when
i was deep in grief,
i
thought i wouldn’t move
again
and then i moved
again
loss makes people
crazy
i moved like i was
crazy.
the
great poet came, she came
and
she said, “i love New York
because
we like to suffer. People
in
other cities don’t like to suffer
like
us.”
a
day later, i was removed
from
the men’s restroom, made
some
joke about Duchamp,
“you’re
in the wrong one tho”
is
gender better than utopia?
there’s nowhere better than this is better
than now there’s nowhere better than this is better than now there’s nowhere
coupled
beings whether they be
darling
divined. it buzzes. i can’t
wait
to put my hands
on
your body, our secret
signal
thread, woven + woven.
one’s,
one’s own
identity,
own space
own
weaving, tapestry
for
intimacy, only for me
our
secret thread
look
at her dirty high
pony,
mounted on the
wall
like a moose, the
thought
of pulling
hair
in an institution
such
as this, the
eroticism
of severed
parts,
on clean, white
walls.
a man was taking
a
video of the pony, i
whispered,
“harder daddy”
and
he ended the video.
are you single, married, widowed, in a
domestic partnership, in a non-domestic partnership, in an unrequited
relationship, in relation to whom?
i
checked my messages
and
you had not replied
but
it is 6 hours and 3,000
miles
so i get it but that
night
i went home and
took
a bunch of photos
for
you to wake up to
and
around 6am you
wrote,
“you’ve been
busy”
but then i’ve
already
chopped my
high
pony, still bouncing,
like
a phantom limb, like
i
was crazy.
Erika Hodges is a
gender expansive poet and performance artist living and breathing in Brooklyn,
NY. They are a graduate of Naropa University and an MFA candidate at Pratt
Institute where they are the current Leslie Scalapino Fellow. Their work can be
found or is forthcoming at Flag + Void, CALYX, The Adirondack
Review, The Poetry Project and others. They are a 2020 Can Serrat
residency fellow as well as an United Artists Grant recipient. They are also
the 2020 Rougarou Poetry Contest winner. Erika is a volunteer at The Poetry
Project as well as a poet's assistant and archivist for nestor poets in the
community. Their work and life is deeply devoted to queer love, troubling the dystopian
values of borders and binaries and the ideas of poetry and lineage as a sort of
home.