Masturbating to Greek Myths
torrin a. greathouse

I'm searching for porn with bodies like mine, but not made fetish—false idol for a stranger's violent desire. So, I'm masturbating to Greek myths & how they remind me of my chimera body. How almost every monster was just the best parts of other animals sewn together. Myth—a stitch threading together the best parts of woman & what I was given. I lie back against the sheets & Charybdis both this body's hungry mouths, let my fingers feel what wet wreckage, what good & greedy breaking these can make of any body. Name this sometimes-unwanted part of me— Hydra  how  you  sever  the  head  of   a  snake   & it grows again & it grows again & it grows again, how  this  blood-hardened    flesh   reminds   me of its presence. & in this myth woman is still born from the severance of man. But not how you were taught. My hands slur semen & seafoam into one word. A sound like birth & drowning. In myself & these sheets. Body breaking the water's surface. Mouth gasping for air

from the book DEED / Wesleyan Press 
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Written early in my transition, this poem is interested in the ideas of monstrosity and hybridity, as they map to cultural conceptions of transfemininity. In particular, I was interested in inverting these conceptions' typically negative tone to make a source of self-love and empowerment, the poem moving in and through monstrosity before arriving at the mythic origin of Aphrodite, metaphorically birthing myself as a woman through an act of eros.
 
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Solio by Samira Negrouche, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Review & Interview: Solio by Samira Negrouche Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson

“Reading Solio is like attending a musical or theatrical performance—the reader is first and foremost a listener, learning the choreography of words repeated, distilled, amplified, and gifted back unto the world of beings and things where everything is in perpetual flux—the poet, as well as the humans and geographies she encounters.”

viaTHE LOS ANGELES REVIEW
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on What Keeps Us


"The sub-title of this installment of What Sparks Poetry is 'Poems to Read in Community.' The Poetry Daily team convened this semester, inspired by C.D. Wright’s 'What Keeps,' to select a group of twenty poems, most from our last year of publication, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, to oneself. In last year’s version of this feature, Kerry Folan said the poems selected were meant to 'offer sustenance.' Roque Dalton did say that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. And I still think that holds true."
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