Waking up asking: what is the point of being alive when there’s so much pain? Poetry is where we go to get lost to get found. One day I woke up with 24/7 chronic pain. These approaches have always felt more fitting for a dissertation than a diagram on how to live. So many posture cynicism and nihilism as the superior and more enlightened way of being. I wanted to craft poems that paid attention to this. Alongside the merciless drone of misery, so many miracles. In all of my pain, there is still beauty. This is the most bittersweet drink on the menu: in this cruel world / there is compassion. Because it was here that I stumbled upon that sublime word “castigate” and found friends to be lonely together. I harbor within me both a deep despair at the way this world castigates our creativity (by which I mean: our humanity) and a fierce love for that very cursed world. We just don’t do the courtesy of noticing it: the majesty of the mundane. Everything is a diamond: precious, complex, multifaceted. Even the things we dismiss as flat, ordinary, or boring. (It’s just that some of us are more honest about it.)Įverything. It is not only possible – but terribly likely – that things are multiple things all at the same time. We aren’t just fighting against the gender binary, we are also affirming the poetics of simultaneity. Queerness is about the perennial, stubborn attempt to reclaim and inhabit the places within us that have been colonized by shame.īeing nonbinary is an invitation to interrogate all the dichotomies holding us back. That doesn’t make me wrong (or even right). The things that you hate about yourself / I love them in me. How would you describe the relationship between the wound and the garden, the relationship between pain and poetry? The title Your Wound / My Garden brings to mind what you have said about the importance of transforming rather than transmitting pain.

Femme in Public by Alok Vaid-Menon