Pink-Think: Queering Poetics

GUILLERMO CALIFORNIA FONG-HIRSCHOWITZ

(preferred pronouns: She/Shoes/Shriek)
Cali is a poetic agitator and person of day-glo rainbow color. 
She is invested in poetry as liquid fuel to be ignited and expended
in burning down the hetero-fascist farm. 
Her work has appeared in Queering the Gayness, Transactions and Humpty Review. 
She has contributed scholarly work to Gendering Migration, 
focusing on gay discourses, U.S. imperialism, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. 
She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Ysidro College. 
She’s a surfer who lost her board but still rides the wave . . .  
proud LatinX needing neither corona ni sombrero.
Cali is left-coast loca calificada for realz. Follow her on kwakee.com.

The Preamble:

Sustainably globally gay / we need more NOW / socially-conscious progressive group-think / openness & tolerance of diversity in perversity / justice for more more more gay gay gay / it’s progress it’s now its queer-friendly because its sustainably globally gay / when gay gets gayer the queering gets clearer / so  start the conversation now about LGBT1A9.ZLX / inclusion through cluelessness in transparent openness / by the way— go GENDERFLUID / before homosexuality queers the queerness of the ongoing conversation / celebrate queerness, OK ?

The Monologue:

I choose to live life gay. More than that—the life of a gay man who has transitioned to woman, a LESBIAN woman. Therefore, I am a man choosing to live as a woman who desires other women. But I actually am a man. At least, I was a man. So, I am an ex-man who desires women (although I am a homosexual transitioned to female Lesbian). Therefore we need to talk about why I, as an ex-hetero, ex-man find myself oppressed by a gender-rigid society that would deny me my right to live as a woman who desires other women and so invert my original heterosexuality, and I am self-oppressed by this inversion. Only in transitioning to homo-hetero paradoxical heterodoxy can I make sense to myself, and therefore prove that God is wrong and that gender is mine to choose and to define. Because this is about ME (and my sexuality . . .)

The Conclusion :

  This world cannot get QUEER enough FAST enough for me . . .  and for my poetry.



PROMPT #8:
Name your alter-ego, and describe him/her in detail. Then write in your alter-ego’s voice.

Trans World Air Lines

Too little and of course, too late
they spend what’s left imprudently
attempting to alleviate
the love of God’s own liberty:
The world transexual one-party state.

They think it’s normal — right for all
lost in a prideful dying fall
their lions heed the sea-horse call
attempting to transgender fate;
the devil searches for a mate
his nightly Babylonian date:
the world transexual one-party state.

They’ll legislate the Lord away
(his fundie followers as well)
their hateful heaven, holy hell
shall wither up and disappear
before redemption can draw near.
Their myths no more shall obfuscate
nor dangle such celestial bait
that underwriters overrate:
the world transexual one-party state.

Their antichrist is overpriced,
the nations, globally enticed,
now glorify the deviance
in herd-like mass obedience
surrendering to expedience:
where good is bad, and bad is great
and Christ the only one to hate,
allegiances exacerbate
the world transsexual one-party state.

Parties will form and parties end
but parties can no more defend
consolidation into one
than flip a switch and dark the sun;
the Caesars left this part undone
the Muslims are just having fun
with our transsexual one-party state.

Bring on the night until we see
that dark means dimming by degree
two parties? Overdone by one !
So let it bleed and let it be
till One is All and all agree
that we are doomed to hesitate
when God cannot resuscitate
the late One-World Transsexual State.

PRIDE: Poultry in Motion

 

The dawn is nigh at hand. The clouds
begin to lift above the grange.
Arise, O Phoebus, bless the crowds—
let poultry roam the range.

I’ll bind a broom of gathered hay
to sweep the hen-house free of hate.
Let roosters hail the crack of day
and chicks with cocks tempt fate.

A fractured self and a challenge hurled:
they left the shell—but found it rough
because our bigoted barnyard world
cannot get queer enough fast enough.

They flutter through the breeder’s farm
subverting gender’s useless role.
We feel their pain, and mean no harm,
yet question this progressive goal.

They cluck a brand-new barnyard song:
Gender Identity Obsolete!
(As long as they claim God hatched them wrong,
biology signals their defeat.)

While poultry scratches rhymes for “hen”
and chicks are combing crests for cocks
let’s ring the dinner bell and then
we’ll synchronize the global clocks.

Let Mankind’s unmanned race delight
at Jesus’ gender-free return.
Soon Africa shall see the light
and Araby’s sun more brightly burn.

Then dawn shall break o’er Russian plains
to liberate the Tartar races;
loose their limbs from Gender’s chains
to stride with polymorphous paces.

China too, and Southeast Asia
swift shall follow in their train
celebrating sex-aphasia
joining in the West’s refrain.

Hindu multitudes will rise
to vanquish gender, caste aside
and shake the slumber from their eyes
with metro-ambisexual pride.

Carib isles, with Latin kingdoms
From the tropics to the mountains
Shall announce they too are Wisdom’s,
drinking from de-gendered fountains.

Juveniles, raised to simply be
shall pioneer new modes of life;
explore horizons happily
set free from biologic strife.

Then shall our earth, in glad array
spade dirt upon Tradition’s tomb;
unshackled from that dark dismay
to grieve – but nevermore exhume.

Alas, the global dreams descend.
We’re back in the barnyard, gender-queer…
where hens have cocks and eggshells bend
transcending Nature’s reign of fear.

The henhouse still votes hetero –
their eggless chickens cluck for rights
biologists, ex utero
are born to further futile flights.

Because I was almost one of them
I’ve earned the right to make fun of them.
Time alone will tell if this trend
remains coherent to the end.

 

June: You GO, Girl !

 

 

The Fowl is Fair

We live in times of innovation. PHX 2
Winds of change affront the nation;
wind most welcome—by a few
(the masses know not what to do
with engineered progressive change,
their morals slow to rearrange).
And thus, in ornithology
we find an apt analogy…

Phoenix-like the vulture rose
in rainbow raiment, from repose
Its plumage all askew, a freak:
a mutant with a painted beak
borne of winds but lately blown.
This strange new hybrid (yet unflown)
did twitter forth an avian boon.
It preened its plumes and croaked a tune:

I represent that rarest fowl,
far wiser than outmoded owl…Phx rising
A dazzling swan of change am I
brought forth to liberate the sky!

(Yet more appeared a fractured emu;
fair is fowl post-op… they tried to
cross said emu with an ostrich!
(What the hell—the surgeon got rich
changing apples into mangos;
altering the twos to tangos…)

Fresh from gender suicide
he moulted into she. Beside
herself (itself?) with grief, regarded
previous selves as false: discarded
Sir for Madam overnight;PHX 3
fixed it, mixed it, made it right.
Since God was wrong the first time ‘round,
Man (or something) thus is bound
hormonally to tweak and mutate,
hastening rebirth’s freakish due-date.

A manly bass—and yet the face
was poorly paired in his/her case
Soprano ought to have resounded;
yet the voice left one confounded.

Rainbow bracelets notwithstanding
this was clearly modern branding
(on the forehead—like a beast?)
well, Jesus told the truth at least:
that angels are of neither gender
(hence no need to check the member.)

Lest we offend endangered species
I commend transgendered theses—
paired with warning and a fable
as they turn the feathered table:

We may nurture fair to foul
while nature shrieks a hideous howl
but foul to fair cannot return;
thus trapped, both Eve and Adam burn.

BEYOND PHOENIX
Phx rising