Aimee Herman during performance: ejaculating beauty
(excerpt from unbound s/he: ejaculating beauty)
I am thinking of a word for this.
Or maybe I can congest it into a sound.
Or a dance move.
Or interlude of intricate gestures.
Beyond gender.
Beyond categorical configurations.
Maybe I just don’t want to be figured out.
On Monday, I stick my whole fist into my vagina and feel around for what may be hidden up there.
I search for the SLASH.
On Tuesday, I dress my cunt up in streamers and lace like cotton-shaped birthday cake.
Clit like a candle, I blow out several times until it’s sore enough to grow lungs and demand a nap.
On Wednesday, I am boy or boy parts or masculine or uncertain.
On Thursday, I am Monday.
On Friday, I am Wednesday.
On Saturday and Sunday, I take turns, as the hours change, revelling in my inconsistencies.
My. Body. Weeps.
I gather the skin on my body like magical four leaf clovers found only from hours or weeks or decades of patient searching.
My closet is a schizophrenic approach to wardrobe.
I am mortar and pestle ground up nerves and identities and genders and sounds and needs and clarifications and blurs and words and poems.
I am queer, this word, this music, this distance between its beginnings—a past—to where it stands now—its present-led future.
I understand this.
* * *
What is left behind.
What is necessary to gather, stick in pockets, or throw away.
What can be should be needs to be celebrated?
…the memorization of inconsistencies…to be both or three quarters of one and a sprinkling of the other…to be unafraid of asking what pronoun is most necessary…to understand the importance and need to ask…a widening of this spectrum…of queerness…of experimental language and representation…the poetics of homo…the song of body reclaiming itself…a celebration of contrast, incongruent gender, and unstuck designations through…
the ejaculation of queer BEAUTY
Aimee Herman 