Things that keep me here
The First Time | "It’s time to gird your loins and read your queer elders."
Don’t laugh, but she’s only realized now, about to officially become a senior, that she’s fabulous.
My mother died after nearly two years in isolation due to COVID-19 protocols, not in her 40+ years home full of memories, but in a new independent/assisted living unit in a Catholic senior’s facility on Five Points Road in the middle of nowhere, skirting what was once rural Northwest Ohio between the Maumee River and Bowling Green State University.
At the time, I had greeted her self-initiated move with praise, no small thing getting out from underneath that home in disrepair, preparation for these final years of living, everything looked after, everything done for her, activities galore, transportation to nearby strip malls and doctor’s appointments, even an old high school chum of mine working there she was friends with. A cross between a Holiday Inn and The Love Boat with a chapel (she had long since stopped going to church). In her typical fashion Suzanne, was gung-ho and mostly spoke glowingly of her new found amenities and life.
Even though I very rarely went down for family Christmas (not my holiday) I knew I simply had to make the exception that year, which was being held for the first time in a Community Room at her residence. And, yes, it was great to see everyone, okay not everyone, but the thing my mother lived most for was seeing all of her four kids in the same place with her, her home, hearing the banter and laughter of our familiar voices, that we still came together to be with her.
“Not all of my friends have this you know,” she would say, beaming, “Hell most of my friends, they're kids don’t even speak to them.”
“Yeah, Mom, we know,” having heard it so many times, but the fact that this mattered so much to her, meant the world.
Then it became the lost world.
The largest figure in my life, the mother who “kept me here,” gone.
Canada’s all-poetry shop, knife | fork | book, as a bricks and mortar place, a place held dear by poets across this country and elsewhere, gone. While KFB still fully functions as a small press and plays host to a yearly poetry festival, this was a devastating loss to any sense of community and cut short what was a Toronto landmark arts destination.
Any city life, any reason to even live in a city, gone.
Many go to places, gone.
Friends in isolation, replaced by screens.
My balcony, a.k.a. the gayest corner in the city, gateway to the Village, my only respite in the good months, a perch to view any signs of life, any familiar. My thankfulness that I even have this base (being put out onto the street is a real fear), my own assisted living that affords me shelter/home. The only thing that kept/keeps me from completely falling through the cracks. The only reason I’m still here.
That, and my touchstones, the very things of life itself, people, places, things, both dead and alive, real/imagined, intimates, beloveds, so deeply/physically connected form the webbing of a hammock between two pines on a single rock in Georgian Bay, or a chair on the porch of dear friends overlooking the Bay of Fundy, a dock where Neil and I dangle our legs in the water, the immediacy of faces who shine, are radiant in return, even [especially when] masked.
My first four years in and out of hospitals—premature, underdeveloped lungs, mistaken for tuberculosis, cancer—I know the faces of masked nurses, my mother, tending, caring, keeping me here. Lifesavers.
On good days, any good day, I steered clear of the ever-present, constantly dark undertow … I’d see it, a few yards from me, just past the calm. You don’t play in undertow, it will fucking take you down.
What are good days? These days.
Good days are finding it. Your senses. What still reaches/touches you. Your awareness of such. A song. A taste. A refreshment. A landing (if your lucky). However ‘small.’ However momentary. Even if it’s just to ‘get up.’
The spaghetti and meatballs at Sugo. Making your way to see the new Kent Monkman at the ROM. Getting to your friend’s show. Picking up/returning library books. Creating new work sources for income. Returning messages, emails. Making a soup.
No. I don’t always want to. I didn’t want to most days. I didn’t want to be here. Live this life.
I live as a single person. Single people know. It can suck to have anything/everything that happens rest with you. No food in the house. Kitchen sink leaks. Run out of toilet paper, money. All on you, kid.
It’s a courageous act to continue. Helps to be self-amused. And my soups are delicious.
Hasn't one pandemic taking the lives of so many close to me been enough? Haven’t I fucking lived [through] long enough? FFS.
As Suzanne might say, “I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
A couple of things really made the difference.
Writing to/for someone.
Unexpectedly meeting someone new who reminded me of, matched my joy.
My book Poetry is Queer was supposed to come out in 2022, but my friend, poet/editor, Jim Johnstone wondered if I could complete it for an early date, and I said, “If I sit down to it.” That’s exactly what I did, mapping it out, placing writings in a shared folder weekly for a year until it was done (Pub date, Oct 2021).
I’m good with deadlines. I love sitting down to something.
But, what really helped me, in this particular instance, was having someone to write to/for.
Having immigrated from the States [Reagan got elected, I met a boy, “America. Love it or Leave It”], my love/hate relationship remains to this day, and what I see happening there now is increasingly horrifying. Yes, there’s much wrong/harm injustice to be tended to/fully addressed here, and the banning of books, curriculum, deliberate erasure of history/facts, full-on attacks of oppressed peoples bodies/beings, capitalism at the cost of multitudes, the very same evil authorities of church and state that willfully kill, call for the murder of anything other.
It’s tough to be a girl, queer, trans, bipoc, hell, it’s even fucked for the gay-friendly.
This is not new, and way older than you and me.
As a young’n, I voraciously combed libraries, galleries, theatres in search of anything remotely gay, a treasure hunt, to imagine/construct any queer life at all in this hateful world. Gide. Genet. Isherwood. Tennessee. Baldwin. Duberman. Camus. Most arrested, all criminals at the time, many in therapies with promises of cures, many married at one point with children, some momentarily praised, mostly reviled, fears of losing jobs or not getting promoted, queer artists always scrounging for money, a place to live, the reasons it was called, “the love that dare not speak it’s name”… to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” to “shut the fuck up already!”
Not on your life.
In PIQ, I set out to write a sort of queer survival map, “this way kids, here’s who I read, this gave me some breathing space, joy.”
Moving the plants in off my balcony at season’s end this past year was physically more then I should have. O, she did it, she’s a Taurus, but I’m not aging well [which simply means, she’s aging] and wintering even less. Sunless, dark days a plenty, her balcony cold, the projection of new variants, no mother to call Sundays. Any day. I don’t share these things as a rule, nor lightly.
Wait, there’s number 2. Meeting someone new.
Which opened the door, made me meet myself anew.
Probably the most exceedingly rare thing in this life has been finding someone, actually, a queer sister, to match my joy. They’re few, less than a handful, a couple still with me.
That person you don’t have to explain fuck-all to.
They simply get it. You.
I pray to the cockgods each and everyone meets someone in kind/ness.
Amir is a 6’5” Iranian queer who fills my doorframe. When he first stepped into my place, I said, “Whoa, there’s a man in my house,” to which he replied, “How do you know?”
“Girl! Get your ass in here! Let me fix you a gay cocktail!”
Our meeting was so unexpectedly sweet, at first I thought it might be a romance, and while I’m not keen on the term ‘bromance,’ let’s simply say our glowing affections for each other are on equally grand display. ‘Mensches,’ ‘babooshkas,’ more accurately apply.
I honestly don’t know exactly how these things happen, I’m simply in awe, overjoyed when/that they do.
We cook for each other. Go to Costco (he drives, teaches others how to drive, has a car!). We point to boys we think the other would have eyes for. Dance our tits off, “This song is THE BEST EV-VAH!”
A defibrillator may do something similar, revive. But, I’d rather it be Amir.
Then there was the unexpected pleasure of returning to my own work.
Wintering, no salary to speak of, still trying to get out from under the debt incurred by business [or lack thereof] during sporadic waves of Covid. Monies lost trying to keep KFB afloat as a poetry shop. I always said we didn’t need much in the way of income [meaning, she mostly made ends meet], but I couldn’t afford to continue to lose money I didn’t have. Grants, a long shot [LGBTQ category dropped off art councils primary candidates list, yeah, like that makes fucking sense]. What the fuck is she gonna do?
“She’s a Professional Homosexual …
PUT ON A SHOW!”
The more readings I gave of Poetry is Queer, the more she realized it was ripe for a one-person show. Though my KFB launch for This Is Where I Get Off was decidedly staged/theatrical, I hadn’t performed in a theatre since the early 90s, a monologue titled, [wait for it], Why We Must Live at Buddies in Bad Times before they moved down the street from me on Alexander.
Little did I know, adapting PIQ into a 90-minute staged reading would [once again] save, change my life.
As a writer, you most often hear of the experience of returning to previously published work only to find it lacking—the things you would change, the embarrassment of this being out there at all. Everyone thinks the work they’re currently working on is their best work, [this btw, is my best EV-VAH] otherwise you wouldn’t commit to it.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I despise the ‘preset’ of this has to be ‘my best’. What a boner-killer.
The will to do something entirely different. Beyond success and failure. To fuck it up. Make a mess of it. A spectacular in bold technicolour splendour replete with a 70’s moaning porn soundtrack on vinyl.
Having written much of PIQ early/throughout the pandemic, I can honestly say it wasn’t until I returned to it that I began to see exactly what I had written. I’m not referring to the text itself, which was all too familiar, but the book, the clarity of its power, strength as a queer manifesto, a map, a guide, but also a call to arms. That unlike some would like to have us think, “it [CLEARLY DOESN’T] get better.”
Fuck that. It’s time to gird your loins and read your queer elders who have lived through way more shit than most.
Find out how. Not only how to survive, though that’s a vital step, but how to LIVE.
This became grist for the mill fashioning PIQ into the staged reading now called, Behold. The throughline, how anyone, particularly queers, find light in the darkness. Light the darkness itself.
But, first it helps to notice the light, the darkness, being here.
Don’t laugh, but she’s only realized now, about to officially become a senior, that she’s fabulous.
And, tonight’s in house performance is SOLD OUT!
Ain’t no stopping her now. No siree bob.
Even though I’m sick to death of my life this Monday morning, when in actuality, she’s simply done with winter, I did make my way to the library and back. And, she finished this column.
Suzanne smiles.
Kirby’s Poetry Is Queer is out now from Palimpsest Press.
"Let's have a gay moment, shall we?"
BOOKING INFO TO BRING KIRBY TO YOUR LIVING ROOM OR SMALL VENUE.
Poetry is Queer
Kirby
Palimpsest Press, 2021Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers.
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