i don't fear work

labor day, writing & art opportunities, y más

Spoons! I’m running out of them. I spent the last 4 days without my computer and with minimal internet/cell service, so maybe I have a few more now. It’s always very jarring, though, to go from The Middle of Nowhere to a busy college town.

I feel there’s a reason I’m always pulled to rural areas.

Sitting outside with my great great tío, who’s been a farmer for nearly 80 years, was the best possible way I could have spent the labor day weekend. He was very close with my late grandfather. I soaked in every word he said to me— my dad and both his parents are gone, and I keep feeling the weight of… something I can’t quite place. Maybe it’s responsibility to keep the stories, history alive.

This country is built on the backs of laborers. Underpaid, mistreated workers. Every right we have as workers in this country was fought for. Yet labor day is often plastered in redwhite&blue and ~limited time sales~ from every store and corporation.

My partner has been reading Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti

I recently watched the PBS documentary Dolores,¹ about United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta (who is not related to me, despite that little fib I told a white classmate or two). Seeing reagan eating grapes during the boycott, seeing bush complain about protestors in almost the exact same language harris uses today… we have come a long way for justice, but some things have stayed the same.

After my tío went back to his home, I went through the last bag of my dad’s clothes, and snagged a shirt from a tractor supply store that reads I Don’t Fear Work. I’m not anti work. I’m anti exploitation, anti capitalist. I’m anti workplaces without accommodations. I don’t fear work, but I fear ableist workplaces killing me.

To recall a book from my queer reading round up, in transtrender manuel arturo abreu writes “I used to be antiwork until I realized being antiwork is racist. The Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue writes in 1880, ‘The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work … The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work.’” abreu continues, “This is not saying that no-one should work, it is a tacit acknowledgment that the right to be lazy is exclusive: the luxury of idleness requires work to be displaced to a marginalized class.”

We see that time and time again in these so called united states.

Before I run out of room for the writing & art links you maybe subscribed for, here are two poems I’ve been thinking about this holiday weekend: “I want” by Jordan Jace, and “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” by Bertolt Brecht. These poems were written nearly 90 years apart, but the solidarity is so salient still. This is the kind of poem I want to leave with the world once I eventually join my grandparents and my father.

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Solidarity with Palestine:

• israel is invading the illegally occupied West Bank. From the BDS movement: Channel your rage, frustration, and grief into effective, strategic BDS action and build pressure and people power to stop the genocide and to eventually help Palestinians dismantle Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid, the root cause of this oppression and unspeakable violence.

• A full boycott of PEN america has been called. Here is an email template if you wish to contact PEN

  • The priorities of the current leadership lie not with poets, essays, or novelists, but with her “former” employer: the U.S. State Department. As a result, the organization’s commitments are no longer to free expression, but to liberalism, imperial hegemony, and exported democracy.

• Sign on to the Not Another Bomb petition to kamala harris here

• The Arts & Culture + event series at NWACC is hosting “The First Amendment and College Protests: A Constitution Day Conversation” for folks in the us to know their rights

• USCPR is a good resource for engaging with us representatives

• Donate through Gaza Funds

Writing & Art Opportunities

• That Trans Friend You Didn't Know You Needed
  - anthology for trans families

  • TransFriend is creating an anthology of writing by family members, friends, parents of trans kids, and by trans kids themselves who have stories to tell

• Get Embodied Soul Movement (GEM) Presents: A Dancer's Sanctuary - paid leadership & artistic development sanctuary to support BIPOC, cultural, spiritual, and social dancers

• here to complain - pays BIPOC contributors $50 - nonwriters welcome!

  • if you’re Black or brown with a work-related microaggression story to tell, we wanna hear it— because who among us doesn’t need to vent.

• LittlePuss Press

  • We are currently considering original manuscripts of fiction and non-fiction (including works-in-progress). We are also considering reprint proposals of literary/historical works of significance by transgender authors.

• Printed Matter is seeking artists books, zines, etc on Decolonization, Resistance & Solidarity

• Arsenal Pulp Press - open for full manuscripts in many genres (no poetry)

• Roots. Wounds. Words. - Virtual Winter Writers’ Retreat for Storytellers of Color - closes 9/8

• fifth wheel press - light em up anthology - open to all genres from queer, trans, and gender variant writers - closes 9/15

  • fifth wheel press is also open to blog submissions for visual art only

• Annulet Editions - full-length poetry, prose, & literary criticism manuscripts - closes 9/15

• Periplus - mentorship collective serving U.S. writers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color - closes 9/20

• Reckoning - open to work about environmental justice - closes 9/22

• Literary Liberation - essays, interviews, etc on craft & writing, detailed guidelines here - closes 9/22

• Changes - $10,000 book prize judged by Terrance Hayes - closes 10/1

• Bed Zine - open to disabled, chronically ill, & neurodivergent writers & artists in all genres - closes 10/1

• manywor(l)ds - open for all/no genres from trans, two-spirit, disabled, neurodivergent, Mad, queer, crip, nonbinary, genderqueer, intersex writers - closes 10/31

• Abode Press - open to poetry, prose, & hybrid chapbooks - fee waivers available for QTPOC - closes 11/30

From around the internet:

• If you aren’t subscribed already,

  Kevin Gotkin
  ’s newsletter Crip News has tons of news, events, & opportunities for disabled folks. Two of the above opportunities were in this recent post

• “Librarians Resist Israel’s Efforts to Destroy Palestinian Cultural Heritage” by Emily Drabinski in truthout

• “Form & Occasion” by Issam Zineh in Split This Rock²

• “Portrait of Crip in Chiaroscuro” by L.M. Cole in Emerge Literary Journal

• C.M. Green reviewed Anthony Oliviera’s Dayspring for manywor(l)ds

• Issue 20 of beestung is out!

• “Believe the Graves” by Rasha Abdulhadi in The Deadlands. This poem was published a few months back, but my partner came across it and showed it to me

• This ONLY POEMS interview with Maria Gray is incredible. The discussion of solidarity, liberation, and suicide is impactful personally and collectively imo.

What I’ve been up to:

• Bay Area Queer Zine Fest has begun! Trans poetica has a lil virtual table! My zine store has two new zines, BIPOLAR MOMENT from last fall and a bigger poetry one I just finished called SOUTH TEXAS SENTIDO. It’s my favorite one I’ve made yet. Check it out, as well as the other awesome zinesters included!

  

  two physical copies of my new zine

• New work: I have a long trans poem in issue 4 of new words {press} alongside some Abode friends! I also have two very trans texan poems in smoke and mold.

• FREE virtual workshop: I’ll be leading “Radical Revisions: One Poem, Infinite Possibilities” with Sundress Publications on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024, from 5:00–6:30 PM CT. You can learn more about the workshop here

• Reading in Seguin, TX: I’ll be reading from my forthcoming chapbook GOOD GRIEF at Pecantown with Brooke Shaffner on September 18th!

As always, thank you for being here. To a brighter tomorrow,

<3

Thanks for reading this far down! Trans poetica will always be free, but tips are greatly appreciated! I’m available for editing, readings, and more through my site.

If you have an opportunity for trans, BIPOC, disabled, otherwise marginalized writers or artists you’d like me to include, please let me know. If I’m platforming an institution that is doing wrong by our communities, please let me know that, too.

1. free on Kanopy if ur local library has it!

2. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent getting lost in Split This Rock’s poetry archives