“Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see the future beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.” 

—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then & There of Queer Futurity

Rose Zinnia was born in Akron, Ohio & is the author of the chapbooks Golden Nothing Forever (Nonbinary), Abracadabrachrysanthemum, Hands, and River (with Ross Gay). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, The Tenderness Project, The Ocean State Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. They live with their wolfdog, Kiki, in Bloomington, Indiana where ze are an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Indiana University & a book/graphic designer. Ze co-edit w the trees, poiesis, & the reading series, syzygy.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Rose, what poems have you brought for us today?

nonmonogamous poem / poem ending w a line by gwendolyn brooks
i told my doctor i was nonmonogamous
& that my tinder profile says
90% lesbian 10% bi/pan 111% queer & she guffawed
before telling me how to safely engage
in rectal play
i asked her if she knew how
it could be scientific /cally possible that
everyone is
as gorgeous
as the blue snow plaiting my dog’s coat
scrawling its lost alphabet
thru the silvery sinews of
the days bellowing & billowing
before melting softly into his ombre’d fur /?
death allows for this ::: for life to be /come
the wild horse in catalonia
stoking up dirt & ash like an earthprayer
rolling & rollicking
on its spine carnally
caught
in my rearview mirror
i’ve come to understand i’ve hallucinated
most of “my” life
everyone was once a tiny baby
wo a name
an armless white tadpole
on a protein chain
in the cellular thought process
even god
keens into the endless black sky
one lugubrious february
after another
everyone is as beautiful as
my dog eating zinnia petals
all summer i felt digital
like a video game
so i re-did my character i ate
yr listening i ate yr ear /s
w my lap lap lapping
god i could liqq up
every tiddly misery all my puny sorrows
& cocoon a w/hole fresh planet
or at least a new moon but for now
i kiss everything i kiss
this achar that dances
my tongue u made my tongue /dance
i kiss the supersoaker
in which i store my tears
for the days i forget to wake up
& press my face
into the earth & singsingsing
i kiss my eyegasming & yrs
& yrs & yrs & yrs
i kiss u then u then back to u
on repeat & shuffle (eternal)
i swallow yr tears
& transform them into joijoijoi
we get close / r
to god /’s argot every-er day i
zoom my eye into the seven ends
of yr hair’s splitting
a firework of mane the same
color as mine i drag my tongue down
yr armpit
i get to be alive
every day
on this planet in this body in the earth
liqqing armpits
i love u & u & u
& u & u who loves u
who loves u who loves u&u&u
i am so full of compersion
i have come to expect ancient mirrors
to fall from the sky
& they do & they don’t
shatter
they ask why construct a dam for our loving /?
i am joi’d in my mutant
longing my mutated
mutilated jouissance
elsewhere we exist
in a giant orgy ball of light
spinning furiously tender
yes i am aware historically & currently
love is a fiscal arrangement
but i am a recalcitrant
extraterrestrial communist
i have to believe in the im/possible
to cleave it / into obl /iteration /s
i fall asleep between two people i love
& wake up holding both of their hands
we are meant to make of this planet
in these bodies
dreams real’d we are meant to
become unrecognizable to
our selves god
says love
yr hearts out my queer
babies love every
never nothing not
& open yrselves so that
u form a new shape
no longer attached
in tightly wrought mannequin’d
casts (the body) we have to let
each other out
we are each other’s
harvest / we are each other’s
magnitude & bond