Life update: I got into my first-choice school in my second-choice country, which is all well and good, but now I have to worry about visa stuff. Visa stuff is a nightmare to handle when you're transgender and the militarized government also hates you for other reasons and you have virtually no money to your name. Especially so for that country from this country, because apparently too many Burmese students and workers are seeking asylum after getting in with subclass 500 and work visas - I wonder why. The only thing left to do for now is pray and kick and scream and be bitter and manufacture some semblance of hope.

We need queer furry literary fiction now more than ever, because now there is a furry coming-of-age rock opera in Car Seat Headrest's delightful The Scholars, and I have realized this unfulfilled need in me to get to read a few hundred pages, at least, of uninterrupted birdgirl introspection. To the best of my knowledge and research, there is no such novel out there - please do tell me if I'm missing out on something that beautiful; I would be heartbroken. But yes. The Scholars seems to be a very cleverly considered project of love, with CSHR and Cate Wurtz's collaborative efforts taken up several notches beyond the usual, but I haven't had the time recently to delve into the lore (mostly present in the lyric booklet, which I have access to scans of) as thoroughly as I wish I could. I know of the two rival colleges, and a raid(?) on the university, and a murder mystery at the heart of the album that ties the loose narrative/ characteristic threads of the first 6 songs together, but otherwise I'm clueless- other than having stumbled across this meme that I think, from the looks of it, holds more truth than the humorous tone might suggest. But oh I'm in love with Rosa's character!!! I love her so much! Talk about a miserable doctor-in-training batgirl Jesus. Her character song, "Gethsemane", is one of my favorites off of the album and features what I believe will soon come to be a post-chorus of my all-time favorite CSHR lines: "Now you have me as I was born/ My bleeding heart beats between your horns/ What comes next, beloved pet?/ I'll be patient waiting for the time to come/ To be opened up, helpless and undone". The somewhat sexual undertones alone sell this The Duke of Burgundy-esque read into dynamics of social control and power that is so befitting of her whole "healing others by absorbing their pain" situation. I would love to read some more little comics of her, maybe, if Cate feels like it. I'm also hoping that work eases up soon, so I get to properly look into the narrative of/behind this project!

[I think this entry warrants a content warning beyond what generally applies to this site, for violent transmisogyny and transfemicide.] I've been so busy I haven't had time to write, or read, or even listen to music attentively, which is making me even more miserable on top of everything else. They are all I (have to) lose myself in. Also, my friends and I were sexually harrassed last week while we were out eating, so we've been "talking about it" a lot. Also, a trans woman sex worker in Pattaya was murdered with her heart and "silicone implants" removed by the male john perpetrator because she refused to have intercourse with him. Friends from Bangkok phoned me about it. I phoned Bangkok friends about it. Woranun Pannacha was a resilient woman who, like many other Southeast Asian transfemmes, was systemically underclassed into sexual labor and had to provide for her family through that means. Which is to say, our calls revolved around collective grief and how most of us could very well have met her same fate, or can very well meet it anytime all the same. It's not really a good reminder of cruelty to be jolted into acknowledging once every couple weeks when yet another trans woman gets murdered. Anyways. We've also been talking a lot about hope, and the necessity even of performative hope, at times, in building/working towards liberated transfeminist futurities. Hope in the face of every force that wants and has the power to render us hopeless is to rally against the unnaturality of naturalized power structures: survival against oppression as informed by the artificial fixity of oppressive structures in falsely eternal perpetuation. All this sounds good, I guess. But I'm so hopeless right now, though some part of me still believes - has to believe - in hope. I don't know. I'm failing at hope now, and doubtless I will fail many times again, because the world is cruel. But I'm not giving in, not when I know what wants me to give in is a no-bite nothing with no real, indestructible foundation that would support its for-ever maintenance.

Everyone knows that tweet that goes "if you are transgender you have to live (...)" and honestly I think it's very real. I feel a sort of obligation to, mostly out of spite. So yes I will live. I also very badly want my friends to. I'm worried about them.

I've got two abecedarians coming out in The Cincinnati Review, & that's such good news especially after my recent rejection streak (this morning alone I got another no from Poetry London), & also because TCR's been such a dream mag for so long. With my moving around, I'll probably have to get my contributor's copy sent to my sister's house instead, but I'm ecstatic still :) This was a pleasant surprise as well, because I had completely forgotten I submitted anything at all to TCR. I think I started sending out this packet of poems last June - maybe last July? I had a bit of an abecedarian 'phase'— I was in Bangkok and pulling regular all-nighters at my friend's flat just to write an abecedarian a day at the minimum; I had gotten addicted to how the alphabetical-linear sequence prompted poetic thought in entirely new directions that I usually wouldn't have followed. Also, I was rereading Lunch Poems. I mention this because Rebecca, the Poetry Editor at TCR, said one of my poems reminded her of O'Hara's "Ave Maria", among other things— and I really do see that, even if only surficially for (spoilers?) the cinema sex stuff. But isn't it always cool the subconscious, powerful hold that the art we engage with have over the art we create? I know some writers consider editors' and readers' comparison of their work to that of some other "great" to be (at times, justifiably) offensive, but I don't— maybe because, the first time that an editor compared my work to another's, it was the editor of The Dawn Review saying my poem reminded her of Notley's work, and I didn't know Notley then but I love her poetry so much now, and so personally at that too. If not for that editor, I probably wouldn't have read Notley as quickly or even half as closely/intensely, truthfully. It's such a novel way to be introduced to a poet whom I have very much benefitted from reading & thinking about & even mimicking in exercise. ++ Also, I have to mention this: I repurposed a few lines about Diana Ross from an old poem that was previously published in the now-defunct INKSOUNDS project, and I'm excited for their new life in a new poem to be read!

just some casual recs of really, really good singles i've listened to recently that i haven't documented on my logs because they aren't full LPs/EPs :)

One of my favorite installations is Greer Lankton’s It’s All About ME, Not You, because it really was all about her (“trapped in (her) own world in (her)/ head in (her) tiny tiny/ apartment”) and not at all about any of the rest of us, and in that defiance and/through ego(-)centrism– in “artificial nature/ total indulgence/ dolls engrossed in glamour and self-abuse/ the vanity/ the junkie/ the anorexic/ the chronic masturbator”– there is such admirable anger. I admire anger so much because I’ve tried to be sincere with/in my anger for/in my work for so long, and yet I’ve consistently failed. I return to begging and hurt too often like the small thing I once turned myself into and now regret having done so. Which is why, of the very few early poems of mine that I still think somewhat hold up, my personal favorite to return to is "my own private nonexistence", whose first lines go “too much begging in my poems i’m sick/ now, i say of it | decoy to hear me my bio/ -organized mess | orthogonal in all my/ repositories all tributaries to All”– that was the first time I kind of just let myself “have a crashout” in poetics, so to speak. I really, really was sick of how I had started resorting to apologies and laments as semi-effortless conclusive bows-on-top of/for my poems. I was/am sick too, in its literal meaning, all the time, so I let myself get used to the idea of death at a certain point– and that does wonders, wouldn’t you know, for the untranscended ego: I guess I thought, if I really could die at any given moment, I wanted to have been a poet who was a bit firmer with their voice; a writer who, perhaps, did more than just channel the sorrows everyone must already assume their t-slur life is plagued with; I wanted to have been poetically angry. So “my own private nonexistence”, for a change, was very much just “I’m a mess, this is what my mess is”, and letting said “mess” of pain/anger situate with/in itself without resorting to the easy, lazy ego-narrative frames of hurt and sorrow– which are as real as pain and anger, don’t get me wrong, but for me, they exist as dilutions of the more offensive but perhaps more truthful intensities of pain and anger. I've realized I sometimes need to be a bit angrier... anyways! I'm saying all this just because an essay I've been working on (on glamor-(ous/ized )pain as expression of sick transfeminine anger) made me think of Greer again. Love Greer.

Someone whom I admire very much, this Shakespeare fanatic, this theatre director, wrote to me recently in anticipation of my leaving, that I should remember to send her a copy of my first book. I had no idea she knew I wrote at all. I don’t think she knows how much that small line means to me, really, but at the same time I felt incredibly small and stupid and like a disappointment-to-be– what happens if I never (get to) write that first book? Or maybe, more aptly framed, what happens if she never gets to read that first book? I know I’m young– very young, actually– but I’m in a rush always, because I’m sick and ill and transgender. I could disappear any moment. I’m not a careerist– I swore to myself that I never would be; even if I wanted to be, I could never comfortably play into what that would demand from me/ my artistry– but I feel this urgent ghost behind me always trying to push me a little further. The ghost of forcible production, so to speak, this capitalist phantom wedded to feelings of inadequacy that I’m at least (self-)aware enough to know have never existed in a vacuum– anyways, the question is, when will I get to send her that copy of my first book? I don’t know– in a year, in two years, in twenty? I should, theoretically, be fine with having her read my work only in twenty years’ time (or more). Art can’t be rushed, et cetera, all those lofty ideals. But I’m not fine with it. I really want to write now because I want to live and have to live, and I really want to have evidence of having written soon because it’s evidence of having lived and having wanted to live. I want to be successful, and soon, sue me. Sometimes I wonder if I picked a dead-end route for myself, writing in my third language of English and getting a little too fond of the comfort of poetic (self- [and meaning-])obfuscation that significantly transforms my work into something “inaccessible”, for lack of a better term, but I guess I won’t know until I walk that route for a little while longer.

There is a building– I won’t say what, or where it is– and for reasons I won’t articulate, yesterday was one of my last days at/in said building, where on the rooftop there is a tennis court. It has been a while since I went up to the tennis court. Yesterday, at 5, I did– and there was a friend tennis-coaching a kid, though I feel guilt and regret calling him a friend. I think I have failed him as a friend many times. I did not interrupt him– he’s getting paid for this, and the kid seemed so happy and invested; instead I leaned on the railing and took in the city. The city shook three weeks ago, though Bahan– where we are now– suffered no extensive damage: even the bamboo scaffolding in my line of sight on Shwedagon’s structure, held together with coconut coir rope, remained stable. I've been involved with organizing drives for victims of the earthquake in Mandalay and Sagaing, and it breaks my heart daily how Tatmadaw cruelties pile on even more problems for the mourning, suffering public, but a small, selfish part of me was relieved that I had to mourn no friends– I don’t think I have it in me any longer to mourn more friends, especially not now. So it was an ugly gladness. I was also hyperaware of how strong the wind was up above– it was like I was at sea; understand that it is also the height of summer, a day after our first summer rain: wind at all felt like a miracle; wind that strong was alien. I felt so strange.