May Links Roundup: Alexa, Am I a God?

That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, talking to ChatGPT:

“People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” Miles Klee reports in Rolling Stone this month.

…[A] Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT…made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software…

…Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

The robotic folie à deux arises from two weaknesses of large language models (LLMs). An AI’s built-in responsiveness to consumer feedback teaches it to skew future answers in a direction that pleases the questioner, whether or not it’s true. And current LLMs persistently “hallucinate” data in a manner both humorous and horrifying. Remember when Google’s AI Overview recommended glue as a pizza topping because it misunderstood a joke on Reddit? Now try basing your theology on that.

My son makes fun of me because I’m the only person in the family who refuses to buy an Apple Watch. I tell him, I spent 40 years having an abusive parent monitor how I walked, what I ate, and how much I weighed. I don’t need a robot on my wrist to do the same thing.

Well, I’m right, because Secretary of Holistic Horse Shit RFK Jr. is proposing to create a national autism registry drawing upon biometric information from our personal devices, according to this May 5 article in The Guardian: “‘A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database”:

The health agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether individuals would be able to opt out of the database, or how it would be structured, what kind of security and privacy measures would be taken, and whether similar databases would collect information on other conditions…

To gather the data, the National Institutes of Health is exploring partnerships with other federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others.

Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also proposed collecting data from pharmacy chains, health organizations, insurance claims and medical bills, and wearable devices like smart watches, to conduct “real-time health monitoring”.

A related essay in The Guardian by Derek Beres contextualizes the autism “cure” push as an aspect of “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed”. Elon Musk’s baby-making fetish, the attack on vaccines, cuts to USAID, and the destruction of social services are all based on “the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.” Check out Beres’ Conspirituality podcast for more analysis of the strange overlap between right-wing white supremacy and left-wing wellness grifts.

In the Columbia alumni magazine, Josie Cox interviews social scientist and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz on “What Your Digital Footprint Says About You”. Matz’s new book, Mindmasters, is about how our technological transaction history allows algorithms to target us for psychological manipulation. She argues that individuals don’t have the time or expertise to protect our privacy across the thousands of apps and websites we interact with. Tech literacy is necessary, but not a substitute for government-mandated transparency and antitrust reform. Matz envisions an optimistic scenario where the Facebook algorithm could allow us to opt into exploring other people’s worldviews instead of reinforcing our echo chambers. When I was growing up, we called that reading novels.

On that note, here are some worthwhile literary reads I discovered this month. My favorite contemporary poet, Ariana Reines, has two new books out, the hybrid prose collection Wave of Blood and the poetry collection The Rose. In Lit Hub’s column The Annotated Nightstand, Reines recommends some books old and new that have guided her preoccupations with gender, esoteric magic, and “fraught romantic entanglements”.

At the blog of Sundress Publications, there’s an interview with trans poet Nora Hikari about her collection Still My Father’s Son. Hikari talks about identifying as a plural system, the link between sensuality and violence that she experienced as the child of a Christian pastor, and using hybrid and fragmented poetic forms to challenge oppressive concepts of family and selfhood. Read two poems from the collection in the online journal beestung.

Speculative fiction writer S. Qiouyu Lu’s flash story “Th Fifth Lttr” is a witty Oulipo piece that at first works around, and then liberates itself from, its original constraints. It implicitly asks whether we should find creative ways to coexist with censorship, or challenge it directly. Check out their Twitter feed for the comical adventures of their food-stealing cat, Onion.

A decluttering webinar offered by the ADHD magazine ADDitude gave me advice that really resonated: “You’re not saving stuff from the landfill by turning your house into a landfill.” I often hang onto things simply because I feel empathy for them. I don’t want to throw something away as if its years of service to me meant nothing. At The Missouri Review, Mindy Misener’s essay “Object Limbo” explores this feeling and what to do about it. I may have 35 books I want to read sitting atop a plastic tub of calendars from 2006, but at least I don’t have a placenta in my freezer…yet.

The problem is this: whether you keep a thing your whole life or give it up partway through, there comes a time when you stop knowing where it is and how it’s faring. Maybe you trust that it will be tended in a way that you can live—or die—with. Maybe you don’t.

April Links Roundup: A Cruel, Poetic Month

Apr4

Happy National Poetry Month! The same absurd positivity that puts reclusive Emily Dickinson’s face on tote bags across America has designated April for celebrating poetry, based on T.S. Eliot’s decidedly un-celebratory opening to The Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month…” Old Tom was onto something, because the reawakening to life is painful when each day brings news of society’s disintegration, alongside forsythia buds and birdsong.

Nevertheless, we go on.

In Ploughshares, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “The Death of Eve” imagines the beginning of creation as a fall into dividedness: past from future, God from the words we remember or invent about God, and those who speak from those who are able to hear the truth.

On the first day God began splitting
things, and time began.
The angels gathered in little groups
—even though it was forbidden—
and said things like: remember when death
and life were the same?

Levi Abadilla’s dark fable “Adam and Eve as the First Horror Story”, published in Singapore Unbound, suggests that paradise without choice is a kind of hell, especially for women. (Link discovered via Authors Publish, a great newsletter for writing opportunities.)

The Garden extends as far as you can will yourself to walk, stretching on and on and on in whichever direction you pick. An endless hallway of perfect harmony, a perpetual state of existential tunnel vision. There is fruit for you to eat should you wish it. There is water for you to drink should you thirst. There are the creatures of the earth for you to seek company in, because you were made to cure the loneliness of Man, but nothing was created to cure yours.

The snake looks at you the way the Man does, like it doesn’t quite know what to do with you. Adam was lonely, yes, but he didn’t ask for you, specifically, with everything that entails you. You must soothe the emptiness of his heart, and he must be content in your existence. A one-size-that-has-to-fit solution, because there’s no one else; there’s only you to appease him, and your role doesn’t give him a lot of options.

Another archetypal pair discover that the worst part of captivity in a gingerbread house is when you can’t afford dental insurance, in horror writer Lincoln Michel’s bleak and satirical tale “Hansel and Gretel’s Teeth” in the magazine Outlook Springs. (Hat tip to speculative author [sarah] cavar’s Substack, Library/Card.)

…And so Hansel and Gretel began their new life as assistants to the dentist witch. Although the witch called them hygienists, most of their time was spent procuring new teeth. “You can never have enough stock,” the witch would say and send them to graveyard with a pair of spades and pliers.

The witch had calculated their debt at one thousand teeth each. Hansel protested—they’d only used 28 apiece after all—but the witch said this was standard markup plus time, labor, and overhead. The witch put magic collars on their necks that would cause them to howl in pain if they didn’t meet their weekly quotas. “This is called an incentive,” the witch said. The only other rules were that they had to brush the walls of teeth every week and they were forbidden to go into the dark basement.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well…

All the poems in Mom Egg Review’s recent poetry folio, Mothering Alone, are well-crafted and emotionally resonant. I especially admired Jill Crammond’s “When I Sell My Wedding Ring at the Pawn Shop”, Kali Pezzi’s “I Treat My Postpartum Depression With Friends On Facetime” (“I finally weigh the same amount of grief I did at the beginning of the/pandemic” and Julia C. Alter’s “The Nursing Chair”, excerpted below:

…The first person who ever sat in this chair was me,
nursing the baby that used to be our son, deep
into the milk-blue nights, fighting my own monsters.
Now he’s half my son, and half his son.
This is his dad’s gaming chair, and he’s sleeping
upstairs on a mattress on the floor.

In beestung, a quarterly online journal of nonbinary writers, Aerik Francis’ “Fat4Fat” extravagantly celebrates our unruly bodies.

…We are still here, still holding
each other– not cropped out, no, more crop tops & muffin tops, bikini bottoms & bottoms up, yes
in any season we please! Love, we have beautiful bodies. We are more than our bodies
& our bodies are more to love. We sit naked in front of each other, belly to belly,
thunder thighs & lightning strikes.

The driving force of Maureen O’Leary’s noir story “One Thing About Blue” is the narrator’s fascination with a toxic friend. Is there honor among thieves? In the end, maybe, just a little.

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Mar5

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything.

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.

Cultural Erasure and Resistance

Feb14

The National Park Service has removed all references to “queer” and “transgender” on the Stonewall National Monument, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City where trans women kicked off the modern LGBTQ rights movement by fighting back against a police raid. Journalist Ari Drennen reported on X that the picture of legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera on the NPS website is now captioned, “At a young age Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights”. I guess all the proofreaders have been sent to re-education camps already.

Want to get on a government watchlist? Go to the NPS website and press the “No” button for “Was this website helpful?”, then leave a comment telling them to put trans people back the fuck on the sign, you fucking cowards.

I have been unsuccessfully applying for a National Endowment for the Arts grant since Ronald Reagan was president. ($25,000 went a lot further then.) Good thing I didn’t bother renewing my extremely cumbersome Grants.gov login this year. A new page on their website, “Legal Requirements and Assurance of Compliance,” instructs applicants to pledge that they will not “operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI)” or “promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Gee, does this mean they don’t want my fantasy novel about a transgender Black minister and his Indian psychiatrist husband using witchcraft to defeat Christian nationalism?

I learned about the NEA debacle from the fuck-you letter that the venerable poetry publisher Tupelo Press posted on social media. Here it is on Instagram. “If adherence to our principles means that we will be ineligible for NEA grants going forward, so be it. Compliance with the new regulations would be immoral.” Send them a donation or buy some books. May I suggest Manoleria by Daniel Khalastchi, The Next Ancient World by Jennifer Michael Hecht, or Butch Geography and The Lake Has No Saint by Stacey Waite.

You’ve heard by now that Trump and Netanyahu are plotting to turn Gaza into Mar-A-Lago East by encouraging the Palestinians to live somewhere else. Jewish Voice for Peace shared this petition on social media, Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing. It was published as a full-page ad in the NY Times on Feb. 13. Notable signatories include Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist Gabor Maté, queer theorist Judith Butler, playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Joaquin Phoenix, and a long list of rabbis and cantors. Add your name too.

February Links Roundup: Monkey Mind Mother

Feb4

February already? When the passage of time surprised me, I used to think “Have I done enough work on my novel?” but now I think “One fewer month of the Trump presidency.”

Close friends of mine recently became first-time parents. When I check in with the mom about her sleepless little angel, I remember the unnecessary self-doubt that was instilled in me about having boundaries as a “mother”. I put the term in scare quotes for gender identity reasons, but also because “motherhood” is a societal idol that eclipses the actual person in relationships with her baby and the world.

At Electric Lit, Sarah Wheeler reviews Nancy Reddy’s parenting meta-advice book, The Good Mother Myth. Her interview with Reddy, “What a Bunch of Monkeys Taught Us About Motherhood–and Why It’s All Wrong,” summarizes how the science behind attachment parenting, including Harry Harlow’s famous wire monkey experiment, was heavily skewed by social pressure to push women out of the workforce after World War II.

Harlow is a really fascinating example of what happens when scientific research escapes academia: how it circulates and recirculates, and how much nuance is lost and how things get used for other purposes. In 1959 he gave this talk as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) called “The Nature of Love.” He played 15 minutes of a video where you see the baby and the cloth mother. And he says something like, ”Look at her. She’s soft, warm, tender, patient and available 24 hours a day.” And that’s really what got picked up about what it means to be a mother. But even in that talk, there are these little moments that are actually pretty radical, where he says, for example, if the important variable is not lactation but comfort, men could be good monkey mothers too. And nobody picks that up!

As a result, Reddy notes, stay-at-home motherhood ends up importing the competitive individualism and anxieties of the capitalist workforce into the home:

It is so easy to see motherhood as a professional identity– that it’s the most important job in the world, and it’s so high stakes, it can only really be done well by the biological Mother and…you should bring all of the skills from your education and your professional life to bear on this work. And I am really aware of how that approach to parenting sucks the joy out of so much of it. If you’re trying to improve your performance as a parent, it’s really hard to actually connect with your kid, which is where the joy is.

Or as I say to Shane when he complains that I haven’t brought him enough ice in his water glass, “Whattaya gonna do, leave me a one-star review on Yelp?”

My alma mater, the Death Star…oops, I mean Harvard…has been way out front in capitulating to Trump’s DEI purge. I thought I was beyond being disappointed, but I hoped that institutions with such tremendous financial and cultural capital would put up a little more of a fight to save civilization. This Harvard Magazine article from Jan. 29, “A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” describes the university’s abrupt decision to close the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) and outsource its work to American Ancestors, a lesser-known and presumably lesser-resourced genealogy research nonprofit. HSRP’s mission had been to track down living descendants of people who were enslaved by Harvard and its faculty and administrators, with the goals of reparations, correcting the historical record, and helping descendants’ families discover their roots. Some researchers affiliated with the shuttered project speculated that the administration was unpleasantly surprised by the scope of Harvard’s slavery ties and the number of descendants who might have a claim.

Anyway, here’s some good poetry. “Science” by Susie Meserve, at Palette Poetry, opens with an injunction–or perhaps a prayer–to “Let It”. Let it hurt to love what is mortal, let yourself persevere through the discomfort of birthing new life or facing terminal cancer. “Science, the miracle./Science, the limit.”

Enjoy a laugh of self-recognition with Ruth Bavetta’s poem “The New Battery Should Come Tomorrow,” published April 24 in Rattle. One undone household task leads to distraction by another, and by the chain reaction of emotional associations and memories that any mundane object can set off. Nothing gets done, but we’ve certainly gone on a journey, and maybe that’s what we needed!

Poetry by a Mom of Queer Kids: “Why I Want to Resist”

Jan21

The author of this poem is a fierce mom in Florida protecting her queer kids from legalized bigotry. She shared this poem in an email to me on the weekend of the inauguration, and has kindly permitted me to publish it here, without attribution to protect her kids’ privacy.

Why I Want to Resist

Why do you want to resist?
You, of all people?

You’re white,
From the more privileged class,

All these minorities are wanting to take away all our gold,
Is the message I heard from my dad growing up,

God rest his soul,
Banker of a third generation,

So why do I feel like all the lights are going out in the world?
They’re taking away our safe spaces.

Please don’t let them blow out our flames,
Goddard College, they accepted me there to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing,

Amongst all the cool intellectuals there,
I felt imposter syndrome,

Why did they accept me here?
We met at Fort Warden, a former military base in Port Townsend, Washington.

It was an eye-opening experience,
I fit in here.

I’d finally found my tribe.
Goddard closed last year.

The lights are going out,
Fort Warden announced they’re no longer hosting events there,

Another light went out.
Oh how I long to bum an American Spirit off a fellow classmate-writer,

Oh how I long to walk the foggy sidewalks,
As a distant ship sounds a melancholy foghorn.

Goddard College was a safe space,
Not only for queer people, but simply for an artist such as myself,

Born into a family in which I did not belong,
Why do I want to resist?

What forces are bringing darkness into my life?
Why do I want to resist?

What forces of evil and darkness
Want to put out my light?

You’re of a privileged upper class,
Why do you want to resist?

I want to resist. I need to resist.
How can I not resist?

The memories flash through my head like a slideshow of oppression,
Yes, me.

The memories flash through my mind like a slideshow of oppression,
The moment my baby girl was born into this world,

A tiny, precious doll,
A light entered my life, a light I thought could never be extinguished.

Precious baby girl; teasing, dyslexia,
Remove her from the public school system,

She has dyslexia,
She’ll never be able to read normally,

She’ll never be able to do math.
“That homeschooling is a bunch of bullshit,”

Were the words of Cruella de Vil,
My own narcissistic mother,

“You’re educationally neglecting her because the doesn’t know how to read.”
She’s a brilliant artist, mom,

Look at her now,
She’s a lesbian, mom.

When I left an abusive marriage
And you refused to help to the fullest capacity to which you were able with all your wealth,

Then no, we couldn’t afford fabric or clay
For her to make her art,

“You’re projecting oppression,”
Someone who’d once been a dear friend of mine

Told me when I dared speak out against the Monroe County Sheriff Department
On social media.

He refused to speak with me ever since,
He returned a bag of gifts I’d gotten him as a peace offering to the store Mother Earth.

He has friends who are cops,
All hail the men in blue,

All hail the enforcers of corrupt and unjust laws
In this Florida.

The dictators are taking their place in the Oval Office,
They wear their bigotry and hatred like a crown.

The slideshow of memories,
My firstborn child, my son,

I didn’t know about gender identity
I did not know

Until he told me at 18, mom do you love me?
Yes.

Do you love me mom?
Yes.

I bought a skirt,
I like to wear it in my room.

Accused of being transphobic,
My ignorance was bliss.

I learned, I educated myself,
My daughter is a lesbian.

I take them shopping,
I don’t care which department they buy their clothes from.

She wears his hand-me-downs.
I was asked once by someone looking at my children from a distance,

‘You have two boys?’
‘No, that one’s my daughter,’ I proudly replied.

I could give two shots
What anyone has to say about it.

Slideshow, my son is standing in the streets of our neighborhood
Between two deputies, a third looking on,

On a mental health call,
After he’d been left home with his abusive father,

Claire and I had been gone.
Why do I want to resist?

The slideshow in my mind,
My ray of sunshine is lying in the back of an ambulance,

I’m in front with the driver,
Half the motherfuckers won’t even pull over.

“That’s my baby girl lying in there.”
When I finally told them at the hospital, “she’s not pregnant, she doesn’t like boys.”

The slideshow in my head:
“Please, can you take the handcuffs off him?

He’s unarmed. He was just crying out for help.
Take the God damn handcuffs off my beautiful baby boy.”

Slideshow:
We’re at the ICU with Claire,

She didn’t know that OD’ing on Tylenol could be so serious,
Could cause her organs to shut down.

Jacob and I were texting, if our sunshine didn’t make it,
The Lord forbid, we were gonna’ protest

All over the streets,
Bail each other out of jail if we had to.

Slideshow of memories:
They put my child in the back of the squad car still in cuffs.

Would you want to resist if you were me?
Ask yourself this; how could I, in good conscience, do nothing?

I want to resist.
My two amazing kids were my only support

In leaving my marriage,
My two amazing kids who the world loves to hate,

My two amazing kids who saved their own mom’s life,
That’s why I will never stop resisting,

Because I love my two babies too much
And I love all the other kids like them,
Trying to make their way in this harsh, cruel world.

Poem by Rythea Lee: “I Blamed Myself for the Election”

Jan15

As we approach the second inauguration of Tan Dumplord, I feel rather like the heroine tied to the tracks in an old melodrama, watching the slow inexorable approach of the train. I’m not alone in having a lot of PTSD reactions to the narcissist-in-chief. Trauma therapist and singer-songwriter Rythea Lee wrote this poem in her e-newsletter, which she’s kindly allowed me to reprint here.

I Blamed Myself for the Election

I blamed myself for the results of the election. I know that’s insane. But it’s true.
In the face of a tsunami of horror, my whole body blamed itself.
That’s what I also did when I couldn’t hold off the weight of my father’s violence.
I blamed myself for having been born into it,
I must have done something wrong.

I blamed myself for other children getting hurt, for how could I be so powerless?
I should have kept them safe. I could have. I wanted to.
I tried and failed.
I must have done something wrong.

And now every trigger is here. The man and the hurting souls.
It looks so similar to my past.
All I knew to do was blame myself. That was my best strategy,
I must have done something wrong.

I can see now that it’s not really gonna work.
Hating on myself, or everyone else, isn’t really efficient.
It was a good idea at the time because back then, at least I could hope to be better.
Hope to change something inside me that might make them stop,
I eviscerated every corner of my heart to be better for them.
And IT NEVER WORKED.
They abused me anyway.
I must have done something wrong.

The sun rises today like the sweet song of a mother.
Calling me into a new paradigm where fighting the system
no longer requires me to harm myself.
Lifeforce courses through my cells with a river of determination.
Love wants its way with me.

Love wants to remind me that I never broke
and I’m certainly not going to break now.
Love is showing me the song of sanity that connects me to others
who are singing the same song.
We don’t have to try to know the song, it has always been playing.
We don’t have to force this song, because even when we were utterly alone,
the song played inside our bodies.
We never forgot the song. We are the song.

And now, as the world cries in its deepest pain, it is the clarity of love, not
shame, that guides me forward, putting me to work to the beat of that song.
In knowing who I am right now, I can trust that within me, within so many of us,
something has gone incredibly right.

In Memory of My Mother

Jan6

My estranged mother, Irene, died shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve/Day. She was 84 years old. I last had contact with her in January 2011. My husband, our son, and my mom-of-choice Roberta (her ex) attended her graveside funeral in New Jersey yesterday, along with her late brother’s widow and a good contingent of cousins from her side of the family.

The Orthodox rabbi hired by the funeral home was very kind and diplomatic about the rather unorthodox eulogy I wrote, which is reprinted below. He didn’t know any of us, but he made an educated guess that my mother, for all her narcissism, was someone who wanted to give to others. When she retired early from teaching elementary school after a nervous breakdown, she lost a creative outlet she might not have realized she needed. He suggested that we do mitzvahs (good deeds) to ease the repose of her soul. If you feel so inclined, give some tzedekah (charity) to a dance program that you value; Jacob’s Pillow was a family favorite.

Though quite a beauty before stress ravaged her health, Irene was never satisfied with photos of herself. So instead, here are some characters she resembled in looks, mannerisms, and/or personality.

(L-R: Queen Elizabeth I; Glenn Close in “101 Dalmatians”; Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond; a favorite Mary Engelbreit Design)

Eulogy for Irene

My mother Irene was a lot like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. Charismatic, disappointed, desperate for love but unable to be satisfied by it. She was too big for the picture of her life. She was an abused child in the body of a femme fatale.

My mother was a lot like Queen Elizabeth I, the historical figure she most admired. Both had rage-filled fathers and early betrayals that taught them to carve out their own path without depending on men. “Queen Irene” was fashionable, intelligent, and a rule-breaker. When she willed something, it happened…but at a high price. Addicted to control, she couldn’t let the mask of command slip for long enough to maintain honest intimacy.

My mother was a lot like a hungry ghost, a Buddhist metaphor for a spirit who seeks what cannot fill her up, looking for something outside herself that was hidden within her all along. Today we hope that the best part of her is set free from the patterns of a personal history that led her to starve herself and others.

Irene was a lightning storm of contradictions. I remember her leading us in joyful improvised flamenco dances after watching a performance at Jacob’s Pillow, in one of the Berkshires cottages we rented during my childhood. And I remember her breaking a picture frame over her partner Roberta’s head in that same cottage, one of hundreds of incidents of violence I had to witness or mediate over their 34-year relationship.

I remember her encouraging me to be a maverick artist, to devote my life to writing even when we had very little money, so that I wouldn’t live with regrets the way she did. Misogyny and family pressure pushed her into the more “respectable” profession of elementary school teacher when she really wanted to be an actress or a ballerina. She channeled that artistic passion into filling my childhood with books, museum visits, and season tickets to Lincoln Center and Tanglewood. (Sadly she was also a pop music snob who made me return my Cyndi Lauper cassette to Tower Records. Assigned-female-at-birth people just wanna have fun, Mom!)

And I remember her trying to sabotage my wedding and telling the adoption social workers that I would be an unfit parent, so that no other relationship would compete with her for my devotion. She wanted me to be the girliest little girl but not to grow up to be a woman. Well…I guess she got that part right.

Irene would have described herself as a child of the Sixties, with all of that generation’s iconoclasm and self-focus. Spiritual but not religious, she took deep interest in Native American cultures, Jewish folklore, and New Age self-help. She raised me to take it for granted that no opportunities would be foreclosed to me because of gender, yet she struggled to apply feminist ideals to herself and other people when her personal shame around social class and body image was triggered. Her longest relationship by far was with her lesbian partner, but she would never have identified as queer. I think she just liked being in a class by herself.

When she retired from teaching, her world became much smaller and unhealthier, caged by her OCD compulsions. She wasn’t able to learn how to transmute her intergenerational trauma into creative energy, so she offloaded that unbearable anger and anxiety onto the people closest to her.

Roberta and I literally had to save our own lives by ceasing direct contact with her in 2011, after ensuring that she had good nursing care in her apartment and then in her assisted living facility. We’re grateful to our late friends Anne and Sid Emerman, my late Uncle Phil, and my Aunt Susan for buffering us by handling Irene’s medical and legal affairs.

I learned from my mother to speak my mind, question authority, believe in magic, buy the best chocolate, and never run up credit card debt.

May she have a peaceful rest and a fortunate rebirth.

January Links Roundup: Fiction and Poetry from Gemini Magazine, Missouri Review, and More

Jan3

Happy (?) 2025, readers. We will resume our regularly scheduled signs of the apocalypse next month, unless I get arrested for peeing in a red state. Let’s start the year off with some reading for pleasure, rather than the news.

First, I was really moved by Stan Duncan’s story “Hodgens” in Gemini Magazine. The narrator, a young preacher in small-town Oklahoma, reminded me of characters from Marilynne Robinson or Walter Wangerin Jr. Perhaps the holiest thing he does is stay present with his sense of inadequacy and not run away from the man he can’t help, a tough-looking but emotionally vulnerable inhabitant of a prison camp. Stan is looking for a publisher for his collection of linked stories; contact me if you can help.

Also in Gemini, Wess Mongo Jolley’s slice-of-life tale “A Candle in the Sun” shows a moment of tenderness between two strangers on a bench in New York’s Union Square Park. Being homeless, the narrator is someone that people often overlook, which allows him, in turn, to be an astute observer of their interactions. “What magic is in this city! How sheer the curtain between Fifth Avenue and Alphabet City. How intertwined the strands of rich and poor, like gray hair and black, braided together in a rope that supports the weight of this city’s soul.”

Gabriel Fine’s “Days of Awe” was The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week on Dec. 2. Observing the Rosh Hashanah traditions with his family, against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the speaker is chilled by the legend that God decides whom to re-inscribe in the Book of Life during the High Holidays.

…Stone and coiled steel
of the maps and tomes. Signs obscuring the way
to the other country. When did I first learn the terror
of inscription? I loved our songs, feared the book
of names: who shall live and who shall die a cruelty
I failed to understand…

Abby E. Murray, author of the fantastic poetry collection Hail and Farewell, has a poignant parenting poem in One Art called “How (Not) to Die” about “children on playgrounds, processing/what it is to exist in a world built/only by hands that cannot survive/or save it”.

Published in Necessary Fiction in 2023, Robbie Herbst’s flash fiction “The Harvard Whisperer” is part horror, part satire of the precarious society that young people enter and the pieces of themselves (literally!) that they lose to get ahead.

Over at Bending Genres, Shannon Frost Greenstein’s hermit crab essay “Quiz: Are You Perpetuating Intergenerational Trauma and Using the Wrong Skincare Line?” reveals that this humorous non sequitur is not so random after all. There are lots of possible connections to be drawn; I was reminded how mothers try to protect their daughters from cultural misogyny by oppressively micromanaging their appearance.

2. What is your nightly skincare routine?

A. I cleanse, towel dry, and threaten my children with bodily harm if they get out of bed.
B. I fall right asleep because I’m not that invested in modeling positive behaviors.
C. I do a laser light therapy facial mask and pit my children against one another.
D. I cry into my pillow because I’m making the same mistakes as my parents.

Tighe Flatley’s essay in the new issue of The Plentitudes, “How I Learned Victoria’s Secret”, is a young gay man’s coming-of-age story about working in retail at the ubiquitous mall store. By turns melancholy and hilarious, the essay describes the slow process of first assembling a false self and then letting it go.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2024

Dec21

I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse: buy Origin Story

Elation, exhaustion, fear, creativity, fury, and perseverance are the competing flavors in the boiling stew that is 2024 in retrospect. I had some tremendous breakthroughs and brought some years-long dreams to fruition. At the same time, I’m anxious and grieving about what lies ahead for my trans community, the Palestinians and their Jewish allies, and many other marginalized groups, in January when America becomes a Project 2025 laboratory. Donate to Jewish Voice for Peace before we lose our 501(c)(3) status under the Republicans’ “nonprofit killer” bill.

In 2024, I experienced sacred erotic brotherhood at Easton Mountain and Body Electric. My second novel was published. I won the Oscar Wilde Award for LBGTQ Poetry from Gival Press for a poem about going down on a cream puff. I took some excellent classes with collage artist S.T. Gately at Northampton Center for the Arts. She helped me with composition and encouraged me to embrace the unplanned. I’ve been making art pretty regularly this year, mostly on my own, but also at the Queer and Trans Art Group at Resilient Community Arts in Easthampton. Their classes inspired me to branch out into dioramas. More and more, I am returning to what I loved most as a child. Making miniature worlds is one such passion.

The Young Master graduated from 6th grade at Montessori and started junior high at White Oak School, where he is especially enamored of the biweekly cooking classes. If I’m really good, he will share his creations with me. Those apple turnovers were top-notch.

Adam doesn’t label himself but he’s happy to be under the rainbow umbrella with me at Northampton Pride. This year our family visited Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and as always, New York City.

I’m not yet allowed to announce which press will be publishing my fourth poetry collection, Introvert Pervert, in January 2026, but here is a picture of Theodore “Big Pussy” DiMeow sitting on the contract.

That’s a wrap, folks. Be gay, do crimes.

Art via @adamgpayne on X, https://adamillustrates.tumblr.com/

Reiter's Block

The blog of poet and novelist Jendi Reiter