The whole world, as we’re coming to understand, is quivering in its place.

That's what I would say about poetry and prayer. That god or audience--the intended direction of both of those--we wish and wish are real.

I was already too afraid to say anything.I can't even properly say my own name,

In the one place everyone looks like me--has my name--i am the most foreign.

To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.

We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn’t feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.