#69: sissy anarchy, everglades & me, my body
sent from pierce's iphone with love
pierce:
Hey angel. I’m Pierce, but people call me sissy. A friend recently said I was complexity embodied, so I suppose that surmises the allure I take to and make of the world. I’m a writer and founding editor of a trans anarchist platform called SISSY ANARCHY, Managing Editor of Worms, a hyper-romantic-vulnerable-pearlescent treasure (angelic anarchist, duh), and I always leave the house with pomegranate chapstick so my lips look wet. TY to Joss for calling me cute and makin’ me blush. Hold tight bby.
Mwah x
the princess of the hour
this is the online bit:
I contort my body down to my feet, adjusting my head to be water level – eye to eye – with the mosquitos fluttering around my ankles. I politely interject their buzzing, I lay out a tablecloth across my flesh. I invite them to dine on me. I feel bad for the mosquito, I feel troubled for this cloud, the swarth, my blood-sucking companions.
The Spanish and Portuguese ‘mosca’, or Latin ‘musca’, meaning “fly” degrades this species into a similar categorisation of that of a literal fly; it’s ability to levitate and gravitate toward flesh — not by feet but by wing — is not enough of a clear delineation for my liking, for the mosquito. This simplistic classification underscores for me a tone all too reminiscent of calling ourselves collectively: mouth breathers, oxygen sippers, and so on. *cringe*. I feel completely impalpable, to pronounce such prophetic, to delineate anyone ever as something by their function is a gross misunderstanding of their complexity. Ew.
I’m frustrated and so I allow myself to become a buffet, to welcome carnage across my pulsing veins, and watch — in some sort of human spite that’s mixed with curiosity — how remarkable the landing is a mosquito makes as it detects my secretion of carbon dioxide, my breath, and the other skin odorants in my sweat. I let the mosquito probe with her labella to find the perfect spot, and when she finds the right place to sink her fascicle into my flesh, our liquids meet.
Hive mind, hit the track.
'Cause I just had a dream I was dead
And I only cared 'cause I was taken from you
You're the only thing that I own
I hear my bell ring, I'd only answer for you
– Mosquito by PinkPantheress
Caption: Diedrick Brackens, blessed are the mosquitoes, 2020, Oil on Canvas, Woven Cotton and Acrylic Yarn Shape of a Fever Believer, 2020, Oil on Canvas, Woven Cotton and Acrylic Yarn.
bell hooks, virginia woolf, and jeremy allen white (my desktop)
I write on my Instagram that it is enough to love words’n’men and 12 weeks on I think, fuck. My hormone replacement therapy means my arousal is all tussled up, but when I look back at this chaotic screengrab (gently curated with a lust to combine the power of words with some sense of enjoying again my lust for men) I spiral with thoughts on what my sexual identity is becoming. What I do know is that more than ever they seem related, bell hooks with woolf and jeremy allen white, in the sense that maybe most of all what I’m looking for is some sort of resolution to the violence I’ve been caused by men. Maybe, what I want is the weight of a man’s words to be so regenerative that they put me back together rather than eviscerating me. *shrugs*, maybe my draw to words is after all aesthetically erotic and I just learn better this way by positioning them drooled in men. Something quivers inside of me though. A growth, a pulse, a libido signalling it’s attracted to jeremy’s assumed gentleness. Maybe that’s what it is, I flirt with the putridity of masculinity only once it’s doused in a fragrance of safety. The words urge me to.
Caption: my desktop junk.
I love archived publications and pdfs online. I’m currently reading through Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments List, published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E #3, 1978: pdf here.
this is the irl bit:
everglades
I feel more trans than I’ve ever been. Here, I feel some of the insidious worries of ’the city’ fade away from me whilst coming into confluence with a new terrain. I’m an observer (to hold is to see) becoming attached to the words people use here, how somewhere along each experience I explore there will be mention of the significant biological diversity and ‘strange’ variability of species and plants that distinctly make themselves trans-ecologically known. I think about how our stories have always existed in sediments, how below the dermis of our skin I can find reason to believe the Everglades is a sister. I think about how to identify our bodies — both manufactured and engineered, hormonal as cortisol rises due to exacerbating conditions — and I know our permutations refuse linearity. Beyond explaining ecological behaviour as oppositional with human behaviour, trans interconnection with the ecological rises from a need to be absorbed again into the natural and conceptual frameworks that have always organised the world. The most natural of all processes is reflected in nature, is to mutate constantly in response to our environment because we are…
being trans is honouring nature
an image I took in the everglades whilst on residency.
me, my body (i am irl)
This year I'm focused on burying the old anxiety hatchet and getting the nervous system stabilised. I'm six months sober and feeling more adjusted. It's a choice I had to make for my health and mental wellbeing, but to say that it hasn’t revealed patterns of debilitating thought would be a lie. I feel more able to distinguish these processes or narratives I've built over time and can easily slip into, and am now more aware of how they serve to ruin me rather heal me. I am still riddled with an overwhelming sense of worry and dread, like everything around me could collapse in an instant. What I hold to, my greatest lesson always is: that which seeks to destroy me needs my attention and healing. I'm approaching six months on HRT and that comes with its own complications and revelations. The least I can say is that when I started, everything I had known became incongruous with how to live now. My entire cellular structure is announcing to me daily that micro-revelations are taking place internally. I feel grateful knowing my body refuses the rigidity of individual transformation and has sought out communion with my trans-siblings, and that’s where I'll take comfort this year.
an ode, a hymn:
I hope you read this at a time where you are unlikely to know the atrocities that have come before you. A moment in our pull where things have flickered off, the systems holding systems have had their plugs pulled out, and a reboot is taking place. Where you’re braver for your inexperience with the violences of the ‘before’ and in our now ‘after’ we’re restored to our places purposefully with balance, strength, and regrowth together.
me.
SISSY ANARCHY
SISSY ANARCHY is an A1 poster (which folds down to an A4 zine) and online newsletter that features essays, poems and visions about contemporary politics where socialism, communism and anarchism converge through the lens of trans queer theory and artistic practices against racism, transicide, femicide and ecocide. The zine’s responses address the abolition of the state, defunding militarisation, activist archivist process and protest, relinquishing incarceration institutions and the government of their power, and reflect on current activist practices.
me at the SISSY ANARCHY issue #2 launch at ICA, no censorship bby.
SISSY ANARCHY issue #2.
love <3 <3 <3 <3