The Maenad's Bone Garden

  2021 – a noose like no other   A tumorous bouquet of opportunities Parliaments of insufferable groupthink Shaking hands with drawn daggers My friend,   do you know the liberating power of total damnation? Just because you are trapped somewhere doesn’t mean there is a way out. Fundamental chaos Not gold, not silver, not bronze Moments and gone Moisture from the Metacosmic Condensation on wet clay. Time is the only coin, Pay & play.

  This shit pisses me off SO goddam much   Entry fees   XXXXXX one poem. XXXX   for each additional poem. XXX   for five poems. A maximum of five poems per single entry. But you can enter as many times as you like.   (Emphasis most definitely mine;   actual fees removed to hide the identity of this bourgeois asshole pub)     Opportunities but never the same opportunities, nor as many.  We’re not pay to play but hey if you can afford to send us dozens…..  Good thing all us po’ folk are uneducated illiterate morons then huh?    By the way, fuck you,  a quite annoyed working class Goddess 

  2020, the Maenad From the Bone Garden (unpublished) 

It’s no secret that I am not fond of this day.   (Honestly for most of the last decade I’d just as soon a skipped over November – December and jumped right to January after Halloween but I am sadly in the minority on this.)   Pigskin tribalism aside, I do have things to be thankful for Living on a planet that is life bearing despite our best efforts to change that Living in a time when there are people trying to change things even if I don’t think we any of us do near enough The possession of my senses, my self, my imagination, and my endless ability to pick things apart.   I am thankful for the sense and sensibilities I have as pertains to freedom and the benefits and responsibilities thereunto. I am thankful for the clear heart.   I have struggled so hard to find this.    I am thankful for the many opportunities I have been shown this year. I am thankful for the handful of people who have published my work. You have my eternal gratitude...

My mother was, before she ran away on a magic bus to California to become a hippie, a hill child from Appalachia. I spent a fair bit of time there when I was very young - in a lot of ways it was a primal time, lots of things.....imprinted.   I have not been back there now in many a year. I would love to but I would need to be a bit better prepared for such a trip.   And maybe a small army.   That's just if I encounter family.   Being a mutt, all of my ancestry is buried below the surface where you can't see....and honestly 99% of it means nothing to me anyway.  But I am ashamed of nothing about where I came from and what made me.   I am the product of whores, and hedge witches, border jumpers and hillbillys.  All of this lives in me.  The Old Coal Miner Taking the particles Inside of me Apart even as my will Struggles to hold it together Decay is how time is measured Spun, reckoned, and cut   Angels in...

I indicated there might be others. This one's still fresh. You were the last person I spoke to you goddam dirty bastard how dare you turn out to be dead   Hey man Your death I think I got some of it on me Hey brother Your suicide I think you left some of your Death with me It’s … not something I need. No, please, it’s okay. Don’t leave. Leave your ghost with me I will try to see to its keep. Dear Goddess, all this death is starting to get heavy It wears on me Is this how we become as thee Wrinkled and mean From carrying so many Dead bodies? How do you do it? How do you look so clean?   I have a message for another Dionysus Tell him The Maenad said FUCK YOU The mad one will understand I think. Dio knows I’m blaming the taking Of (REDACTED) on he, and his blessed Propensity for drink Fucking give your drunken whiplash ministrations to me You ….. Shutting up on advice of divine counsel I’m taking a seat Hollow agai...

So apparently Red Planet magazine is gone.  While I know they closed their doors, now their twitter feed, their website, everything.  *snert* Well, nonetheless, here is the piece I had in what turned out to be their last issue back in Spring of this year.   IF anyone out there managed to grab a screen shot of my actual piece LMK pretty please?   I seem to have lost the folder with all of that in it. :(  Sapphire Rain   Wake me up my littlest pod-pea Stir me from this waking artificial dream of alien minds not wrapped in writhing, hungry vines but instead trapped in strange idle binds. Bodies that do not swim or hover but drown and lumber, they sneeze not shudder in their thin atmospheres where, hiding in their homes, they fear the sound of the coming, palid thunder. On savage warming planets where the natives Suck the marrow from their cradled Infants. Living amidst ruined days, supping soup of their bones and dolin...

 Karliah Keeps Inviting Problematic Guests to Her Queer Dinner Parties I know, I shouldn’t,  Sometimes though I will  Just invite the problem children.  TERFs are easy, I take their hands.  Those Hands always saying “shh” & “Hush” while placing themselves firmly over your mouth, Forever.  What timorous knowledge is knitted deep in those finger bones? A soup? A stew? CRUMPETS Consumption brings knowledge. And I must know this terrible thing.  SWERFs are harder, they sit on your hands, whisper lies, pretend to be what they are not, make demands.  I already take hands. Tis only appropriate then, I take their glands I swear I have swole two cup sizes  Since I started eating the brainchildren  Of Gloria Steinem I will burn your bra while I fry and eat your sclera.   It was that or slices from your typically bony behinds.   A feast on the beach at sunset  A rump roast, hands and half a body’s glands, shish kebab...

  from Maenadum vol 1 number 2 I'm a bit closer but I am very much still making good on these obligations.  Aren't we all?

  Thoughts in the Shower at four am washing the cum out of my hair  from Maenadum vol 1 number 1 This is one of, maybe, the very first thing I wrote on Xanadu (She is the laptop I have and so the repository of all my dark sorcery).   Despite most of Maenadum 1/1 being stuff I had from the (tiny) scrap apple print run of vol 0 (which is a story itself), a few things I had been writing that year snuck in there  when I decided to put these together.   I think this is from January or maybe early  February  of 2020.  In a lot of respects the stuff in Maenadum vol 1 one and two feel now like precursors or companion pieces to Ishtar     Who knows? Maybe one day I can fold them in?  . At any rate, like a lot of my super early stuff it’s very slice of life (something I think I would like to get back to a bit honestly).   And like a fair bit of the material in Ishtar, it speaks about and with the language of sex work, w...

  Dance of Ruin   One day this too Like bronze shall pass away Our words, this place All our gardens plowed under To make way for the coming age The death of words and the death of meaning Will take Jack Chick, El Ron, Jordan Petersen with them Into eternity’s oubliette The ultimate discarded offal Shoveled, awful Fertilizer, shit For the new world we ordered Of this age, this civ We chose to sacrifice first our stupid shit Guess who's been reading about the bronze age collapse to the exclusion of all else?   

THE ISHTAR CYCLE You would think I had subtitled it The Picture of Gwendolyn Red or something with all the reluctance the Ishtar Cycle seems to have garnered.        (I’ll let you decide if that’s an apt metaphor or not; now accepting gifts of your lifeforce, essential essence, chi, divine breath, etc) Make no mistake,   it bites.    Though I think – most likely – you will appreciate having been bitten.   Maaaaybe after a period of burning.   Ha, see your doctor if that doesn’t go away after a couple of hours. It has however been a VERY effective Pruddishness detector, if the seven+ people (at last count) that have arbitrarily blocked my twitter feed since this dropped a few weeks back are any indication (and they are).    While is is not precisely a need being unmet in my life, perhaps I can monetize this blocking tech and send it after datamining bots? There are still lingering print copies of the Ishtar Cycle left so gra...

Necrophobia is zero  Water, the arena, the medium,   through which you reach through to the other Wasting away in some hot Atlanta outlier Too weak to stand Can’t leave the house anymore Why did I not reach out to you more? Fear Fear to stand Stupid toxic dumbass fear ‘my love is toxic’ you said and so it seemed Goddammit How many people do I know who died from HIV? Why so cruel memory?   A life so quickly wasted and wasted and then now gone Who else remembers? Who else could see? Goddammit This is fear is what has happened to me I hope however this is not My only source of empathy For you my friend, gone long beyond the sea Boil me in oil your name is lost to me  I’ll bet you run a mean game Of Changeling: the Reckoning This  is the last of the Letters to Dead People this week though _maybe_ there will be more, just not this week.   This week is always a bit rough for me and moreso since The Powers That Be have opted to turn this into Trans ...

 I wrote this for TDoR last year. I make no great claims to it's quality as a piece of work but this was not about that.  - M. Another Saying Good-bye  ( Dauun) I had a dream about you You’re mostly the product of my head now you see Two weeks and out Thirty years of ambiguity I saw a little what if An imagined visitation Had you broken the curve like me And made it past goddam 33. Not what I   - or you maybe Expected but never rejected. Very Norwegian power dyke.   Nice, but you.   First memories, last.   All speak to the power, screaming, of what could have been and maybe somewhere could still be In some kind of real Alternate world capacity.     I dream not of the bad times now, or all the bad things Also, not just on what could not be But instead – I dream only of you now, just out of bed Having somehow gotten better from being dead And stopped by for coffee, to see what things bring I am ...

Letters to Dead People - is pretty self explanatory. All of these are old, composed sometime last year or before.   Most of them wound up in my Bergman sub, which was largely ass,  and so needs to stay confined to a file cabinet.  Most but not all.   September to November is always the time the many ghosts I have accumulated seem the loudest, for various reasons.   These past few years it seems they have spoken louder than the living.  I'm having a really hard time writing _anything_ right now so this is as much a one foot in front of the other / get to the next screen thing as anything else.     All of these are a good bit more primitive than what I've been doing lately so it seems weird to share them but .. whatever.   I'm thumbing my nose at the uncaring universe just by posting this.  There will be at least two others in this series this week. I may just post them all today rather than ride the anxiety rails ...

  Magnificent cover image by  Embry Valentino The Ishtar cycle is a transgressive and provocative work of transgender identity, sexuality, experience, and liberation.   By turns, vulgar,   mythical, fearless and embarrassingly honest, this is a work of sacred sexuality, and manifesting the Goddess within.    A praxis of spirituality, ethics, activism, flesh, and a fierce call for the liberation of all, body and soul. The Ishtar Cycle will challenge your notions of sex, love, identity, fidelity, reality, and dare you to do what is right.   Imagining a world where trans bodies are sacred not sinful, to be cherished, elevated, and celebrated in all the ways humans have done since the dawn of time.   That trans voices have important things to say and that we should be listened to.    A demand to be acknowledged – and respected – challenging traditional notions of ethics.   A Divinely carnal path through poverty, oppression, and a pop...

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I miss this show so much. If I could I would get infinite sort of half seasons jammed (kind of) betweenS1 and S2. Or just an alt timeline where all the neat people don't die.  Jack and Gwen are cool and all but Ianto, Tosh and (especially) Owen were the show for me.  That and the rampant adultness and far more rampant queerness.   Fuck I miss this show.   This was the last time I had even a toe in fandom so .. yes this was some time ago.  all of my live journal (haha I just dated myself) icons were character themed. You remember spending endless hours on fannish mood boards?  I met SO MANY COOL PEOPLE thorough that fandom, most of which I wonder what happened to.   No? Well then shut up.    In any event,  I want this show back Uncle Rusty can I write for this show if it comes back?   The world needs more snarky transgender women in their 40s in media.  A lot more.  Besides the...

 Darken the lamps and begin the howl, Bring the sacrifice, It is time to dance. The Ishtar Cycle is now available from Lupercalia press Magnificent cover image by Embry Valentino The limited print run of The Ishtar Cycle is available for pre-order until they run out