The girl who isn’t there

I’m the girl who isn’t there---
but in the middle.
Cloudy day gray
 in-between
is my favorite space.

On a good day,
I lean into the silence
 of the calm before the storm
where it smells different
--- brine and pepper sharp and good
--- colors in techno.

I’m the girl of the hash mark,
 the dash,
 the hyphen,
sitting on it like some people say
Others sit on a fence,
but I recognize
the spikey picket part
pokes the ass crack
---it’s not comfortable.
Maybe I like what’s not
comfortable.

I am neither here
nor there,
--woman or man –
butch or femme,
I am more like Prince’s “something you will never understand.”
I am curious about IT-ness.
I patrol borders without being a border patrol.

I jumped chalk outlines
even before the experiments
of being a nineteentwentysomething.
The IT-ness became
pre-Hedwig and the Angry Inch
articulated when I noticed the lushness
of green grass and trees
rolling over the scar of where a Berlin Wall dug out a wound----
how all that concrete couldn’t last against human flesh and dirt,
how barbed wire
rusted there.

I am not undecided
I am free and roaming without charges
I am in the middle of the road
 and I like the view
 of both sides.
I like front, back,
center,
turn around
and spin

Naked Ladies

for Shannon Collinson

“You’re wearing naked ladies,”
someone would say about my favorite concert shirt,
Seven Year Bitch’s mirror image logo of women in silhouette,
silver on black,
sparkling across my chest.
“Indeed, I am,” was my common retort.
I was proud to have Mudflap Girls on my boobs,
inspired by my favorite band.
They introduced my obsession with the naked ladies,
the metallic shadow omens of eighteen wheeler speed freaks,
high hat wearin,’
toothpick chewin,’
working class heroes or chauvinists,
depending upon how the ladies reflected off their vehicles.
Eventually, I collected naked ladies
to hold my crotch up with a belt buckle,
or cover my ass from a wallet.
The naked ladies in their glitter-shimmer, I believed,
kept me traveling.

It all started on a day like love at first sight,
the way one thing leads to another,
the way one band opens me up to a whole scene.
All the details were sharp--from the wet, sugar-grey sky
to the attractive, sculpted, boy jaws of my friends--
to what we wore in grunge-before-grunge chic of
layered long underwear and flannel,
buffering us against the wind.
The emergency siren, breakage sounds of the political punk band Fugazi
swirled us together in squatter contrast to the Washington, D.C.,
polished whites
of the monumental mall.

This day became a culmination, a summation, and an epiphany
in thigh high boots, short plaid skirts, and the scowls
--emphasis on “grr”--of
Riot Grrls.
Led by the band Bikini Kill,
they smelled of sweaty flannel and black Sharpie marker,
thick obscenities like “slut,” “bitch,” “witch”
scrawled on their flesh
to demonstrate the physical impact of words
slapping flesh.
I was hooked.
From that day forward,
I immersed myself in the squalls
of gravel voiced women in bands
who were not afraid to like things heavy, hard, and tough.
Battalions of the righteously “angry women in rock” had names like
Women of Destruction -WOD for short—
a group with a dread headed accordion player
and whose lead singer snarled,
“everything’s better with my cunt!”
These were the Reagan-Bush tyranny years viewed from DC,
the mosh pit of political dysfunction.
These were the days of the die-ins and direct actions
of activist groups like Queer Nation and Act-Up,
reclaiming words like “faggot” and “dyke”
from the squalor of threat,
elevating them into identities
and adjectives of empowerment.

With the discovery of a soundtrack,
I included myself in the punk collective of “we.”
We were bratty and sneery with our reclaimed cunts, sluts, dykes, whores,
and we wielded these words as though we were picking boogers
and smooshing them
under “b” in the book of entitled language
known as the d-i-c-k-s-h-u-n-ary.
It wasn’t like we were going to topple the patriarchy by spelling woman with a “y,”
but we were going to have fun trying.

I found Seven Year Bitch on a compilation LP with Bikini Kill
and preferred Selene Vigil’s voice to Kathleen Hannah’s.
Selene went beyond Kathleen’s pouty grrl lyrics
--a reverse challenge to “suck my dick.”
Instead, Selene dove right into songs like “Dead Men Don’t Rape,”
leaving tits alone and going for where it counted.
Seven Year Bitch invited a rethinking of “bitch”
and a re-imagining of their logo,
guilt by an association of rock and roll women,
on tour and stealing a sign,
one of the road’s talismans:

The Mudflap Girls.

The cookie-cutter silhouettes became more than one sided,
they became and signified rock stars on tour.
Mudflap Girls peeled themselves from a two dimensional sticker,
shook off that mercury coating
to reveal track marks, scars, tattoos, and smeared make-up—if any—
and a lopsided smile with a “fuck you” made of tobacco-stained fingers.
Their hands had to have been calloused from the solar steering wheels
of drives criss-crossing the country,
and the metal chords of their electrified instruments.
Their arms had to be hard from holding that half-reclined sitting position,
but even more,
from turning wrenches,
changing endless tires,
and pumping rivers of gasoline.
They tossed their hair out, not like a shampoo commercial,
but to reveal Mohawks with dragons and vipers tattooed
under the shaved parts.
They were stinky with bar sweat
earned from hot lights and frenetic guitar solos.
They were tribal pierced and flame designed.
They had bugs in their teeth and whisky breath.
They were familiar with loving difficult noise
and difficult people.
They were witnesses to miles of road kill.

Mudflap Girls were easy to reverse appropriate,
coming in pairs,
like tail lights,
like eyes,
like a pair of women,
like mirrors a couple of dykes could see our reflections in---
pairs of dykes
not afraid of the open road;
grit, asphalt, adventure, a tool kit, flares, spare parts,
greasy food chains and trees flicking the lights at sundown
into druidic night shadows.

What is a little mud compared
to sitting still?
They became the signifiers of dykes on road trips together,
equipped with steely glares and steel toes,
voices hoarse from screaming along with homemade tapes and cds,
skin dried out and turning red on the arm hanging out
on the driver’s side window.

The Mudflap Girls,
from their perspectives on too-hot, rearview mirrors
or the close range of big rig tires,
would know how the road irons out the mind,
plays raucous music,
adds to the lore of making love where it’s found,
making treasures from trash.
Those Mudflap Girls cracked jokes from neon signs
with certain letters burnt out,
or from funny names of apparent nowheres
that are somewheres
to someone.
They’ve overseen the little pits of suburban hell
and over-ornately quaint, rural traps
trying to survive against
the relentless, high bas-reliefs of cities
with their industrial, cigarette stack teeth.

Mudflap Girls were women recreated just a little,
by 7 Year Bitch and their punk dyke fans,
as a symbol for movement, traffic,
and the noise of not fitting in with the stillness of status quos.
They represented a collision of punk, of rock star,
of dyke, of underclass, and finally,
escape.