Communities, come unity. Who belongs?
Defining right and wrong without binaries.

You can’t decenter something that isn’t centered. You can’t see outside an ego that hasn’t yet entered your mind. You can try, but you might end up with schizophrenia.

There’s a site in my mind that’s a sight in the desert. A storm that I weathered. Stiff as a board, light as a feather. Shit I’m so bored, the days are all tethered together. Now I’m ripped and forlorn, deciding whether or not to recount this stuff.

Once in the basement of my boarding school I was taped to a chair it felt cool against my skin.

Holding your own reality while confined by people who tell you to hold your own reality is pretty absurd.
Brainwashed by words in basements. Adjacent lives tied together.
Tightening the chord, lifting the lever.
Gifts that I scorn versus righteous endeavors. Who’s clever now?

Don’t dismiss feminism as 2-D, it’s got a history,
its rich in fat. Feminism: the cat’s pajamas.

I step in line for “Beauty Night” every friday night for fifteen months. No running.
In the med room one by one Mary hands us plastic boxes. Some contents are toxic, or sharp, some are nail files. We file out.
Now in the cafeteria we sit at tables. “Lately I’ve been feeling much more stable”
“C.” says as she tweezes her brows.
This kind of statement was extremely political, in critical proximity to our note-taking captors.

I wonder about the performativity of recovery.
How can we tell who’s “recovering.”
If “C.” had said “I’m shuddering at every moment” like when we were alone,
her mobility would have been considerably postponed.

My community had four horizontal and vertical divisions. Weird incisions, disciplining us.
“Families” A, B, C, D. “Phases” 1,2,4,3. Unless you ran.
Phase Orange. Neoliberal contortions.
You had to wear slippers after you were caught. They taught us. “If you run,”
they’d say, “you’re far away from water and could die.
Your only other option is to hitch a ride and sell your body.”
This shit was casual, haughty, authoritative.

“T.” files her nails furiously. “L.” paints hers bright pink which she thinks is allowed because she made it to phase 3. She’s wrong though. It’s too neon. She takes it off quickly.

Phase ones can’t pluck their eyebrows because they haven’t earned it. So we called “J.” Frida. She’d turn her head a bit, she’d smile. “I’ll be movin’ up soon, should be just a little while.” She moved up four months later.

I AM THE RECKONING AND THE FORCE; THE RELENTLESS GRINDING OF TEETH. I AM DIALECTICALLY REMORSEFUL. THE ENDLESS FINDING, DELETED.

To prove our sanities we had to become Women. Upper phases were driven to creepy group dates with a boy’s school. Rules about bodies.
To prove our sanities we had to be straight. They didn’t even really hate admitting it.

I sit in a dark room with my therapist. I confess, “My shadow is manipulative and mean. Show me your throat and I’ll show you my teeth.” Hand me my coat and remove the wreath. Know I’ve got photos I owe you some cheese. Show me a boat and I’ll loan you my sneezes Jesus I don’t know. The days just kept going and going and going and going and going.

“G.” sits in the shower and removes the safety guard from her electric razor, pushes it deep into her arm. Human alarms sound. She’s put in solitary.
I saw the room once. There was a drain on the floor to pee into if they left you in there too long.

I was still a gender love spy. I felt so alone. We weren’t allowed to use the phones.
Everything we did was documented. Every hour during sleep. Flashlights in my eyes.

Every Friday we mylinate neural pathways which oppress us…
We learn to be ladies. We learn to be neoliberal.
We yearned to be shady. The personal is the political.

Lockdown helped me to value my life. Lockdown taught me to be a wife.

The desert was my prison. The desert is within me.

Those girls were my companions.
Those girls have Stockholm syndrome and won’t abandon it.
They won’t let up, they worship that school.

My friends were broken. Now they feel fixed… Literally they are the Smith to my Marx.
We’re describing the same things, except they totally loved it whereas I am barfing.

Once in the basement of my boarding school we were taped to chairs and brought to new awareness.

I long for a community imbued with something like “mestiza consciousness”
“…though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm,” (Gloria Anzaldua).

A modest masochism motivates me.