Love Poems to the Poet's Body

Abstract

This is an abstracted narrative of recuperation. These poems attempt to salvage a body marked by physical and cultural violence. Beginning with a series of "love poems" that address the body as an other, the poems move through the body's interior, caressing its organs, and finally examining its surface, repairing and rebuilding as best they can. The project of its reclamation is both incomplete and contested under the assumption that there are some words and some bodies that might not be reclaimable. But my queer body was intact within the wreckage of my queer self, and it could be written. If I succeed at anything, I want it to be in the form of an écriture faggot. “Here is my homo / glossia.” Like an écriture feminine, this faggot writing is the necessary outcome of the necessity of faggot writing faggot. And so I write my body to write myself.