I’m so excited I can’t stop hugging Sam and running up and down the apartment. Even the poodle is happy, barking in celebration!

We explore transracial adoption, mixed race identity, and interracial/cultural relationships in the queer community. We debut June 11 & 12 at The Garage as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. queerculturalcenter.org/NQAF/performance/mixed-blended-whole

To help raise money to pay for theater space, rehearsal time, community workshops, costumes, marketing, and hopefully ourselves, we have put together two events:

ONLINE AUCTION

Auction ends: May 21, 2012

An excellent opportunity to bid on over 30 amazing talented healers/artists/businesses who have donated their services: write your memoir, enjoy a massage, get a swanky haircut, unblock chi with acupuncture, rock out with music lessons, and much more!

Here’s what you’ll need to make a bid:
www.32auctions.com/108
Auction ID: 108
password: heal

HEALING DAY BENEFIT

Emergence Healing Studio

4052 18th Street, San Francisco

Sunday, May 20; 12-6pm

Emergence has graciously donated their space and some of their healers to support our work. All money will benefit Mixed, Blended & Whole.

Participating Healers:

Dr. Anjanette Price, Upper Cervical Chiropractor, 12-6pm
Jules Sears, Sound healing with tuning forks, bowls, and gongs 12-3pm
Mark Peterson-Estrada, Reiki, 12-3pm
Dave Robb, Swedish and Deep Tissue Massage, 12-3pm
Florence Arnold, Swedish and Deep Tissue Massage, 12-3pm
Tiffany Wade, Craniosacral and Integrative Massage, 3-6pm
Kristin Dodds, Reiki and Swedish Massage, 3-6pm
Tracy Dixon, Rolf Method of Structural Integration, 3-6pm
Cade Sparkman, Deep Tissue Massage, 3-6pm
Dave Haase, Deep Tissue and Chair massage, 3-6pm

Cost:

• Walk-in availability: 3-6pm we offer chair massages at $1-$2/minute
• 55-minute sessions are available at $60-$90 (To reserve a session with one of the participating healers contact Amber Field, tabla_queen@yahoo.com or 415-573-4092.)

Come join the Mixed, Blended & Whole community and help heal divides and re-member our wholeness through art.

Thank you !

www.herkind.org

I’m PROUD to present HER KIND, the official blog of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, which Rosebud Ben-Oni and I co-edit. It’s been two years in preparation, and we have numerous fine writers to feature. First up: Elizabeth Searle, Lucy Biederman, R. Erica Doyle, and Monica A. Hand. Coming soon: Roxane Gay and Melissa Chadburn, as well as Neelanjana Banerjee, Laura Goode, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, and Lisa Sisler.

Check out the press release in my News & Happenings.

The right side of my body has been protecting the left side. It was on the left a car hit me. I broke my leg, scrapes and bruises, a damaged liver. The liver is fine, “it heals like a starfish,” the doctor said to me. I was eight and still my body remembers this. My subsequent physical ailments, from eyes down to toes, have manifested on my left. The left and right sides of my body curve into each other as if I’m making a pod of absolute safety. Nothing enters, nothing exits. Maybe something will be born.

After the completion and then the publication of Hurrah’s Nest, I feared I wouldn’t have anything else to write about. I’ve written so much about my childhood—it was the difficulty and confusion of those years that brought me to poetry. My interest in writing through those formative fears and shames were defining me as a poet. Without those stories, those same pains I keep returning to, what now will be my inspiration?

I have maintained the roles my body has taken on. Allowing the left side, which represents the feminine principle—the ability to ask for help, to receive or to surrender; to nourish and care for others; inner world of home and family; how you feel about being a woman or expressing your feminine energy—to remain inactive and passive. The feminine is underdeveloped, fearing expression. What was nurtured in my home, and reinforced in society, were the masculine aspects of rationality, efficiency, the ability to dominate and be assertive, knowing all the answers. To engage my emotions, I did so in private, minimizing what I believed feminine in me to protect it from abuse, misrepresentation, and rejection.

My poetry no longer feels like it can be that tucked-away, private room I assigned it to be years ago, because that room was necessitated by the moment, by that period of time, and now that I am in a different season of my life, I want something balanced, I want the feminine energy to be as public and formidable as she is private and timid.

Being off balance, with pigeon-toed feet, it’s as if I keep walking into the same part of myself. Departing with a similar set of words, metaphors, and prosody. I have repeated childhood patterns in intimate relationships and ended up reinforcing my own invisibility and victim consciousness. Afraid to shift my heart to receiving and giving love, I take and take on. Emotionally hoarding a past, I’m bored with my writing and my body’s aches and pains are letting me know, it’s not working anymore.

As a poet and writer, I think of building a body of work. I’ve been thinking too of what it means to be a black body, woman body, queer body building a body of work. What I’ve come to realize, is I don’t want to be divided in my understanding and experience of self. In a culture with is violent discomfort with the feminine, to actively invite and honor that energy within my own body and work, is subversive. Is queer. Is black. Is everything that doesn’t fit with what they tell us. (“They” being those who we give authority over our lives.)

In Saeed Jones’ essay, “Queering Poetics, or “Werking” It,” he writes that “queer implies a slipperiness, a subversion of expectations and conventions, and inability to sit still, a refusal to obey.” I’ve been asked, when did I know I was gay/lesbian/same gender loving/etc? I think a better question would be: when did you know you refused to obey? That question keeps me whole—I don’t feel divided and constructed in my experience, like I can be conquered and tamed, instead I feel tapped into my personal authority. Unafraid to be me, my many and varied parts.

To answer the question of disobedience: I started kindergarten, it was winter, the first time I really experienced snow. I wore my favorite outfit to school: red, corduroy overalls, and the bib was heart shaped! While the other kids were lining up to go into class, I decided to stay outside and play. Make snow angels where there were no footprints or dog pee. Played on the jungle gym and at one point my classmates spotted me and informed the teacher. The principal came out—tall, authoritative man with a tiny mouth hidden by a dark beard and said, “Young lady, what are YOU doing out here?!” Flushed from running around, snow melting on my face, I met his eyes and told him, “Playing in the snow.” What?! Couldn’t he see I was werking this snow for every fun-filled flake it had?

My partner tells me, while checking in after our session, that the back and forth sensation she often felt bouncing from shoulder to shoulder, one side compensating for the other, now shifted to a horizontal rhythm. Up and down, like the spine, midline—centered. This makes me proud. I’ve been consciously breaking the pattern of relying solely on my right side. Even simple things as letting my left hand pick up more objects, as well as flit around in conversation, touch and be touched. Too, having that sense of safety with my partner to let go and trust that she can hold me is sweet surrender—burden off my shoulders, bridge off my back.

That kind of unwinding feels like a snow day. My heart bright, visible on my chest. I have no need for body armor because I feel loved and protected. And this feels new. I haven’t quite gotten the language. Reminds me of being in first grade and learning to read—how to make these shapes into meaning? I need a teacher (or teachers) to help me crack the shapes into meaning! I was standing in my kitchen preparing potatoes for roasting and I had a taste for form, particularly writers who play with poetic form in compelling ways and who are innovating their own forms. I needed examples of disobedience and so asked my friends on Facebook who they would recommend. The response was overwhelming, even one friend commented: “You’ve struck a vein!”

The blood is the ocean, the ocean is Yemaya—the essence of motherhood, the protector of children, the patron deity of women. This list of poets will help me find my lefted voice, speak my whole nature, remind my brain of its “tough mother:”

“To A Mouse,” Robert Burns

Blue Front, Martha Collins

Skin, Inc: Identity Repair Poems, Thomas Sayers Ellis

A Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

me and Nina, Monica Hand

Erica Hunt

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Bhanu Kapil

Penury, Myung Mi Kim

The Black Automaton and Fear, Some, Doug Kearney

Gigan form, invented by Ruth Ellen Kocher

leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess

Radi OS, Ronald Johnson

Dambudzo Marechera

Committed to Breathing, Tony Medina

Entrepôt, Mark McMorris

Harryette Mullen

Thylias Moss http://www.quickmuse.com/archive/landing.php?poem=1uTB8M4QJXiFeJKXgfhxMgFgQmD8S1

Akilah Oliver

Sightings, Shin Yu Pai

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine

City Eclogue, Ed Roberson

The new black, Evie Shockley

Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith

Juliana Spahr

Butterfly Burning, Yvonne Vera (novel)

Reverse Rapture, Dara Wier

c.c., Tyrone Williams

Avery Young

Read the rest here: Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White.

I am sharing work in progress for a show called Mixed, Blended & Whole, to be performed at that Queer Arts Festival (SF) in June. The performance and my writing is exploring racial identity, relationships, and intimacy. Mostly for me, I wrestle with identifying with absence, my father’s absence, and how that affects my sense of visibility, importance, and loveability, even how I regard my own femininity. . . .The neurotic questioning that shows itself in intimate relationships: what part of me is wanted, not wanted; am i?

Here is the final vignette from the recording:

If there was dust, my eyes could not see in this night, her face inhaling the exhaust of his car, driving down East 15^th to a set of lights that hold him in red, hugged by a tree-line street that will not judge him for leaving her in the road.

            Her body she lifts and drags to the curb; down and out, she looks at the sky like someone will come and take her back to the moment when this was just fear lurking in the back of her throat. Tonight she has proven herself right. And what does it mean to be right in this case?

            When I ask her if she is OK, first she has to clear the brake lights from her eyes, the grief from her face—I am a stranger who has witnessed the little girl part of herself: deprived and feeling unlovable. If I was to tell her that we are the same, would she believe this look of concern on my face? Will she take this needle and thread I carry and start stitching the wound she thought healed? Will she look for the glass buried deep in muscle and memory and hold it to my face like a note and tell me, This is what I’ve been looking for?

            Second she must find her humanity to come back to. She, in perfect puppet fashion, looks me square in the eyes like chopped-down wood and says, I’m OK.

            I’m hesitant to leave because I know this lie—this final frontier of words you say because you can’t name where you are and you need to be left alone to figure it out. And I leave her there. And the neighbors are taking trash to the curb, and the homeless woman with oversized shoes will seize the redeemables before the truck comes.

Arisa White « Hazel.m4v – YouTube.

In her debut poetry collection Hurrah’s Nest, Arisa White offers a lovely and haunting family portrait. Drawing from he life as a young girl raised in Brooklyn, Arisa is neither guarded in her honesty, nor self-indulgent. The collection poignantly recovers moments of a childhood, simple as they are impacting, dark as they are colorful, while it explores a refreshing range in style and form.

Ultimately, a narrative is assembled in Arisa’s lines, and we come to love and hope for her characters — seven siblings and their mother, who cannot be protected from her own struggles and search for love. At the same time, Arisa’s style shapeshifts into the abstract, expertly playing with the possibilities of poetry, so that the story of a family grounded against its will is ultimately told in a language that leaps into dreamlike flights.

I had the privilege of interviewing Arisa on her experience writing Hurrah’s Nest.

It continues here: Poetry Review: Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White | The Narrator.