I came out many years ago, when the HIV crises was peaking, and when a person still had to cull hard-copies of encyclopedias and the DSMV to see what the word Bisexual even meant – and it meant different things in different resources. I knew I was simply attracted to people. It didn’t matter what their gender(s) were. It didn’t matter what society said – or maybe it mattered more that I didn’t like what society said my being a woman MEANT. So, when I started to work on poems for my MFA in the late 90s, I had run the gamut as a community activist… letter writer, support group facilitator, marcher and button wearer, columnist in Out in the Mountains (our then local Queer newspaper) and the national Anything That Moves magazine (Now sadly defunct, and I hear worth about $20 a pop on the Bi circuit). . .
Here is one of the poems I wrote during my tenure in graduate school in an effort to articulate my identity, both as a woman, and as a bisexual (read: someone who was interested in people – whatever their gender identity)…
I Dared not…
Mother, I dared not ask you
Why I could not seem
to love only men,
to swish my square hips
just so, to leave behind
my favorite boots for a pair
of your immaculate pumps.
You would not listen
if I told you I don’t
believe the skirt
makes the woman.
I’m not attracted to
that great harry lump
of muscle across
the room that winks
and calls me sweetie
when he orders a drink.
I’m intrigued, instead,
by the small-boned man
by the piano with
the delicate fingers
who plays the cello and
smiles sublimely.
I’m all aflutter when
the waitress at table five
with a shaved head and
combat boots winks her
pierced eye at me and
says she’s dying to taste
my dull, unpainted
lips after hours.
I know you don’t believe in
my search for the perfect hybrid
that you don’t want to release me
from the grip of your ideals.
I find myself covered by each bit
of praise you ever gave. Each nod
or no has stuck to me like starfish
splayed over my cheekbones until
your portrait was complete
and only my frightened
eyes peered through,
reflecting your identical face,
until now.
Now, I have gone out to pick
the parts of my gender from the air
Like great bubbles. They float
just out of reach as
I climb out of
myself
in a twisting dance, and
Each piece might burst
as the soap dries or
solidify as the glass cools into
Victorian witch-balls so that –
if I place them in the window –
I know they can deflect the worst of the storm
while still calling down
the lightning I long to feel on my skin.
girlusinterruptus 