I first came across the writings of Ben Kline in 2021, 2022? Forgive me. I, like so many others, struggle to index those years. I was half in a zoom reading, half doing the dishes, until Ben began reading from his book Dead Uncles. I’m a sucker for poem a poem meant to be read and a poet who reads their work well. Ben’s poems sing both in text and performance. No italics can match the emphasis Ben can put on the word ‘husbands’, there’s no proxy for his accent, no hard stop can convey the way lines end in his voice.

It’s no secret that this interview series exists largely to give me a reason to email a poet whose work I love and who’s brain I suspect I’ll adore. This is a conversation I want to keep having. My questions are open and earnest and pleading, Ben’s answers are searching and soothing and full of grace. May you gain half as much as I have from this conversation. May we all find ways to hold our lessons and lost as we age. If you need anything, you can find me watching this visualisation of  Ben’s “It was supposed to be” from West Trade Review again. 

This interview was conducted by william katharine blair between the ___ of December 2024 and the 4th of January 2025 via email.
Aside from the odd typo, the questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

We’ve returned to this image of uncles. Let’s talk about it. Uncles, literal and not, ride that sweet, awful line between parent, authority, stranger, and some-time friend. Be they bully or conspirator, their presence somehow skirts the rules. I have two uncles, both the babes of their families. Mine were (are) childlike in affect and behaviour. Both have opinions and neither feels compelled to use caution, give care. I’ve had many ‘uncles’ besides over the course of my life. I am compelled (often saddened, sometimes angered) by the stories of men. Tell me of your uncles. What compels you to call on them so often? What do we learn from their voice?

I grew up with numerous uncles - siblings of my parents and grandparents, their spouses, along with men of their same generations who were so frequently present I went years without learning/realizing some of them weren’t kin at all. That is a common occurrence across humanity’s many cultures, but specific to me and my Appalachian origins, these distinctions were of no mind even after they were known. The uncles, and the aunts, blood or not, were to be respected, revered the same as parents. However, like grandparents, they could relate to you more directly as a person, as “you” as opposed to “nephew.”  So many of my uncles were storytellers and myth makers, veterans and fathers doing their best, men of faith and science (as they were farmers, engineers, oilman, etc.) who would freely admit after a shot of whiskey that none of us really know what we think we know. 

Of utmost importance to me and my work were the gay uncles. The guncles, as we used to say. Both family and not. Some named and acknowledged, most not. That was the way before all the changes that a reader will be reminded of (or learn about) in IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE. My first guncles were my mom’s baby brother and his queer friends in the pre-AIDS years. Then, a couple of closeted teachers. College professors. Elders I met at the bars. Fonda Peters, of the opening poem “It Was Never Supposed to Be Ours,” who understood men as men more than anyone I’ve ever met, who told me stories I can no longer repeat in polite company and reminded me that the oldest currencies will outlast whatever happens to our cultures and societies in this century on fire. 

I wouldn’t claim to call upon or summon the uncles, especially the guncles. They visit me. Crows in the tree. Mosquitos in my ear. Narrators in my dreams, where they appear at various ages, including the ones who died young but appear as elders on the porch. I call on them in the work because they inspire it and their voices speak through me, and I through them, some sort of hillbilly magic I don’t really understand. I’m not sure I need to. Not at this stage of my life, when I’m closer to ghost than youth. 

The crows are an appropriate comparison. It’s believed they have communal, ancestral memories, and I feel that with my uncles. I cultivate it with the guncles. I often worry I’m not doing my part as a guncle, sharing forward, though I suppose that’s an unstated intention of this book. 

I raved about the video for “Whatta Man”
until Rory and Wade started arguing about Bill Clinton, 
“Things He Said to My Face”

I was thinking about the grief in these poems–in all our poems–as I was reading ‘Things He Said to My Face’ and got to this line. You keep clashing with men who should have been happy, should have a right to happy, and instead we watch them closeted, self-hating and, in some cases, going to war. And here you are trying. How much of you wants to be Lily? The simple win of a boss bitch over another night holding a man while he cries? Women get shit in this country but we somehow get less. How often do you wish there was a little more time for MTV?  

Hmmm, “Things He Said to My Face” is one of the poems in the book that braids all the themes and motifs in a simultaneously agreeable and contradictory jumble. (Blame my Gemini nature!) The narrative holds the poem together, and yes, that story is about making and unmaking promises. The unmaking always leads to grief for queer people, because, in the time stamp of this poem and most of our time, queer people only have one another. I specifically remember writing the first draft of this poem during another reread of Larry Mitchell’s seminal The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. In thinking about capacity and possibility, at a moment when both seemed abundant in the shadow of the Cold War and the dawn of the internet, I found myself writing about then and now, about bro culture and allies, about love and self-sabotage, about the specter of fear that could be both disease or society turning against us yet again. The current moment feels too similar - so much possibility, too much looming risk. 

As for being Lily, well, the real-life Lily is one of my favorite people in the world, and I can attest she is that boss bitch. I’d spend my life in kiki with her, watching more MTV and dancing, keeping vigil on the fools in the next room. For fools they are, seeking eternity where it doesn’t exist. 

Look, I don’t even know if this is a direct reference to the Madonna verse (“let’s get unconscious, honey. Let’s get unconscious.” - Bedtime Stories) or to Björn Trenker’s very gay pop punk music project of the same name and like. Feel free to tell me, but what I want to talk about are the breaks. As an editor I am constantly recutting lines and sending them back to poets with notes that say some version of ‘what changes if?’

I glimpse myself

in the wall, arms
wide as Andromeda
and God—the music

or

and God—the music

can’t save me
I don’t want it to

Woven and overlapping, the “Unconscious Honey (7” Mix)” delivers exactly how it needs to. Thoughts blending, light strobing, the give and take of it mirroring the slip stick of skin on skin. And all that before we get to the dissipation of the last twelve lines. Walk me a little bit through the form of this poem. Tell me first if you got what you wanted then tell me how.

Ok, several questions to unpack here. 

First, yes, this poem is directly inspired by Madonna’s song “Bedtime Story.” Written by Bjork, (though I do enjoy Unconscious Honey, whose LP Loose Beginnings I discovered months after I’d written the first draft of this poem,) that song was both of its time and ahead of it. Bjork intended it as a snarky wink wink about her impression of Madonna’s commercialized and blatant spectacle. But Madonna, being Madonna, transformed the song into a pulsing ode to searching and desire.

Second, on your note about the breaks and your “what changes if.” That’s an interesting suggestion but relies on a different reading of the lines than I intended. It abandons the phrase “--the music // can’t save me–” being the volta where the speaker of the poem gives in and gives up. That line is the most interior of the poem - the clear thought above the throb. I love the contemporary editorial tendency toward ditching punctuation when possible, such as that second dash, utilizing the break for that work. 

But I wanted a more pointed choice. I wanted the bass to leave, heavenly synths floating around us, the crying out to God where the poem changes. (I also like to imagine the speaker is thinking that at the exact same bar when Madonna sings “And inside we’re all still wet.”) I chose the phrase in dashes to cut the poem in half - a knife line, I like to call them - and switched the indentation of the tercets before breaking the form all together into the dissolution that readers have interpreted as euphoria, as drugs, as death. 

So, the breaks were built to do exactly as you mention, blending, strobing, the push and shove of the throng, but then, the tercets shift once the speaker gives in to…again, I let the speaker give in to the moment. Readers experience this. 

Lastly, I’d say yes, I achieved what I wanted from the poem. The form keeps the poem moving, mimics numerous sensations, then permits the reader to exit in a choose your own adventure kind of way. Is it drugs? Pleasure? Boredom? It’s a very Gen X poem, both affected and disaffected, plunging in deep only to reach a certain crucial point and say “eh, whatever.”

He told me love
craves time
and he had youth—
I had plums

chilling in the cooler
next to the beer
“Plums”

Do you know when you’ve written a great line? I read a lot and I think about this question often. There are no small number of mediocre books I have spent hours with with zero regrets because they have given me one perfect line and those lines are often a little like this one, ‘Paint distance between your subjects’ is the assignment and the vast majority of writers are going to come back explicitly naming class/agency/age. You give us plums in the cooler. I’m not letting you off easy so don’t tell me the plums were real and you get no credit, tell me instead why you picked it and then tell me your favourite line.

I have never thought of my work that way. The concept of a great line tips into a subjective/objective realm I admit I dodge. Mostly because my take on great - or more accurately, favorite - changes with my mood and context. I prefer art that can fit my any and every mood. I love a memorable line, but it will rarely mean the same thing to me later.

“Plums” was one of the last poems written for this collection. It wasn’t in the version that Variant Literature accepted for publication. I was finalizing the sequencing of the poems in the summer of 2023, considering how the book moves in and out of time, through class strata and pop culture, when I saw a tweet (I know, I know) about “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Which sparked an online rabbit hole and found me sprawled atop one of Williams's other very famous poems, “This Is Just To Say.” I find “Forgive me / they were delicious” a memorable (likely great) line because of how easily it embodies contradictions and manipulates expectations in a poem and a reader. 

I wrote the first draft of “Plums” a few days later, the whole poem in one sitting, queering the role of the plum in the poem. The original title was “Hustler” and it opened on the plum in the cooler with another line/image about pornographic magazines. This first draft had the epigraph “after This Is Just To Say,” but subsequent revisions retitled the poem as “Plums” and felt less reliant on the nod to Williams. The plums, as you point out, became a context clue instead of the instigating image. I deleted the epigraph, expecting readers who spotted the nod might enjoy it, but otherwise, it didn’t enhance a reader’s access to the poem. I suppose one could imagine the speaker in this poem is the “you” apologized to in “This Is Just To Say,” which takes my poem into “Wide Sargasso Sea” territory, but that wasn’t really my intention. 

All that said, if I’m forced to choose a favorite line, it’d be this, from the third section of “Calamus” in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

1    WHOEVER you are holding me now in hand,
      Without one thing all will be useless,
      I give you fair warning, before you attempt me  
              further,
     I am not what you supposed, but far different.

—I heard men settling into safe
expectations, the inverse thrill

of legality, the freedom to be
seen.
“It Was Supposed to Be”

‘It Was Supposed to Be’, raises an interesting topic. Queer hygiene and sex education is still lagging so far behind. When I was in middle school, HIV was a death sentence and IUDs could kill you and now my sisters all have them and my friends are on prep. This is amazing but we can only gain access to the care that we know and, in our communities, we still learn sex ed from our peers. I feel like I’m surrounded by the smartest wildly uneducated people a lot of the time. I don’t want to say we benefited from growing up in that shadow but what do we do with and for a generation who has possibly too much “information” and doesn’t know AIDS?

That’s a question cocked with possibility. There was and is almost too much the royal we could do, but do we have the willingness and the resources? How much self and time can we give? I have always tried to share what I’ve learned, to offer guidance when asked. Just before the holidays, I found myself the eldest at a table of decade-plus younger queers, telling stories about adult gay life in the late 1990s, early 2000s, like a gossipy teacup in a Disney movie, about nightlife and strip clubs, the city park and the frozen food section at a particular Kroger.

Additionally, I wrote this book. Both to document and remember from a macro perspective, though it has started feeling slightly like a time capsule since the election, as we teeter on a regression that seemed far-fetched ago until the pandemic upended civil society and any remaining sense of shared values, and to track my own feelings before I’m old enough I forget them. Which I discovered already happening during the revision process. Thank goodness for my journals and spreadsheets. 

Not that there isn’t a library’s worth of novels and poetry collections about the AIDS Crisis years and the decade of queer life after, written by amazing writers, some still with us, documenting the time and presenting ideas for our continuance and success - but I found myself drawn to the arc of the change, from the record deaths in 1992 of gay men between 25-45 to the expansive rights and visibility of the late 2010s. I thought of how those advancements were not deployed or applied equally across class, race and age groups. I thought about how differently I felt about it all now, if I could reconnect to and convey my feelings as I watched Clinton sign the Defense of Marriage Act. If I could remember the transgressive thrill of the first time I logged on to Squirt to cruise parks in a new city. If I could answer the questions “What do we do now?” and “Was it all worth it?”

Ok, back to the specific question: as a teen in the 1980s, I benefited from public schools still having robust sex ed programs. I saw those crumble into foolishness as my three younger siblings moved through the schools, even my youngest brother, a teen during the Bush 2 era of abstinence only sex ed. Like, what? It seemed odd that, with all we knew, we had stopped being honest with young people about sex. But I always remind compatriots to watch their actions, not their platitudes. Compassionate conservatives…mmhmm. From the present day, those choices feel like a well-planned beginning of a snapback, a retraction, the political right’s continued resistance to social progress, especially queer liberation. 

I’m not sure I’d want anyone to read my work as a poetic kind of sex ed, but this book definitely documents exploration, learning from mistakes, making those same mistakes again, grappling with change, with contextualizing all the “information” and possibility, with what was never supposed to be. For the generations after - Millennials raised on fear and MTV; Gen Z left to find it on OnlyFans and 4chan - I hope this book is perhaps a window into a set of feelings they never have to experience.   

And yes, I earlier said rights and visibility, not acceptance. Because the current political moment reminds us that social media, the internet, movies and television, and much of “popular culture” represent a veneer. The appearance of acceptance. There remains a large swath of our country and the world that’d sooner toss us into the colosseum floor with the lions and cheer the spilling of our blood. A lot of the poems in the book touch on this, and even just 2-3 years ago, I’d at times feel quaint for including them. Now, they feel like harbingers.  

                        I join them, my body trembling

into the gloaming, where we live to the end,
wild in the pines again, free and looking

at the two men, silver and weeping, eyes
bright from the back row, still here.
“We Didn’t Die”

we used to finish on our knees / under bush / over porcelain /
Welcome to our new millennium / civil unions & Peak Gay TV
“21st Century Homosocialization”

The internet, streaming, and the loss of third spaces: discuss. Adult theatres, strip clubs, and street based sex work were a pretty big part of my childhood landscape in downtown Toronto. I grew up right next door to Canada’s largest public housing project and Mom worked in The Village so sex as a lifeline and pastime were unremarkable, expected parts of our world. They’ve rebuilt Regent Park now and a recent Out Magazine article suggested residential buildings as one of their top five places to cruise and. I’ve got to say, it feels like possibly we’ve lost the thread. The internet has connected to many and taken the in person out of collective. Can I still go to park on the weekend? Yeah, but it’s half families now and not everyone can. Has something been lost?

I hear that. But I find nostalgia a temporary comfort. Stories about the pre-AIDS or pre-internet times can rouse a sense of excitement or risk-thrill that a grid of photoshopped photos might not elicit. But seeking comfort in that sepia glow can convert to feeling loss. The good ole days. When I was a young queer, we had to walk twenty miles into the state forest to a shed in a loblolly grove where…. 

In poems like “New Queer Cinema” and “Idle Hands” I wanted to portray cruising’s risks and rewards. As a heathen of a certain age, I find the torque between thrill and safety is easier with apps and the internet. I think of George Michael defending his joy of cruising parks and public restrooms. But I also think of how you can arrange and host an orgy a lot more safely and efficiently now. 

This question also cannonballs right into the urban/rural and class divides of queer cultures. Those who couldn't or didn’t move to the big coastal cities had a very different experience, really, until the introduction of smartphones and sex apps. (I refuse to call them dating apps.) Websites like gay.com, the instant messaging apps, and early social sites like Friendster leveled access and flattened the experience a little, but smartphones and the apps are what truly created a seamlessness to connectivity and reach, to who and what you could do with a similar degree of ease and comfort. There are many arguments to be made for and against this. But I find, it’s much safer, which matters to me a lot. Frequently, I ponder all the young queers (often young queer sex workers) whose lives have had no known end. Whose families never looked.  The digital era leaves some clues, but it still happens, and we know why and how to change it, but there’s no societal willingness. (I wish some bold gay would ask more questions before signing some billionaire’s NDA and then post it on Reddit!) 

The internet and apps also unlocked a variety the hanky code barely imagined. But that’s a topic for another day!

I find the loss of third spaces more troubling. We abandon them foolishly - as states like Texas and Florida begin to police the internet and telecommunications more stringently  - where will those queers find one another? Again, visibility doesn’t equal acceptance…or care or safety or legal rights, and if we think places like Texas and Florida will stop with Pornhub, with any website that mentions gay, lesbian, queer, bi, trans or any other “deviant” words…we might as well buy those tickets to Mars. 

It’s true that queers gather with their friends in all spaces now, and usually feel safe and liberated in doing so, but I worry losing our physical sense of community makes us easier to subdue, to render us invisible again, back to as-needed status. The return of global authoritarianism might try to come for us….public sentiment remains in our favor, but the political othering rarely sticks with a single target. I know I’m worried. I think a lot of us are, especially our trans siblings, presently abandoned by almost every level of our politics. We’re having this conversation between two US presidential administrations. Who knows how we’d feel or answer this six months from now. They might pass some insane law and raid all the bars/clubs. I might be hosting discos in my basement or resurrecting a book club for banned queer texts. Everyone secreting their double-sided, twice folded photocopies of Dancer in the Dark, Chelse Girls, and A Million Quiet Revolutions. 

9. I prepare
a. my work lunches at home
b. my mind with the New York Times and encyclopedias
c. my body with yoga and push-ups
d. for dates with Google and cologne
       i. for good dates with condoms and plastic handcuffs, breakfast the next morning
       ii. for bad dates by hiding knives in strategically reachable places.
“You Tried to Rape Me, and I Could Only Make This Useless Outline”

My fork bends faster than Uri Geller could ever. These men have kept
their holsters unbuttoned since Ruby Ridge and Waco
“The Legend of Swing Voters”

Your references are fantastic and we’re getting old. The ‘I should have’ that haunts this whole collection is ‘I should have been dead’ and yet here we are talking about gay sex and queer life in 2024. What are we doing? Are we really going to grow old in these bodies? What do we do now, those of us who lost too many too early; who’ve lived like we, also, would never survive.

I think about this a lot as I enter my 50s. A decade of life I came of age never expecting to achieve. At 18, I thought 30 would be my terminus. Maybe that explains the catalogue of references in this collection? I included a notes section for what we felt were the most obscure or important ones, but the layers of history, music, art, and pop culture references in these poems could fill a large essay. 

I think we’re doing the best we can as a generation or two in the shadow of trauma. Who lost most of our elders and now, thanks to their struggles, have more choices. We have the possibility. (At least in a self-actualizing manner; perhaps less so politically.) Which means…growing old. We have to try it, right? What else do you do when you end up where you weren’t supposed to? You fuck around and find out, write books about it! Have long dinners with friends. Go dancing! Help your in-laws set up their smart TV. (What queer from the 20th Century might have imagined that one?)

I consider it my duty to my queer forebears to age in fabulousness. And, to define that as I see fit. Reinvent ourselves and…write about it. 

As I said in the intro, I really do believe your voice, your performance, is a credit to your words. As a poet myself and a person who has never stood in front of a class and not cried, I am torn by how often a poem connects in a new way when read. I write to an internal meter, even in prose, and I know for certain it doesn’t translate over. I can prove that. I’m doing it now. In my voice this would all come out cleaner. In my voice you’d hear where I want you to waiver, where I want you held. Voicemail Poems, Fruit Journal, and others offer sound files with their postings and, as the library reminds me, there are audiobooks. Still I bristle at the distance, the abstraction. Call me nostalgic for face to face interaction, but I like the communality of live readings more. You watch the chat while you’re reading, I suspect you might agree.

I love hearing poets read their work in person. Sitting in a bookstore or coffee shop, the library, a park even, listening to poets share is probably one of our oldest human joys. It returns us to the first campfires. The songs and stories told under the stars. And in today’s world, it makes us stop. Listen. Think. Feel. And, we poets hope, react with genuine emotional movement.

Yet, one of the internet’s grand gifts to literature is its ability to contain all our voices. I love listening to the recordings you mention. I love making them. Once I hear a poet read a few of their poems, I can revisit their work and hear it anew. For example, I often struggled to connect to Carl Phillips’s poetry until I heard him read; thereafter it was perfect alchemy. Similarly, while I'd always loved Maureen Seaton’s work, after I heard her read on a Zoom during the pandemic, my love went next level! And you haven’t experienced Taylor Byas’s poetry until you’ve heard her read. I’ve never seen a poet command the room as Taylor does.

I think about this as I write. How will this sound in my voice. How will I enter the reader’s ear and mind. How will this germinate in their dreams. How many times can I use the word fire in a poem and not slip into my twang and say far on the mic. 

All that to say, yes, I prefer in person readings. I used to host an outdoor summer series of readings with rosters of poets and special cocktails like The Pantoum and The Blood Rush. I co-coordinate a university-sponsored reading series called Poetry Stacked. There remains an undeniability to the in-person engagement of and with poetry. To hear a young poet’s nerve, or their confidence. To detect an experienced poet working out a fussy line break live on the mic. I like hearing the oooo’s and mmhmm’s of the audience, the laughter, intended or not. 

You play a lot with form in this collection. I think “What Was Supposed To Be Ours,” “You Tried to Rape Me, and I Could Only Make This Useless Outline,” and “Lover: a lesson plan” are particularly effective. Are you comfortable being playful? Does form lead and you follow or were these ideas you played out in other ways first?

I love form. From a good ole fashioned sonnet or villanelle to “hermit crab” exercises like the poems you mentioned, I like using the rules and structure of a form as a control element in which the poem can otherwise go wild. Some days, I think I want to write a villanelle about fingering my archnemesis. Other days, I will revisit a long gestating draft and realize, This poem should be a [form.]  “Abecedarian in which we were supposed to” is an example of that. When I started conceiving that poem, the first draft, with all its internal arguments, went on for pages and pages of couplets. Too much. The 26 lines corralled the poem into a much more manageable thing and forced me to think about the speaker’s emotional progress more creatively. 

Others were…more straightforward. “What Was Supposed to Be Ours” is a poem about divorce in the post marriage rights world - why not write it in the form of a divorce decree? The form introduces language and movement not typical for a poem, but that’s half the fun. The outline poem…yeah, that highly controlled form was the only way I was going to pry that poem out of my guts. 

I think being playful in poetry keeps it fresh. Too much of the same studious tone in a book makes me slip in the bookmark and go watch music videos on YouTube. We are here to enlighten, but also to delight, to shimmy and shimmer and be memorable. (Those great lines again.) I have no illusions about ever being so quotable, but I want readers to enjoy their trip through my book’s sexy sad world and its oft-zany adventures.

In the next room, my current
lover snored through high sea rise,
beach erosion another neglect
of gaunt boys who counted

their days by the vein.
“Patient”

This line reminds me of the guy on Instagram who refers to his husband as ‘my current husband’ to keep him on his toes. And he’s joking, but also he’s probably not. Queer people have come so tarnished to loving. We bring deep scars and worse fears and patterns of praise and rejection that can make it hard to trust and be loved. We’re a nature/nurture tsunami no court ruling can heal. Throughout It Was Never Supposed To Be, you write of connections and collisions born of need, safety, violence, and offers of grace. As I say, I’m broken4broken (tongue in cheek but also) and I can’t wait for healing. We have to find ways to love and be loved by each other right now. “The steam softened our skin. I kissed his neck. Neither of us could afford to be too hard on ourselves.” (“The Last Condom”). Tell me about the softness you extend to these uncles, these peers, yourself if you’re willing. How do we hold these men?

We hold them as we wish to be held. Tender or rough. Near or at a distance. It’s a conversation we have to have with ourselves and others, friends, family and lovers alike.

Which isn’t the same thing as that love and be loved line from “Nature Boy,” which many know from Moulin Rouge, but a parallel path of self-examination and outreach. Similar maybe to RuPaul’s “if you can’t love yourself” mantra. 

I know, that feels simplistic, sophmoric even. But, for me, who has always held desire and love equally, it’s a way to, maybe, have it all. Especially when having anything was dangerous. Now, it’s an ease of access divided by opportunity times willingness equation with varying control elements, depending on when and where you were born, who you had as parents, etc. Yet, the same struggle in varied degrees. 

I don’t have a complex answer to this question, or even something revelatory to say, because, to my point about circumstances, I can acknowledge I popped out with a strong sense of self and a many-sided willingness to navigate circumstances as needed to be, go, do and become what I wanted. I never lamented my queerness, even as I understood I had to encode it or utilize it quietly sometimes. My twangy high voice and shiny eyes gave me away, as did any attempt to dance. Even as a little kid, I used my hips like a stripper. As if I were signaling every gay angel in heaven to come hither onto me! But inside that bawdy joy, I understood the specific form of sadness inherent to so much queerness, and recognized how it caused so many to behave, to self-destruct, to seek connection in ways wise and not. This is absolutely the theme lurking in poems like “Idle Hands” and “Nephews of Icarus,” as well as “Aubade” and “Progress//Be the Change.” 

Funnily enough, at this point in my answer, I don’t think of it as softness, but as fortitude. As the power of queerness in unison.

“President Obama…,” about the Obergefell decision is followed by “I’m the Sidekick” and “Swoon” and it’s a very tight tryptic of hollow promise and loss. Do you think a lot about order, how poem by poem these speak to each other? You spoke recently about this collection having a series of ‘tent poems’ that hold up the theme. My notes from that reading are half titles and half crib questions and all perfect lines. Explain the structure as you see it, what do you want from a theme propping poem?

As the book came together, I realized several of the poems with titles that play on the book’s title (“It was supposed to be” and “What Was Supposed to Be Ours” for example) were sort of like tent pole movies in a summer blockbuster season. I treated them like the theses (and hypotheses!) of the book, with the rest of the poems filling out the universe around them. Meaning I spent a lot of time sequencing the book, largely in chronological order, but not always, as I wanted time to feel like a wave riddled with crests and loops. The tent pole poems portray a lot of big political and social benchmarks, allowing other poems to play off context to portray quieter, more intimate aspects of those ideas and actions. The three poems you mention purposefully ponder a bit of “be careful what you wish for” and go macro to micro on the idea. 

It’s also why I didn’t use chapters or sections. The poems occur in movements that loop into and through surrounding movements. I should make a venn diagram of them…I suspect the center would contain SEX+LOVE, FREEDOM, and REPUBLICANS SUCK.

innumerate possible outcomes,
but I only get invitations
to midweek three ways

and all-weekend ceremonies
instead of the thrill of anonymity
I wished lasted longer
“Science and culture advance one gay wedding at a time”

Can we say we’re happy for progress, for safety, for good meds, and less isolation and still admit there’s something in the illicit, the stolen, the outcast of it all? My lens here is transness and yes, I’m glad I can tailor my ID, that my kids don’t get shamed for calling me Mom, but goodness, do I love that my girl confuses; that our family looks a mess to those looking in from without. “Marry at will, queers. I’m here/for new forms of fucking.” Our relative safety comes hand in hand with a sameness. Is it also a launch pad for joy? 

Hmm, I like to say I have a rebel’s heart but a slut’s body and soul. So, as wonderful as progress, safety and community are (and can continue to be with the good work!) I still like a little fight and a lot of fun for the sake of both. I hope the poems in the book reflect that. I hope my smart ass mouth continues to spew that into the world.

I think I don’t believe anything queer/trans/whatever else we discover and name anew will ever suffer sameness. Even if we have full legal equality, sameness before the law, we are different. We’re queer! Here and still getting used to it ourselves! We can only assimilate so far as long as the patriarchy and class structures still exist. Accepting that our tinge of illicit risk will always exist, we can stay in touch with our rebel hearts. We can launch our crooked joy into the world. 

visiting my lover’s parents,
squeezing his thigh under the table,
trying to loosen the hold of my parents,
of the plague years, of locusts
from the genus Christianist.
I don’t know how the kids sissy their walk
without worrying someone will throw a rock, 
“PDA”

Ours is an interesting generation. The last of the offline, we’ve found ourselves bypassed pretty fast. It makes it even more stark when we see the ways we’ve held back and held on. To the voices that scolded, amplified fear of diseases, our nascent nervous systems left to play catch up and keep us alive. I had kids young and I’m amazed at the queer world they take for granted. Onward and upward but what comes of us? It’s a hard road to unlearn this. It’s a hard road to need it. It’s a hard thing to look back and wonder what if. On the verge of release, how do you sit with these poems? Have you answered your questions? Has your story been told?

Oh, what comes of us is what we came through - we keep going, we keep trying new things and engaging new ideas, even if they crash into every thing we’ve ever known. We grow old! A privilege we maybe didn’t expect to have? I know if often feels like the Gen X queer have been between shadows – the AIDS Crisis and then the massive Millennials that followed us – but in moments of doubt I remember we are the ribbon tying it all together. The before and afters of so many massive changes, movements and progress. So…I apply my serums before bed, take my vitamins, try to eat well, booze included, and spend this unexpected time with people I love and adore, with that hard road a note folded next to the condom in my wallet.

I think about this most frequently when I see young’ns exist with ease, as you mention, in a world and culture that was never supposed to be. It makes me more happy than sad. Because we helped make that happen. We created the world in which the youth engage with new ideas and question pronouns and come up with new language for the most ancient natures. (Honestly, watching my fellow Gen Xrs unravel over pronouns gives me an old school revolutionary glee. Like, who knew something so quaint and simple could drive people so wild! I remember learning about ze and other pronouns in undergrad in the early 90s and my reaction being Cool!) being Cool!) Even for my teeny tiny part in what’s changed – by being here, being myself, volunteering when I could, donating, knocking on doors, etc – I allow myself a little pride.

So maybe we listen to our ghosts without letting them haunt us? I sit with these poems folded in my pocket next to the hard road and the condom I might not need anymore, maybe, yes, a little maybe there, and I keep asking questions. Life has answered plenty for me, and I think this collection trots a few of them out whether I wanted to or not, opening myself to consternation, but that’s ok. I’m telling a story that’s mine and not, it’s been told before, and will definitely be told again, probably on hologram decks buried in a submountain server farm that survives the atomic apocalypse.