ABOUT
thedaintyfunk@gmail.com
A manifesto for ugliness, monstrosity and its revolutionary potential / an exploration of what power we can gain through embracing the parts of ourselves that are puss filled, odorous and purposefully hidden from the world / a community framework that prioritizes the disfigured, disabled, and ‘inhuman’ among us / a war cry / a plea / a rejection of my own humanity in exchange for something call on the audience to reject their own humanity for something more authentic, more freeing… more monstrous.
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Monster Portraits
a ghazal after Sofia Samatar
I am kissing the mirror it knows me to my bones monsters are an unseen, blur in the page but the mirror sees me — monster!
Pitchforked ivory bone bursts forth, gangly wet and crowning — the house of me too limb filled, too stiff, and finally too monstrous
my fury is a molten silver rake scarring the ground I am a weed and I am killing everything and I am still too monstrous.
Desire — a pier, pointing toward the shore. I kiss every grain of sand! Look at the moon, the horizon, how awe is big and monstrous.
That sailor’s calloused hands on my bedrock will be forgotten but they will remember my rows of teeth, my monstrosity.
I had hoped the wonting would make of man a pillar a foot hold but here you are still suckling, spilling milk, making monsters.
An eroded, wooden feeling worms its way into everything, whimpers in the unearth. In deep, once-secret tunnels it whispers gravely — you are the monster.
Throat blood-raw, cheeks still hot, I was forsaken, beaten, wing-clipped mid-note, staring up, halved, cast out – and you call me a monster?
What use is blind and faithful servitude? Prayer to a jealous, fearsome god? When all those pleas are deafened by your very own monstrosity.
Why not return to gap teeth? Honey-fingered? Scraped knees? Before I was so full of my own grief. Before I was a monster.
Isn’t it amazing? Here you are still begging to return to some place you can’t recall, still a monster.
I am loved and it burns like jumping into an icy pool or being the one to see the drool, the tail wag of a monster
I am eating my heart out it turns to wet ash in my mouth, a graveyard of selves, stonewalled and phantom and still searching for monsters.