics, but maybe other writers will understand me when i say - most of what we do is born in darkness. it is born with us sitting in our little, lonely houses. living invisible lives on screens; imagining ourselves gods and kings. imagining a love story that eclipses our own banality.

i was writing a little funny post about plagiarism, about the ways people get defensive over what is clearly my work. and then i remembered: her.

she had taken all of the pronouns in my pieces and turned them masculine. every she was he. every her was he. i wrote about women dipping their hands into the honey of my chest and she changed it in this stark, violent way - men now, in my work. in my ribs, i guess. how odd, to stare at it.

i write a lot about worshipping at the knees of my girl. what sapphic can resist the allure of chapel-talk, the divine nature of what is ours and ours alone. her hair in your shower. her chapstick melting in your car. when we say holy here, it is a different meaning. it is the smithing of our own haloes from mix-tape cds. no hammer to the anvil - only our own palms, skin scorching. forging every astral ray with the prayer please don’t leave. our bible a history that is never taught in high school. we shape a church from the tent of her arched back. what other word for hymn but her voice. her moaning.

a poem can be stripped of its component parts, maybe, but can it still breathe? is it still the same ship? the words this woman changed, biting and spiraling up at me: my man is holy. i worship at his feet. he is the divinity of saturdays and the wheat of my communion and he is the hushed summer’s glorious release.

it’s common knowledge that you can say a word too-many times, and then it loses meaning. but here was something new: it wasn’t that the words had lost meaning, but rather that they had shifted in the air somehow and turned radioactive to me. all of my words were otherwise unchanged, except for the unkind and glowing eye of him.

ivory-tower glowing in my aorta, i thought about talking to her on the sanctimonious and erudite level. telling her: a poem can be changed, can be erased or added to or demolished or reconfigured; but we do try to respect the original author. i would tell her i would have preferred her not change only the pronouns; that her actions felt like censorship rather than collaboration.

and in front of me: you cannot cut him out of me, i was made to love him. no scrubbing, no penance. i will always come back to this house, come back to loving men.

i thought about telling her why her actions were cannibalism, not care. i would tell her about being 18 and pressured by my catholic family to accept a man as a partner; how i’d dated him for 5 years before being able to escape. how abusive he had been. how he had made me kneel in front of him - that i wasn’t using the word worship idly, but rather as a reclamation. how i had to be re-taught even the concept of faith. how when i learned peace again, it was by the hand of a woman.

i thought about telling her about the wound behind it, the unceasing loneliness. i thought about telling her shape of the small and quiet hours; the fear; the endless and unpretty nature of just being queer. i thought about saying: all of my work comes from a place of pain.

i thought about telling her everything. when i finally found the words, it was only one: why? in that was the summary of all i felt: why not write her own poem? why change it so violently? and why choose my work, if she disliked it so much? why me?

i imagine she shrugged when she responded. all i got was a single sentence: “i really like your work but i want to be able to enjoy it without being made uncomfortable.”

on her insta, her pinned post is of her boyfriend - now husband - proposing. they were married in 2023. congratulations. i really do hope she’s happy.

i hope one day it stops hurting.