Ally > Recent Status Updates

Woods were ordinary,
needing no name. Landscapes need no name

until you leave and language becomes your one bridge back.

- "Blue Ridge Elegy"

I first lost you
abstractly, like losing

a right not needed
yet. Then I lost you in flesh
and there was no more
blank loss.

- "What we lost may come ashore"

Some of us don't get any peace, not really. But that's not the same as happiness. Peace comes to you if you're lucky. Happy you grab and make with your own two hands.

[There's a printing error here where the top line of a poem continuing from the previous page is typeset as a new poem title, leading to a neat moment of dislocation: the previous page ends mid sentence & then there's a whole new poem that only after a moment do you realize can continue the previous one. When would it be cool to do this on purpose?]

we desire to both want and be
until memory strikes a pose

and crosses over the borderline
of our love

-- "Poem on Madonna's Birthday"

we were waiting to
find the way to cross
that parking lot
learning to want to
cross it like the first
mariners did on shore

-- "All Conjunctions Aspire to Greatness"

When I say I, I mean
a Pol Pot bobble head bouncing on Steve Job's [sic] desk.

-- "Cantata After Burning"

bless me
bless you did I sin
no I sneezed

-- "Cantata Under Parker's Statue"

...Last Christmas...

[this is the twelfth? nineteenth? time this joke / device has been used, come on]

...Meredith says, as soon as I accept her FaceTime...

[...on the TOILET, she accepts a FaceTime call WHILE SITTING ON THE JOHN, this girl is not ready for a relationship]

It's impossible to look at Andrew's face and experience negative thoughts.

[She has a crush on a LANDLORD? Ok, this MC's mission of charming the reader is starting out in a DEEP HOLE. Make me hate you a little less, Ellie?]

Ari gives me a look almost as condescending as Greg's. Yet, with her thick black hair, curly punctuated with an undercut and dyed with streaks of purple, I will draw Ari as I always do in my webcomic panels, like a trans dark-skinned badass Rapunzel.]

[Natalie Naudus yay! but ick ick ick, get outta here girl who draws anyone like a 'trans dark-skinned' anything.]

[It’s the All the Birds in the Sky narrator yessssss! Alyssa Bresnahan]

I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap. And I'd bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what they meant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle.

Mollie Houses were a hush-hush part of society... places where men who were attracted to men, women who were attracted to women, people who weren't either gender, and others of the like frequented. He'd even heard others like him attended. Boys mistaken as girls and vice versa.

[Why is it so very common to fold lesbians and trans men into histories of legal persecution that did not include them?]

"Futures" - A.L. Major: This is the obvious closer given its very lovely vision of a Black trans future as a living elder, even among environmental and economic devastation and failing to achieve all of the world-repair one sets out to do. The rest of the essay didn't make much of an impression on me - mostly generic non-binary journey stuff - but that ending is incredibly beautiful.

"In My Worst Nightmares, My Father Transitions" - Kaia Ball: Loved how this bookended the Addie Tsai essay, both looking at unspoken parental queerness. This one is formally really interesting, ranging between vignette to more extended examination to poetic flight, some really nice craft on display. And wonderfully specific in the emotions it invokes. Perhaps still proxy-fighting with the author's parents too much.

"An Incomplete History of Trans Immortality" - Zeyn Joukhadar: This one was bonkers and I LOVED IT. (And beautifully read with appropriately escalating over-the-top-ness.) Mixes art & saints & Inanna (though 'gala' were referred to as 'galli' - first is Sumerian, second unrelated Romans) & lichen. Gorgeous. Also weirdly precarious for a dude with a PhD, but they spoke enough from 1st-person-plural it was forgivable.

"Gender Euphoria Is a Power Source" - Caro De Robertis: Probably my second-least-favorite essay: wild how the light-skinned upper-class non-binary transmasc professor projects so much more anxiety about the violence & precarity they feel they face than any of the Black trans women.

"All Power to the People" - Raquel Willis: Recounting of a particular protest against Eric Adams, centers on Willis' speech at the event. Bog standard rah rah activist essay (without any juicy reflection on how the event actually came together or how the group conceived of its impact, the parts I'm most interested in as an organizer). She is a badass, though, and somewhere this collection has to talk politics, so ok.

"Lusus Deux" - Autumn Fourkiller: Portrait of a childhood/adolescent PCOS-like hormonal issue. Writing was a bit stunt-y (direct & confrontational reader address, playing with the withholding of information, fragments) & I don't think that had much effect. Was grateful for a representation of this category of experience in this collection though, & I felt for the writer.

"Becoming Femme" - Tanais: Oof, I hated this one, and it felt very long. It gender-essentialismed, bad-poly-ed, and straight-leaning-bi-lesbian-fetishized all the heck over me. Orientalist in the fearless way only a rich brown person from Carbondale, IL could be. Shapeless & directionless in form. Ends with a believable story of how the author drove off all their female friends with pettiness.

"Speaking My Language" - Edgar Gomez: The way Gomez fits the trans/gnc umbrella is subtle & doesn't show up much in this piece - the personal anecdote here is a gay guy cruising in a maybe-not-gay bar reassured by 'latinx' on a sticker. Most of the piece is rehashing the latinx/latin/latine/latin@/latino/hispanic debates at a pretty 101 level, plus a lightning-speed non-specific queer childhood retelling. Meh for me.

"Redemption Slayage" - Denny: Written well but also very baby-trans-feeling, not conscious that many of the presentation pressures discussed here as transfeminine pressures exist for many other people, missing nuance toward the many many different forms & strategies of passing & beauty that exist & their implications. Liked spending time with this writer, though.

"Trick" - Meredith Talusan: another one intended for a trans audience, I really liked this one & the specificity / tenderness / risk with which it treated gender identity. (The sex was read weirdly flatly - not at all like Talusan's reading & writing style! - in the audiobook.) I dunno why I always get jump-scared by Boston-in-a-time-period-I-lived-there showing up but that intensified the experience of this one.

"On Beauty" - Akwaeke Emezi: Short one, exemplifying what I love about Emezi (specific prose for hard-to-name feelings & abstractions) and dislike (just... wrong about the world's mechanics, glorifying of suicidality). Their read of gender is off here IMO - their top surgery didn't make them a freak outside the gender system, it didn't even make them visibly gnc to most given the rest of their presentation.

"The Goddess in the Volcano" - Gabrielle Bellot: I liked this writing style: specific, diaristic. Felt I got to know the writer. A little low-stakes, like, cool, you dropped acid and had some therapeutic breakthroughs, and boo, your mom cut you off relationally, and ok, you visited Hawaii and felt connected to another culture's myths. Not much "so what". Would have been fine but the essay was long for the stakes.

"Femininity Was the Knife I Wielded" - Jonah Wu: A transition 101 essay for a cis audience, but not a bad one.

"Straining Toward Humanity" - Kai Cheng Thom: The most t4t essay so far, a meditation on the cost of the monster or saint mantle, and the inadequacy of monster-reclamation attempts. Like most KCT essays, it's pretty trans-woman-specific, has a little academia envy, and some nuances might be inaccessible if you weren't trans in the 2010s, while being beautiful, incisive, generous-hearted, and full of fresh insight.

"I'm Still Learning" - Miss Peppermint: goes abstracto for a long while describing political dynamics I think most readers are going to be familiar with already. Veers toward the personal but doesn't remain in specifics for long. An essay any supporter of trans rights could have written (except for the mentions of being on Pose). Would have liked to see more risks here.