Signal Boost for "Arcane Perfection" and statement of position on trans-issues in the community

I know my readership is probably so small, it's null, but I still want to make this post on the chance that those who read this might discover a project that is very near and dear to my heart.  Arcane Perfection is an anthology with a submission deadline of August 1st that is open to queer, trans, and intersex witches. From what I understand, this is a response in part to the pile of transphobic hate speech that is coming out of those members of the goddess movement who are working on "Female Erasure" - a very transphobic collection of essays that is sadly only a few thousand away from reaching it's indie gogo goals and will soon be published. It is also an opportunity for trans voices in the witch and pagan community to be heard, to let the wider pagan world know that they are here and are not going anywhere just because society at large chooses to ignore them or  worse actively work to their erasure. If you are queer/trans/intersex and you are a witch, I think this project would be of great interest and I encourage you to submit.

As a word witch, an arcana witch, and a pagan, I cannot simply stand by while the movement to destroy the queer presence in our community gains traction and support. I am pansexual and I have recently come to terms with the reality that I am omnigender (or pangender), and the emotional and spiritual space I once felt at home with as a community is drastically shifting to a site of danger for those I love. I am choosing to abstain from submitting to Arcane Perfection because I have lived most my life to the world at large as cis-gender woman and I want to give priority to those voices who certain members of the pagan community are right now striving to erase from our circles.

So here I take my stand. I am an omnigender witch who believes trans lives matter, and I will do my part when hate speech arises to denounce it, argumentatively combat it, and will always welcome queer/trans/intersex people into my spiritual circles.

To all of my trans/queer/intersex siblings in the pagan community, I love you, and I want you around.

May this post stand against the bigotry and hate that wills to destroy you. We will not bend, we will not break, and we will be here when the waves rush over and the rain howls.

Arcane Perfection

(first cross post with my other blog on more spiritual matters, Ecstatic Fire Baby in Search of Water)

update: The editor encouraged me to submit, so I am now going to do so. And all of you who are queer/trans/intersex witches and are reading this should too!

"Inanna"

Hello, my lovely duckies. If you are here, I thank you for taking the time to read this. It is with great pleasure, much fear, and thrill, I put into your hands for your reading pleasure the chapbook Inanna. You can set your own price, which means it is absolutely free as well. You just type in "0.00" when you go to check out. My body is not feeling up to too much chest puffing over this, as it's the cumulation of three months worth of writing and editing. I'm tired, and I will just let the synopsis and the book itself do the talking.

And yes, if you know what the cover art features, I salute you, you naughty kids. ;)

The mythos of Innana has enchanted readers for decades. After dreaming of the elusive sky goddess one evening, I found myself writing of her polarities, her anger, her grief, and wondering at what sort of voice is hiding in texts that are undoubtedly, like all religious scriptures, ensconced in a certain gendered ideology. "Inanna" is a chapbook filled with explorations of identity among sexual, spiritual, cosmic, and social axes. When the radiant goddess of the sky goes down to meet her cthonic bound sister, her body breaks as it is hung on a hook, and her whole life - from the establishment of her own godhood to the marriage of Demuzi - spins out before her. On Ereshkigal's meat hook she is doomed to rot, and in rotting, the Queen of Heaven fully blooms.

Click here to download it at smashwords.

P.S. If you want to know what covers I worked on didn't make the cut, check this out:

I ended up going with the unlayered image since I enjoyed it's simplicity and I felt like the one above is too busy and the effects take away from its meaning.

Juggle of the collections

Whelp. I've done it again. I still have "Inanna" and "Trifecta" to finish up, but in the post Caldera Fest wonder and madness it seems that another is rising with the summer grass. "Trance Lost" so far has proven to be a collection wherein my spirituality, grief over the state of the world, and personal claims of identity intersect to create a poetic baby that might not quite know who she is because she keeps falling asleep and waking up in dreams of astral wandering. Maybe she's angry, but it's hard to be angry when you stare up at the night sky and see Saturn and Jupiter winking back at you. Maybe she's overjoyed to be dancing but the dance moves to the beat of distant war drums she spits on but realizes they shape the world she lives in. She drinks soy milk thinking shes doing good but has to cry in the corner when she realizes its a homogeneous culture ruining the rain forests and the diversity of life. She loves her grandma while feeling confused about what the love demands of her when she confronts the mindset of a post Appalachian baptist who can only see the world in shades of biblical red and black.

All in all, "Trance Lost" is a poetic mess. But its one I have to get out on paper, or it's probably going to go septic and all you will get out of me is stuttering sentences full of hippie self righteous anger that don't do anyone a lick of good. So let me have this, just for a minute.

I am waiting to get the artwork for "Inanna" sorted out, but all in all the editing on that collection is complete. So it should be coming first as soon as the cover comes to fruition. "Trifecta" still has a lot of work and I think I want to reach out to a friend to work on that cover so that one might not even be a possibility until the end of the year. But "Trance Lost," as improvisational in feel as it has been since its inception in meditative journeying and mundane rants, will undoubtedly not be so demanding. The cover is another GIMP project playground for me, so hopefully that should be up shortly after "Innana." Who knows, maybe before even.

Here is a poem from "Trance Lost." I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.

Queer in New Jerusalem

You say your guns will save you

when the Apocalypse rises to the surface

like a boil on the skin of the earth

Who is going to save me from you

when my scales pop out from under my skin

when my pine cone flower mandala blossoms

and drips all over the threshing floor

of my ever evolving tree house

and you are peeking through the window

thinking to get a peep,

but instead its just me dancing

in the myriad irradiated bulb light,

hoping to get a moment’s peace

as I step out of this corset

bound body suit that keeps it all in,

letting nothing escape, not even

My exhale

My sweet breath I have to shunt out

or I will choke looking out

on the world you built

where pine cone flower mandala

children have only

a grave as their home

"Jo-Isis" & news

I'm about to take a step back from working on poetry to edit my short story collection & novella, but within the next month or so "Inanna" should be available, once I've finished formatting and getting the cover I have in mind in order. But in preparation for the ascetic lifestyle that comes with editing longer works (i.e. locking one's self away in the tower, fasting on avacados and water for the whole day while you try to get this damn story in order, because who has time to cook, am I right?), I wanted to get all of the poems sitting in my notebook in order and realized that I had not only "Inanna" coming out of that morass of text, but also another chapbook tentatively titled "Trifecta: Maiden, Mother, Crone; Girl, Monster, Toy"














So far, the running thread of these seems to be targeting the problematic notion of feminine divinity in neo-paganism, which is the reoccurring motif of women dissected into three neat little categories of "maiden-mother-crone." If I am recalling correctly, it's largely a notion that has come out of Wicca and has influenced goddess centric spirituality.  Now I myself definitely would say that I fall under the "neo-pagan" category as I simply have a hard time adhering strictly to re-constructionist beliefs, but I definitely am not Wiccan, as it's really too dualistic and simplistic for me. For our purposes here, I will just say that I am a pantheist - which is the belief that the universe itself is divine.  But I do firmly recognize that human notions of the divine often reflect what we believe to be true about ourselves and our values. The "trifecta" of maiden-mother-crone has a tendency to put women into little boxes and I feel this fails to recognize the inherent plurality of identity. It misses how our lives are essentially gradients, for lack of a better word, in which the self is at any one time many layers of inter-sectional states. And if we view the divine in such a fashion, are we not underestimating the beauty and chaos of the universe itself? But I don't intend this work to be wholly religious in nature. So far it is definitely more of a sort of path finding for identity while navigating the spiritual road posts culture has laid out in front of you.  I really look forward to sharing it with you once it is all in order.

Since it is Mother's Day tomorrow, I figure it would be fitting to share a poem from this collection which feels ready to be shared and is about the matriarch who kept my father's side of the family together for decades.
***

girl into maiden into mother into

every death

are these the tests of my faith?

didn't get the memo

that goddess equals  the many color

gradient

fire is not contained in urban decay

summer pallets

you can pop out Robert Graves all you like

but I met my grandmother once,

and in her eyes, I saw her running

the length of the earth, wild, jubilant,

crushing whole cities with leaps

and bounds, all the while to come home

just a little tired, collapsing in the

depression era dining set where she smoked,

and dreamed about flowers

that really grow

in beds she spent her whole life

collecting the egg shells of yesterday

laying down her own body as glorious

americana compost

Sea Shattered

So here it is, another poetry chapbook I finally edited and compiled that's been sitting on my back burner for six months. I've spent the past week working on the edits for "Inanna" but that cover will have to wait awhile until I can get a hold of the resources to make the cover I have in mind, so in the meanwhile I used all of yesterday to finish the touches on this little menagerie of words inspired from my trip to the Gulf last October.

I am pretty worn out from all that screen staring I did yesterday, so here is the link to the Smashwords page where you can find it. You can have it for free or, if for some reason you think this pile of poems I conjured up while sitting on stormy shores for a week is worth a coin or two, you can pay me what you want. Regardless, I hope you enjoy it, and I am grateful for the time you take in reading it (insert heartful emojis here)

When I visited the Gulf for the first time in twelve years, I was sensually overwhelmed by the power of our Ocean Mother. She's out in the waves, and ever true to her siren self, she's looking for a meal to shatter, for a wayward human to wander too close to her rip tide. Like the seagull bashing shells against rocks, the sea has a way of fragmenting you as you stand face to face with her alone on the shore, the edges of yourself fading into the misty morning light. These poems are from that experience of confronting Ocean Mother for the first time in what seemed an age, and I'm still trying to discover if I myself shattered on those shores, or if I ended up taking other pieces home with me

click here to go to Sea Shattered @ Smashwords

Illuminated Anatomy of an Annunaki

you open up your books

to your diagram of goddess

where all my arterial rivers

which run into your Eden are displayed

girl child keeps thinking all she sees is

bone chalk clogging up the tear ducts

from which the original, that primordial

mercy conjuring pollen conjuring helix ballerinas

conjuring tears of Baghdad and Ferguson,

you think of that old Inanna,

with her vulva splayed out

like the folds of lotus into which

all of you keep pissing

your radiation in

but don’t worry children,

I’ve had my mouth open

for your terror of

a father for a long time

this cum shot of industry

the money sequence through

which dollars countdown

like a doomsday clock

for your little rioting, bloated, quaking

world

No one knows how to extract

hope from chaos better

than old Inanna

I stole the code for civilization,

I’m willing to break it down again

just to bring lovers and children alike

back into the folds

a vicious flower hug,

dragging you all down into my nectar trap

Reset is easy, when you are the sum total of Desire

gather all the pieces

the board is clear, and my tears flow

like atoms looking for the spark

Mine is life eternal when the elements are here to party

you keep thinking I’m so angry I would burn down your beds

just to watch you wither from girl to granny

but honey, I’m just craving, yearning

for all the children to drop their technicolor screens

and follow me home

a seven pointed star hovers over a young girl’s thoughts

I’m trying to get through

beauty is a transmission that often dissipates in space

giving into the frequencies of other, brighter stars

honey, you’re never as lovely as you were in nova, just wait

it will come around again,

incendiary, grand, and vibrating on a string

that cosmic wake up call of your realization

and when you look at your anatomical drawing of me,

consider the ovaries

I promise you are witnessing yourself

a star’s light as a time capsule

of when you were dying,

and in dying, you were the best you ever were

A long overdue poetry chapbook

As it looks like I just keep failing to live up to expectations by actually submitting anything with enough frequency that it would have a chance in hell at being published, I have decided to at least let my work have a little bit of air beyond the trappings of my notebook and hard drive. I find that as I get older, as much as I would love to see more of my work in publications beyond this blog, it really isn't the end game to be honest. I have always loved the thrill of putting the words together like so many pieces in a puzzle that I have no reference for, and so I am free to assemble to something as close as possible to the world that waltzes around in my head. For me, in many ways, it's this creative drive that keeps me moving in and out of the cycle of days.

But really, I want to give these little sons of bitches a chance to play around in the recess of the reader, and so it is with gratitude and warmth that I put into your hands, the first of four chapbooks I hope to publish in their entirety and share here.

Receipt Dandies is the first poetry chapbook I ever wrote and it's more or less a collection of poems I had been working on for nearly two years by the time it was completed last October.  I really feel that more or less the poems seem to touch on this muted theme that what you put into life seems to have such muffled and jumbled returns, and if it were all on a receipt, they would be politely worded out to say so much as "What a waste that all was!" But enough about that, I will let you all be the judge of whether or not that theme is executed well.

For now, I am publishing under the name of Michelle Lore, to differentiate my poetic attempts from those of my prose fiction. It's not an attempt to hide my identity, but to give my different mediums a separate space to grow in my head.

The chapbook is 100% free and is available through Lulu.com, and they claim it will be available through kindle, nook, apple, etc, but I have yet to check. But here is a link to the pdf file on my google drive as well as the page on Lulu.

I hope to update the cover as soon as I get the chance, but goodness knows when I can get that up and running.

Links:
Receipt Dandies PDF
Receipt Dandies at Lulu.com

Right now I am currently working on chapbook themed around Inanna, the Sumerian fertility goddess. I may have a teaser for it here in a few days.