ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Visual Art and Interview with Angela Jimenez

July 11, 2014

Angela Jimenez is visual storyteller based in New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. CutBank asked her to select work for "All Accounts and Mixture" from two photography projects: Welcome Home and Same-Sex Ballroom. She was also kind enough to answer a couple questions. Notes on the images follow the interview. Enjoy!

Ayla and Crew raising the Diana sculpture. 2006.

Night Stage raising crew, listening. 2006.

K.C. testing the Night Stage lights under a full moon. 2006.

Bros walking in Festieland: Andy and Dug. 2004.

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CutBank: These two series are stunning. Can you say a little about how “Welcome Home,” and “Same-Sex Ballroom” each came about?

Angela Jimenez: Thank you. I started both these projects while working as a photographer/editor with VelvetparkMagazine, which my friend Grace Moon founded in Brooklyn. It is still online velvetparkmedia.com and the print version no longer exists. I was working as a newspaper intern, then professional freelancer, in New York City and Velvetpark was this amazing outlet where I could cover queer culture/subculture. I really credit Grace, and Velvetpark, for creating a space that valued this work that was too out there for mainstream newspapers.

Years later the New York Times published both these projects in some form. Things have come a long way.

Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival started with me and Grace going to the Festival to do an article for the magazine. It took me awhile to understand how special it was, and how to approach it, and how to get access. But it turned into a book project that I did over the course of the next 6 years or so. It is a visual poem about the worker community that builds the Festival every summer. I self-published the book in 2009. The first edition is just about sold out.

“Same-Sex Ballroom” started with another Grace Moon road trip, this time out to Chicago where we were photographing athletes at the Gay Games in 2006. I had first seen this in Australia, because I went and competed in the Gay Games with my soccer team from Brooklyn and we saw there was gay ballroom dancing. I mean, how cool. So, I was curious.

CB: Can you discuss what “home” meant to you in the first project?

AJ: The title "Welcome Home" is not something I made up. It is something that the womyn at the Festival say to each other when they first greet each other on the Land of the Festival as they arrive each year. I found a home there too, a very beautiful and complicated community that is full of herstory. And that is what the book is about.

CB: In “Same-Sex Ballroom,” where did you travel to capture images? What captivated/surprised you most about the project?

AJ: That summer in Chicago, I decided to set up lights and shoot the same-sex ballroom the way I learned to shoot high school basketball games when I was interning at the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey. Which I find hilarious in retrospect. But, I felt really clear about it. I started shooting and I thought it was really breathtaking. The pageantry is sort of funny, but people are serious about it, and I respect that. They are doing something totally subversive. It is also really visually rich- there is emphasis on the sameness of the couples in the costumes and the dancers more fluidly change and switch gender roles. Dance, in all cultures, is such a powerful metaphor for gender roles and relationships. I was tired, I think, of the way gay relationships were visually depicted. Where was the fun? The passion? The character? This had it. And I found this pamphlet for the next world championships to be held in Budapest. I was like Budapest? Wow. That was the beginning of an obsession. I followed this subculture from Chicago to Budapest to New York to Antwerp...eventually I had to stop. I shot it through like 2010 and it has been on the shelf for awhile. You never know, I might go back to it...I am still in touch with some of these wonderful dancers.

CB:What are your goals for yourself as an artist? What do you hope viewers of your photographs take away?

AJ: I really want to communicate something about the lives of my subjects that makes a viewer connect with that subject. I come from that school of thought (I studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia) that all the small moments of people's lives have value and that you can change the world by telling stories so people understand each other better. I really do believe in that. I feel really overwhelmed and powerless about all that is wrong sometimes. Visual stories is what I have found as a way to put something out there, to contribute to change and evolution in some small way. I am really drawn to stories that can crack open some rusty, old door of thinking in someone's mind. Because that is what photographing them does for me.

CB: You designate yourself as a “visual storyteller.” Can you say a bit more about that?

AJ: I use photos and video and sound to tell stories, stories that you see. I work a lot as a photojournalist, but I am not always working in traditional journalism. So, storyteller is the title I am most comfortable with. I also write songs (which I am sort of closeted about) as a hobby and I think folk musicians and other storytellers are amazing. I am trying to associate myself with that tradition.

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Image Notes

Welcome Home

All Photos: From the book project Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, self-published First-Edition 2009. All Photos by Angela Jimenez. Copyright 2009 Angela Jimenez Photography.

Same-Sex Ballroom

1. Same-sex ballroom dancers Lee Sharmat, rear, and Melinda Kay, foreground, compete in the women's standard dance at the 5 Boro Dance Challenge on May 5, 2007...The locally produced 5 Boro Dance Challenge, New York City's first major same-sex dance competition, was held at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan from May 4-6, 2007.

2. Choregrapher and professional opposite sex dancer Tony Scheppler leads a same-sex Viennese Waltz segment Dance Times Square in Manhattan, during a rehearsal of "A Show Unlike Anything on Broadway!" on March 18, 2007. The show was the entertainment portion of 5 Boro Challenge event.

3. Defending World Champion same-sex ballroom dancers Robert Tristan Szelei, left, and Gergely Darabos, talk to Hungarian television journalists in their dressing room at the Korcsarnok arena in Budapest, Hungary, after a disappointing round in the Latin category during the 2nd annual World Championship Same-Sex Ballroom Dancing competition on October 21, 2006...Darabos was overcome with a leg cramp while trying to defend their title in the Latin event and the couple dropped into fourth place. The pair, however, went on to win the mens Standard division...Darabos and Szelei, known as the "Black Swans," have been training and preparing to host the 2nd annual World Championship and the Csardas Cup, the first-ever Eastern European same-sex ballroom competition. This is the pinnacle event of the blossoming same-sex ballroom scene...The event was organized by the US-based World Federation of Same-Sex Dancing, which hosted the first World Championship Same-Sex championships in 2005 in Sacramento, California. The Black Swans did a large amount of the coordination and planning in Budapest, a city that had never seen an event of this kind. When government funding fell through, they secured funding from patron Desire (accent on the “e”) Dubounet, owner of the local Club Bohemian Alibi drag club...The World Championship events are newly recognized, but same-sex dancers have been competing on a national and international circuit for a number of years, especially in Europe, including at the Eurogames, the Gay Games, the London Pink Jukebox Trophy and the Berlin Open, among others. Countries including the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and, now, Hungary, hold their own national same-sex championships. Hungary held its first national championships in April 2006...Szelei and Darabos spent three months at the Sacramento Dancesport same-sex dance school in California this summer, on the first scholarship offered by the World Federation.

4. Gay ballroom dancers Bradley Stauffer, left, and Soren (umlaut on the "o") Kruse, both of London, England, clap for the female dancers during the Dancesport (ballroom dancing) competition at the Hilton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago during Gay Games VII on July 19, 2006… Over 12,000 gay and lesbian athletes from 60 countries are in Chicago competing in 30 sports during the Games from July 15 through 22, 2006...Over 50,000 athletes have competed in the quadrennial Games since they were founded by Dr. Tom Wadell, a 1968 Olympic decathlete, and a group of friends in San Francisco in 1982, with the goal of using athletics to promote community building and social change...The Gay Games resemble the Olympics in structure, but the spirit is one of inclusion, rather than exclusivity. There are no qualifying events or minimum or maximum requirements...The Games have been held in Vancouver (1990), New York (1994), Amsterdam (1998), and Sydney (2002).

5. Lesbian ballroom dancers Petra Zimmermann, center left, and Caroline Privou, right, both of Cologne, Germany, compete during the Dancesport competition at the Hilton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago during Gay Games VII on July 20, 2006...The couple won the gold medal in the standard A division for women.

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A long-time regular contributor to The New York Times and a contract photographer with the Getty Images creative department, Angela Jimenez works on assignment and develops & produces short & long-term documentary projects. Her work has been honored by the Magenta Foundation as a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer in 2010, New York Press Photographer's Association, Review Santa Fe and the Communication Arts Photo Annual, supported by grants from The Alexia Foundation student award and The Puffin Foundation, and acquired into the permanent collection of the Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay & Lesbian Art.

Cover Photo by Angela's wife, Ashley Harness

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose by Rachel Ambrose

July 10, 2014

Butter and a Whole Lot of Need

My mama Eudora was a champion pie baker; her chocolate pecan pie could bring a woman to orgasm after three bites. I saw it happen clear as day in my kitchen when I was eight years old. Formative stuff, that kind of thing, hence my appreciation for beautiful, breathless women and a good piece of pie. Sometimes you can’t tell one from the other.

She died when I was twenty three, and like all good witches, she didn’t leave her recipe book behind. I have no idea where she put it, and neither does anyone else. It poofed into thin air when she did. Maybe the book never really existed in the first place, and it was all in her head. I call her a witch, but that’s not strictly true; there wasn’t any sorcery in her crust, just butter and a whole lot of need. Feminine need, like the itch to run your fingers down someone else’s spine to just feel their skin, to taste it with your thumb. And there was longing. If my mama couldn’t get my father to kiss her that night, she’d sweat it out in the kitchen, 3 AM in the middle of July with the sweet smell of strawberries hanging heavy in the air. And we all knew when she and Daddy were having a fight. That was the only time she’d make blueberry pie, his favorite. The chocolate pies were for her lady friends, and I viewed them like I viewed lipstick and moisturizer: a welcome reward for the backbreaking task of getting through motherhood unscathed.

When she died, at the moment of her passing, I was in the kitchen in my fancy apartment uptown, and inexplicably, the air was filled with the smell of cinnamon and peaches, and I knew. I ran to my car, shoes clacking against the pavement, heel straps flying undone behind me, and drove home like I had the fire of the Devil inside me. I honked my horn all the way there, because it was better than letting my screams echo in my own ears, and when I tore myself out of my seat belt and stumbled inside, it felt like the pilot light on the oven had gone out. There was no more warmth. There was only a cooling pie on the counter, chocolate and pomegranate, as if to mark my ascent into womanhood as she passed into the underworld. After the doctors and medics came, after arrangements had been made, after I had pressed my last kiss into her gray skin, I allowed myself to cut a slice. Bitter and sweet and dark and rich. I added the salt from my tears as a final flourish. Mama always did like a little salt.

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Rachel Ambrose is a twenty-something writer from Connecticut. She enjoys reading and writing about powerful queer ladies, eating cake for lunch, and cooking eggs for dinner. She can be found @victorywhiskey on Twitter and victorywhiskeyjuliet on Tumblr. Her work has been previously published in 2014: A Year in Stories, Crack the Spine and The Colton Review.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Caitlin Mackenzie

July 9, 2014

We are leaning creatures

drinking bright pilsner in a dark kitchen. The party oscillates in endlessness as we ease ourselves into the idea of each other. Beer the color of cymbals— crash and linger. A pulley, windows open in November.

There is no after to wanting. It is endless,

the rooms we find ourselves in. We stare at our naked feet, then at each other awake in lamp light. Limes dry into exoskeletons on countertops. A tongue burns.

We flinch from self-awareness, covet what flies, nests, though we’re without a branch, without a song long-evolved that screams I am eternal! and I am worth fucking!

It’s no wonder we’re drunk, that we blush and brace, that our pattern of staring begins inverted then corrects itself. We escape ambiguity, bother with a question and then another.

We hang pressed shirts in the darkness of uninhabited spaces. We shave and toss what’s spoiled. We worry and invent alphabets.

Unearthing

We went slow to cut stone, cattails whipping our thighs as we gave our bodies to the sleeve of lake and night. Swollen memories are a dream’s jurisdiction— us in the smaller body, cove of fresh water, clothes abandoned by campfire. We gathered duckweed in upturned palms to avoid touching, staring too long. Cottonwood bloomed and deserted in a dense scatter. Cranes circled, crushed against summer’s county. I wished it for myself— the firmament, escape into long harvest, body and plain nourished by laboring hands.

Fortune

You will not turn your head toward the closing door.

You will travel far and wide for pleasure and business.

Adapt to each abandon, as the sun sets two minutes early one evening and three minutes the next.

Learn to keep a tight fist of air in the lungs.

Renovate your needs. Refinish the floors.

Crab fish on your birthday. Throw the clicking keys back to salt. The sun will set in the rear window on the drive home.

You will always feel the spin. It will be enough to throw you into outer atmospheres—quick burn like a meteor.

You will always love too fast.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit by it.

Remember the sound of your heart in your ears: percussion of blood and cartilage.

Heat climbs in the transfer.

Each return will be less than the one before it.

I Didn’t Know to be Jealous

We drove to the coast, through towns desolate,

to trade overcast sky

for humidity.

The ocean is good for this,

for waiting, which isn’t always like holding

your breath. Don’t try, as I did,

to hypothesize the number of seconds

or molecules

between parallel bodies, legs stretched

toward shoreline.

Lungs are like skin, she said,

intimate with oxygen, and as tender.

Starlings flew in unison over inerrancy and line—

charge of intuition. Tide.

I didn’t know

to be jealous.

When she collected agates upshore

I thought of following,

but didn’t, fingers in sand,

counting. I touched my hair again

like an instinct to be clean,

or cautious.

When she returned, stones dropping wet

from her linen scarf, I studied each

while water drained, changed the color

into something subtle, concealed.

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Caitlin Mackenzie is a writer living in Eugene, Oregon and working in book publishing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, Fugue, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, HTMLgiant, and Structo among others, and one of her poems was recently nominated for the Forward Prize. She has a MFA from Bennington College, a passion for vinyl, and a single-speed bicycle she rides every day.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose by Eric Longfellow

July 8, 2014

Countless Tiny Windows

“You took my cello,” I went on. And before I could finish the sentence, I saw the recognition in the skin around his eyes—little creases that deepened when he smiled. “And I remember you lifted it up like a violin. Even made for a child, it had to be three times as big. You pressed the endpin into your neck.” For years I had thought back about the impression that it made in his skin and how painful it looked.

When I got there the place had been full of people, but by the time I went up to him the crowd was starting to thin out. He was friendly and apologetic for not recognizing me, but I couldn't blame him. By now my own wrinkles had begun to set in around the eyes, the skin around my neck was a little looser, but I had still kept my figure for the most part. He took me to an office at the end of a well-lit hallway, and we chatted like old friends. At one point he asked about my parents and I told him they passed away in a car accident. It wasn't true. I couldn't tell you why I said it. He reacted with a stern nod of sympathy that might have been enough given the context. They weren't close. They didn't keep in touch. If it weren't for a chance encounter I'd had with him, I doubt he would have remembered them at all. He asked if I still played the cello, and I said that I didn't.

I'd read in the paper that he was in the city for an exhibition, a small gallery in the Mission. The photographs were mostly landscapes, hills and remote villages that I didn't recognize, the occasional farm worker. I had to walk around for a while before I worked up the nerve to approach him. He was with a young woman who couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

The first time I met Edward was when I was a little girl. My parents would often play host to visiting Romanian artists—a succession of painters, sculptors, writers, and other musicians. He was there for two days, but he stood out to me because of how quiet he was. My father was given to making wild declarations that I, at around nine years old, couldn't really argue with—and really I had no reason to argue. He would say things that I didn't understand about the revolution. He would make emphatic claims about Ceausescu that could have been supporting or condemning him for all I knew. The things I remembered were the swings of emotion when he talked—the loose, expressive movements meant, perhaps, to counteract the years of constraint. Edward, though, had these tempered mannerisms. He would nod his head or set his napkin down and nothing else. It wasn't a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, but a kind of removal that, in thinking back, I imagine was cultivated by a desire to see things from a different perspective. It was a bit like a puzzle when I would think about him over the years—each fragmented memory with its own ebb and flow of connection.

They were both musicians, my parents. They moved to San Francisco just before the December revolt, and as I grew up that fact always felt poignant to me. This idea of a turning point, a crescendo—where the cacophony of existence can hang for a moment, suspended, and we never see what could have gone another way. My father had been a pianist for a small orchestra, and my mother was a sweet and mild woman who gave cello lessons out of our apartment, including my own lessons. Both my parents would shower me with affection whenever I so much as showed an interest in music. It wasn't until age twelve or thirteen that I began to consider how uncomfortable it all made me. This exposure to the arts from such a young age, and regardless of how little attention I payed, how many times I skipped practicing to go and hang out with friends, they always told me how beautifully I played, how proud they were of me. But it was all too much, and I think I started to recognize that fairly early—this notion that I was special, that I could be special, was something I only ever wanted to push away.

It was just the three of us in a small two bedroom apartment in Bayview. When the men came to visit they would stay for a night or two nights. I would build a fort in the living room using chairs and blankets, while some strange man would sleep in the small bed in my room. The men and my parents would talk and drink; I remember losing interest in the conversations, my mind wandering off. I'd get lost in some piece of clothing—the intricate weave of a jacket or tie. Then a word would be spoken, one that I recognized, one that might have been animated, and my attention would snap back. Firing squad, internment, Timișoara—I began to feel as though I was perpetually entering into the middle of conversations.

Edward had been a stout young man, and he looked much the same the second time I met him. I was away at college. It was a small liberal arts school in Oregon, and he was giving a talk about photography at the auditorium. I was studying history, but I went because I was seeing this girl who was getting her degree in media arts. Before her I had only dated boys, but I liked how she was a little standoffish. She didn't get jealous if I kissed someone at a party, didn't complain if we went a few days without seeing each other.

At the talk, I recognized him instantly. I don't know how to explain it other than to say I have a thing for faces. He hadn't changed much, though. He had the same broad face and black hair, and he spoke with the same measured cadence that seemed to rise up a little at the end of each sentence as if to create a hint of uncertainty. After it was over I went up to him and told him who I was. He didn't recognize me, but I hadn't expected him to.

That night, the three of us went out for drinks. The college put him up at a little motel just off campus, but we invited him back to my dorm room to spend the night. We'd all had a lot to drink, and I remember he sat on the bed when we got there and watched us start to fuck on the floor. The gag and the spit dripping off lipstick. Wrists held together and the brittle rope. The riding crop she used to use on me. At some point the blindfold went on, and then it was all quiet and nerves and anticipation. In the morning the three of us had breakfast together, and we talked about Hedda Sterne and Tristan Tzara.

After that night I didn't see him—it had been, maybe 20 years. We'd exchanged phone numbers, but back then I would have never thought to call him. I traveled a lot after college, working different jobs. I lived for a time in Paris and Istanbul and Krakow, but had moved back to San Francisco a few years ago. I thought about him often, though. I had the impression that for Edward the time we spent together had passed in hours or days, while for me I had lived a number of lifetimes.

By the time we walked back into the main gallery space, all the spectators had gone. Empty, the room felt somehow smaller. Without a crowd of people moving and buzzing around one turned to the darkened photographs—all the landscapes, all his memories, like countless tiny windows. We passed a partition and saw the girl sitting, but she didn't hear us. I held my hand out in front of Edward's stomach to stop him, and I felt my knuckles brush against what could have been the fabric of his shirt or his soft stomach underneath it.

We stood in silence watching her for what felt like a long time. Her back was turned to us, and we could see her gaze shift periodically as people passed by on the sidewalk outside. She was sitting on a bench made from the same oak as the wood floors—her slow movements a play of shadows that seemed to give off their own light. She was holding her heels by the straps on two outstretched fingers, her palm up the way an aging movie star might hold a cigarette. At some point one of us breathing must have become audible because she seemed to stiffen a bit, and the heels began to sway back and forth. She didn't turn around, but I got the sense that she knew we were there. It was the type of subtle shift one only picks up on when there aren't any other distractions around.

After a moment of this, she changed her position to lie down flat on the bench, her legs crossed at the ankles just barely hanging over the edge. How long have you... Not long. We were only just... of course. You could have... I know. But he watched her a little longer, the change in posture not enough for us to concede our presence. Maybe a minute passed.

“Did a man come to see you?” he asked, to which she didn't respond, but hung her neck off the side of the bench so that she was looking at us upside down.

“He would have had indistinct features. Likely nothing you'd be able to pick out. He might have been difficult to understand—his voice muffled sounding.” She still didn't answer, though—her only movement was to lace her fingers together over her ribs. Her hair, now in a pony tail, rested on the floor in the shape of a long S, and she continued to look at him.

“He wouldn't have been upset. Floating there in his barrel. Buoyant, buoyancy, bouncing. He wouldn't have been angry that you used your heel to rip a hole in the netted blanket. How else were you going to escape, after all?” It was at that point that I realized this was some kind of game they were playing. I felt as if I were trespassing, but in a way that wasn't entirely unwelcome. I was there, but I wasn't—this stranger, a little like a mirror, to take in their performance and feed it back to them through the subtlety of my working through it. Another conversation of which I'd come into the middle.

“Did he come to see you?” Edward asked, again. “Stinking of coconut and cinnamon?”

“No,” she answered. Sitting up and turning to face us—to face him. “He smelled like a fruity kind of gum. Rubbery and chewed up.” She was smiling a bit at that point, but it was with a certain amount of hesitance. I noticed the way that when she gave in, it seemed like a calculated choice that had little to do, I thought, with what he was saying, or the game they were playing. I wondered what my role was in it all.

“We were only just talking,” I said. It was a statement that didn't need to be said. She could have taken it as defensive or possessive, though neither were my intention. It did come out a bit awkward, though. And so, on instinct, I took a step toward her, the strangeness of which caused her to fix her gaze on me with a determined skepticism. Here was this seemingly sweet girl who probably knew very little about who I was or what my relationship with Edward had been. Through the prospect of ignorance she took on a childlike quality.

“Can I touch her?” I asked. Even before I said it I knew that it would come off strange, but I thought maybe she would detect the gentleness in my tone, my offer to show her that even though we didn't know each other, our lives had overlapped across a number of years. The thought that this was all just some romantic notion I'd concocted didn't seem to matter. I think a part of me was just trying it out—testing whether walking this interaction into a corner would produce something strange and new, or if it would be met with the brisk dismissal we've all been trained to recognize as authentic. I'd become accustomed to the latter, but I hoped that we might leave it all open just a little, not wanting the ritual of intention to be subsumed by any perceived idea of formality.

Edward nodded. He seemed more comfortable than I was. He seemed like he had expected this even. The girl didn't move, though. She remained frozen in a state of reluctance, which having lingered too long began to take on the sharp edges of anticipation. I had the feeling that there was something I could communicate to her. Something that might normally take years of slowly chipping away at an exterior hardened by... by what? Any number of things to be filled in or not.

When I got close to her she blinked. First impressions are an interesting phenomenon because one must invariably ask from which point a first impression is to be gauged. The argument could be made that it's the first time you notice the color of someone's eyes because surely that's no more arbitrary than any other moment we might choose.

By my own actions I had set up a scenario where I was the one on display. This girl, paralyzed by circumstance, appeared to me as no more than another audience member waiting for the inevitable anticlimax—a collection of movements on the street mimicking their various coughs and twitches. Of course, none of this was real, but the myriad complexity of possible imaginings seemed to play out like slow music. And so I ran one finger from just above her knee up the slit in her dress nearly to her waist, playing my part, as it were.

When I raised my hand to her cheek she might have blushed. I was close because I wanted to smell something on her—cinnamon or coconut, something to flesh out the dreamlike quality she and Edward had prompted me to consider. Her eyes were green or brown or blue, but it was too dark in the room to know with any certainty. She still hadn't moved; I'd begun to think of her as a statue. One that I could admire, taking deliberate steps around—the grace of which an economy of movement. But I didn't. I brushed her hair from her cheek, the stone I was expecting replaced by the reality of each relaxed lock, my own hand, nervous, giving way to something of a compromise in the shaky pluck of strings. With her hair brushed back I could see the little dimple where an earring used to be—the spike of a heel pressed into a thigh or a stomach. Just as easily a freckle. I could smooth her out because I could. Squint to make her glassy and still, and watch her eyes glaze over, slowly—the way a picked scab fills up with blood. That is what stood out to me.

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Eric Longfellow is currently pursuing a PhD in English Studies. He holds degrees from New York University and Illinois State University and has worked in the publishing industry doing book design for the independent press FC2. While his main focus throughout doctoral study has been fiction writing, his research interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and kink studies. He is currently at work on a novel that takes place in New York City and is set to the backdrop of the global uprisings of 2011.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Joy Ladin

July 7, 2014

Learning to Say “I”

I like a tree in a walking forest

walks slowly over a mountain toward a city

where fourteen million I's brush branches and root

in one another's soil.

Sunset purples half-opened windows.

I smokes on the sill in short-sleeved tee,

smoldering self-destructively.

I is nothing if not sexy.

I knocks on I's door, asks to borrow

full fat milk.

I is a mammal, so is I.

Let's not talk about that.

When I is alone I will will shave I's legs.

Sometimes I is pregnant.

I wishes I could stop saying “I.”

“I” is a lie. Or is I?

I looks inside, excavating versions

of I within I, each unearthed I

larger, cruder, than the I it hid inside.

I pixellates,

dissolves into blurry cells of I,

a swarm of stars or fireflies. I is too close

to appreciate the swarming beauty of I.

I has had it with searching for I,

blessing I, regretting I, fingering I's privates,

feeling shamed

beside slimmer, smarter avatars

of I's idea of I.

Sometimes I stops fingering, excavating, blushing,

smoking, swarming, lying.

I realizes that whatever I does,

I is always walking

in a forest whose collective sigh

expresses something I

hasn't learned to say,

something other than “I.”

The Water We Are

The water we are: the stream of you

braids the stream of me. Braided,

we wash stones toward the sea.

The water we are wills itself thicker.

Whitens; ices over. We trade flow

for crystalline structure. Clarify

how thoroughly we've merged;

the strain

of flowing together.

The water we are – something's changed,

some tilt of earth toward sun

melts our grip on one another, unbraids us.

The water we are

abrades the bed that shapes us,

the forks of dirt that break us,

you into you, me into me,

separate streams, separate directions,

that share a source, a destination, a sea.

Similes for Sentiment

Like a flower deflowered by a 12-year-old,

one petal a pop, despair and hope,

I'm stripped to stem and center.

Like the 12-year-old, I don't care

that I keep getting the wrong answer.

It's June, school's out, the whole wide world's in flower.

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Joy Ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University, has published six books of poetry, including Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life and Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration; her seventh collection, Impersonation, is due out in 2015. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: A Summer Web Celebration of LGBTQ Writers and Artists

May 6, 2014

A CutBank Literary Magazine Summer 2014 Web Feature

Design by: Susan Reahard

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Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”

Please enjoy the series from July 7 through August 23, when we will celebrate at the ZACC in Missoula, MT. We hope you can join us!