Sinister Wisdom 125: Glorious Defiance

Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Editor & Publisher: Julie R. Enszer

Associate Editor: Sierra Earle

Guest Editor: V. Wetlaufer

Graphic Designer: Nieves Guerra

Copy Editor: Amy Haejung

Board of Directors: Roberta Arnold, Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, Sara Gregory, Shromona Mandal, Joan Nestle, Rose Norman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Yasmin Tambiah, and Red Washburn

Front Cover Art: Isa by Bell Pitkin

Media: 8 x 11 cyanotype printed with a digital negative

Biography: Bell Pitkin is a twenty-one-year-old experimental photographer and artist studying at Wellesley College. They work primarily in photography, collage, and non-narrative video to explore themes of youth, memory, and identity, often situated in the landscape of their home, the southern United States. Previously their work has been showcased in the Wellesley College Review, Pentimento Magazine, and multiple independently published zines. Currently they are living and working between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts.

Artist statement: Isa is part of a series of cyanotypes made between November and December 2020, when Pitkin took portraits of their friends at Wellesley College and transformed them into a collection of dreamlike scenes. Originally digital portraits, the images were distorted and collaged in Photoshop before being printed as digital negatives. Then Pitkin would coat paper in a light-sensitive potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium solution and use a UV light rig to print the negatives onto the paper. This process is extremely hands-on and time-consuming but produces gorgeous indigo prints unlike those in standard photography.

In this print, Isa appears as an almost saint-like Virgin Mary figure, smiling with her eyes closed, as barbed wire pulls at her midsection. The piece asks its audience to consider the juxtaposition between the harsh, discordant background and the soft femininity that the figure exudes. Created at Wellesley, a historically women’s college, surrounded by a community of women and nonbinary individuals, Pitkin explores the way identity unfurls and expands when misogynistic and oppressive perceptions are removed. What magic can be revealed when one’s understanding of gender and self are free from the distortion of public perception? Isa reveals what happens when one embarks on this process, and beckons others to follow in the same stead.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976

Former editors and publishers:

Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson (1976–1981)

Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981–1983)

Michaele Uccella (1983–1984)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983–1987)

Elana Dykewomon (1987–1994)

Caryatis Cardea (1991–1994)

Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995–1997)

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997–2000)

Fran Day (2004–2010)

Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi (2010–2013)

Julie R. Enszer (2013–)

Copyright © 2022 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication.

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Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Notes for a Special Issue

Petra Kuppers

Turtle Disco

Contemplating Hilma af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge on Easter

Waves from Irinjalakuda

Then the Diva

The Diver

Chatham Greenfield

Ten Signs and Symptoms of IBS:

Batya Rossberg

Mayfly

Rae Stone

Porous boundaries

Ruby Cromer

Untitle (Two Pears)

Jesse Rice-Evans

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

[ Interlude: Anti ]

[ Meds Interlude ]

[ Interlude with Essay abt Pain ]

Beauty Is a Lure

Allison Bird Treacy

Narcosis

The Cosmic Crystal Circus

On the Admission of Harriet Jordan

The Transorbital Approach

Chaya Hazel Caninsky

A Touch That Wasn’t Clinical

Dear White Disabled Presenter Leading the One Workshop on Disability Justice at the LGBTQ Activist Conference

Erin Russell

a theory of strength

sediment, or pacing the other

Formulating a theory, my dear

Ed Marlowe Hirtzel

i. A segment on the body: Framing questions

ii. A segment on the body: Pointed questions

iv. A segment on the body: THE BODY DEMANDS AN AUDIENCE

recreational suffering

Casey Catherine Moore

No Leaves in Winter

Breathe

Sarah Cavar

Social Skills: A TransDyke Autie-Biography

Stephanie Heit

Gill Club

Petra the Great Temple

Perigee

North Sea

New Lesbian Writing

A’Ja Lyons

TO GLORY

Caroline Halliday

Old women

Medusa

Natascha Graham

Would You Like Some Wine with Your Epiphany?

Anna M. Moncada Storti

The moon, the tide, the sun

July 9th

Jocelyn Heath

The Galaxy is a Lesbian Dance Night

JSA Lowe

Love song for Rachel

Chanice Cruz

We Could Live Here

Kit Kennedy

The Teapot Wishes to Thank the Women in Your Family

Janet Mason

Kitty – a representative of Satan?

Koss

Emma Lazarus’s Outing

Love Songs to My Ancestors: Great Great Grandma Koss

Rocko Foltz

My Legs Were Covered with a Cothurnus of Luminous Blue Cardboard, Which Reached up to My Hips So That I Looked like an Obelisk

Hippie Priest Very Anxious about the Violence, the Abductions, the Social Situation

Pixie Willo

Vanilla

Celenia Delsol

ALL LIVES [NEVER] MATTER[ED]

Juanita Kirton

Dear Aunt Jemima

Shari Caplan

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Female Gaze

Faith Ringgold on the Female Gaze

Rowan Harvey

Unapologetic

Chrystos

She Could Have

Beck Guerra Carter

Tripod

Ruth Dickey

Broken Tooth Hymn

Archeology of loss

Trenna Sharpe

Hannah! We’re socially distancing these days

Genevieve Rheams

Under the Oak Street Awning

Maria Petrides

Cruising Paradise

Joanne Rocky Delaplaine

Long-Distance Call

Butterfly

Paradise

Gloria Keeley

Driving Red Riding Hood

Shelonda Montgomery

Sunday Evening

Roberta Arnold

From Saint to Sinner

Aren McCartney

The plant knows

Jimmy Fay

Elegy for Eve’s Hangout (1925)

Rae Theodore

How to come out as a lesbian to your parents

Things overheard in the workshop the day god created lesbians

Ava Sofia

Swipe Left

Batya Weinbaum

Poem upon Returning

Yuna Kang

Old Friends

Victoria Lee Hood

Chestnut

Hannah Leffingwell

Barren

Passing

January

Regina S. Dyton

Dear Ella

Margaret Randall

The Photograph

Book Reviews

Remembrance: Our Madeline Davis by Joan Nestle

Notes for a Magazine

Valerie Wetlaufer is one of my favorite poets working today—and I was thrilled when she agreed to edit an issue of Sinister Wisdom . If you have not read her poetry collections, I encourage you to get your hands on Mysterious Acts by My People and Call Me By My Other Name . You will not regret time spent with her poems. Valerie, or V as she also is known, edited a wonderful journal of lesbian poetry, Adrienne for a few years; I treasured that journal (and hope someone rejuvenates it)! For Sinister Wisdom , she has assembled an incredible collection of work by twelve writers on the theme of d/disability in lesbian communities.

Publishing this work in the summer of 2022 as we all continue to reel from the effects of the global pandemic of COVID-19 and explore new ways to live with this virus in endemic form feels both vital and cautionary. In many of our lesbian communities, we have worked and continue to work for greater accessibility for deaf, disabled, and differently-abled women. As we move forward living in a world with continued dangers to women who are sick, disabled, immune-compromised, may we keep their needs and their lives at the forefront of minds in making decisions about our collective future.s

In V’s Notes for a Special Issue, she writes about the challenges of meeting deadlines and assembling this issue. Her experience is not unusual. Editing an issue of Sinister Wisdom is challenging for everyone. It is also filled with extraordinary joy and pleasure. I imagine some people reading this Note will wonder how to become editors of special issues of Sinister Wisdom. The process is easy: simply email me with your idea. The truth is I say yes to everyone. All you need is to come to me with an idea to edit an issue of the journal. Sinister Wisdom is our sister, mother, lover, friend, who always says yes.

Another truth is that I say yes to more issues than ever appear. While the idea and proposal stages of the journal are relatively easy, execution is more difficult. As contributors know, there is often a long wait between submission and acceptance and between acceptance and publication. Not all good ideas for issues reach the manuscript stage. And that is fine. We continue to have enough issues to publish quarterly, year in and year out. A great deal of work happens each year at Sinister Wisdom by editors, volunteers, and many other people to produce the journal. The work—and everyone’s patience and forbearance—are appreciated always.

I know most people think about Sinister Wisdom primarily in its embodied form, a quarterly journal that appears in mailboxes for subscribers. We all work very hard to make that happen. It is the core of our work. Sinister Wisdom, though, is more than a single bound issue; it is more than a container of words—poems, stories, articles, artwork—that fill its pages. Sinister Wisdom is also a platform for writers who want to think in a new direction and network with other writers. Sinister Wisdom is an experimental space for writers and artists interested in connecting with communities, in having a space to play and explore. Sinister Wisdom is a training ground for people interested in book production, in understanding writing, editing, and lesbians further and in new and surprising ways. Sinister Wisdom is the lesbian who says: yes, try this. Sinister Wisdom is the space of our collective pasts useful for imagining new futures. Sinister Wisdom is the place for lesbians to share research, ideas, and areas of interest. Sinister Wisdom is our dreams and our hopes, our triumphs and our failures. It is a communal asset for lesbians, now and in the future.

Sinister Wisdom is all these things and more because you read it, subscribe to it, believe in it, contribute to it, and use it. I thank you for that trust and support.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

Summer 2022

Notes for a Special Issue

I write this as we mark, in the United States, one year of living in a global pandemic, where disabled and chronically ill people have faced especially precarious situations, being more vulnerable to COVID-19 and yet often excluded from vaccine prioritization. Spending a year in various stages of lockdown, the rest of the population got a taste of what so many of us experience in our daily lives: isolation, attempts to work from home, and the struggle for productivity amidst the imminent threats to our lives. Suddenly accommodations we’ve begged for become commonplace, and we wonder if they will remain once the able-bodied world regains its sense of normalcy. Chaya Hazel Caninsky’s words from this issue seem all too fitting: No one makes this climb alone . . . And not everyone will make it. We mourn for the countless numbers of disabled folks who have not survived this pandemic, because of our greater susceptibility to the virus and sometimes because our lives were deemed less valuable than our able-bodied peers, and thus care was denied or withdrawn. How can we reckon with this level of heartbreak?

As always, we turn to art, words on a page connecting us from within our isolation and despair. The twelve writers featured in this issue represent many different versions of disability, chronic illness, mental illness, yet each of their pieces grapples with the beauty and difficulty of embodiment when that body does not always cooperate. How can we inhabit the joy of our lesbian selves when chronic pain keeps us away from the party? What does it mean to find happiness in bodies that are too often medicalized and dissociated? How can these bodies society classes as disposable become sites of pleasure?

Our bodies are more than sites of risk and pain. These narratives and poems bring our delight alive and capture the reality of living a life in pain, proving those lives remain worth living. As I gathered the work for this issue, I fielded numerous emailed apologies from the authors within as their bodies interfered with deadlines. My own chronic pain means I am typing this while lying flat on my back atop a heating pad. Somehow we muddle through a world that doesn’t want us, working together to create the access we require.

Within these pages, we read not only of disabled experience, but also gender, race, religion, the multiplicities that make up our lesbian lives. Sex and death, families and losses. The stories we tell about ourselves and one another to keep us all alive.

Valerie Wetlaufer

March 2021

Correction: The photographs on the front and back covers of Sinister Wisdom 123: A Tribute to Conditions are not photos of the Conditions editorial collective. They are pictures of the Necessary Bread affinity group, which included several Conditions editorial collective members. Formed for the June 12, 1982 Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City, the group both issued a statement that was widely published in the feminist press and made a banner that read: Necessary Bread: Third World/White Lesbians United. The front cover photo, taken while waiting to march, included two members of the editorial collective, Dorothy Allison (far right) and Cheryl Clarke (second from right), as well as Barbara Smith (third from left), co-editor of Conditions: Five / The Black Women’s Issue. The back cover photo is of the Necessary Bread banner at the August 27, 1983 March on Washington, which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Turtle Disco

Petra Kuppers

(upon performing as part of Full Pink Moon: Opera Povera in Quarantine, a durational livestream performance of composer Pauline Oliveros’s open-form The Lunar Opera, April 7, 2020)

She shimmers silver

suburban room glows like an ice rink

she crawls through the microphone

there’s a green glow around my liver

immune support on the gong

alone in the night sky, a dream

purple beads drip from here to Chicago

her Full Pink Moon tutu crown

flicks across my lips

grease paint dissolves into almond cream

no note is wrong in the universal hum

three hours in, midnight is a slow river

my shoulders press the steel-tongue drum

fingers vibrate, cool metal cry

hypnagogic caress of darkness

She rises high

Contemplating Hilma af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge on Easter

Petra Kuppers

two winged birds kiss beaks, cross into the cosmic egg

lungs dance along Mobius bands, carry it on

radial orientation: feel your mouth and anus in the center

starfish striations encompass and guard turbinate structures

pulse breath, be breathed color along wide strands

give birth to dark pink, to gray and white.

pool into leaves of a flower, assemble upright to tree

your wings embrace stamen and glide curve

light merges with pigment your skin soaks intensity

infinity scatter on the mushroom’s curved mantle

your fingers pick the pomegranate chambers

nautilus twirls fungi fruiting body

blossom from the earth circle, velvet

ants run and run

all over your back

let them be

inhale seed

be fruit

Waves from Irinjalakuda

Petra Kuppers

(upon performing as part of Full Pink Moon: Opera Povera in Quarantine, a durational livestream performance of composer Pauline Oliveros’s open-form The Lunar Opera, April 7, 2020)

Paper crinkles from Sweden: maps of world click

Elder couple tells the story of a lesbian composer

expands the realm of sonic possibility

Deep gong roams in golden-green metallic flow

Butoh moon boom

artist of considerable breadth

Tuning: moan wind through the other ether

Lips pull into coherence

creative chameleon who would love to collaborate

Percussive violin ticks in pink light

México City compress needle rip

Feminist Autonomous sensory meridian response

Reverb: echo old stories flow till the rhythm picks up

Spank an open hole, drape softer sheets

Walking with the Disappeared

Washtenaw morning roar cuts through trees

Susurration sand from Byron Bay

multiplied view of the characters’ gestalt

sharp red blur streaks across the garden’s pitch

Semi release. Train hoot. Arrivals.

citizenship makes moral and ethical claims upon our bodies

Then the Diva

Petra Kuppers

bites my neck, eyeteeth

punch right through to collarbone

ruby dots spurt jewel on my skin blood

pearls capture an insect each

or a memory. They harden, ossify

to precious stones, are found, are gone.

She smiles, licks her charcoal lips.

I wear the necklace beneath

the legend-wash t-shirt soft in

its fifth season, thin beneath my breasts.

Fleece socks split at the seams,

warmth in air-conditioned summer.

My toenails silver in the sun, fresh

lacquer praises a queen, beneath plastic

fabric leaches fragments

into wash water, clogs the river:

the consequence of varnish. Tomorrow,

asp-licks at the silver hoard:

will a pickerel fish swim to my toes,

nibble once I stand still long enough?

The Diver

Petra Kuppers

The diver faces the monster.

The monster tastes the bitter water.

The bitter water bathes