Sinister Wisdom 122: Writing Communities

By Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 122: Writing Communities gathers a selection of work edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle under the rubric Writing Communities. These important pieces reflect on how writers--and readers--build communities of shared interest. The issue also includes selections from the best new lesbian writing that lesbians submit to Sinister Wisdom. Sinister Wisdom 122: Writing Communities features a wonderful collection of writing about the life of Frances Clayton, an important lesbian foremother and partner of Audre Lorde for many years. Frances and Clare Coss assembled stories about Frances's early life and her life with Lorde. Lorde and Clayton's daughter, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins provides a moving afterword on Frances Clayton's life. Also included in Sinister Wisdom 122: Writing Communities are remembrances of Alix Dobkin and Irare Sabasu. Open Sinister Wisdom 122: Writing Communities to share in lesbian imagination, inspiration, and community.

Featuring Creative Work by:
Jewelle Gomez
Sheree L. Greer
Nicole Shawan Junior
Krystal A. Smith
Arisa White
Audra Puchalski
Paula Molina Acosta
Lourdes Dolores Follins
July Westhale

& More!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Apr 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781944981600

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Editor: Julie R. Enszer

Guest Editor: Stephanie Andrea Allen & Lauren Cherelle

Graphic Designer: Nieves Guerra

Copy Editor: Amy Haejung

Board of Directors: Roberta Arnold, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, Sara Gregory, Shromona Mandal, Joan Nestle, Rose Norman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Yasmin Tambiah, and Red Washburn

Cover Art: Lesbian on a Ledge - Artist: Madari Pendas

Media: Acrylic on a Canvas Pad - Size of Artwork: 9 x 12

Biography: Madari Pendas is a Cuban-American writer, painter, and poet living in Miami. Her works focus on the surreal aspects that accompany the exile experience and the ways Latinidad intersects with other salient parts of her identity, like being a woman, queer, and working-class. She has received literary awards from Florida International University, in the categories of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Acentos Review, Pank Magazine, The New Tropic, Lambda Literary, Jai-Alai Books, Politicsay, The Beacon, The Flagler Review, Sinister Wisdom, Junto Magazine, The Reporter, Saudade County Press, MOKO Magazine, WLRN (Miami’s NPR affiliate), and The Miami New Times. She is currently a graduate student at Florida International University.

Artist statement: The chaotic and violent background behind the subject of the work demonstrates the world and environments lesbians, minorities, and disenfranchised groups experience. The woman is painted in the same colors as the frenzied backdrop she inhabits because she is not immune to its effects; she is a participant in the world, it floods and subsumes her body. However, despite the consuming and commodification of her existence, she is still visible amid the tumultuous scene. She is still whole, not robbed of her individuality or reflecting back the same terror that is regularly inflicted upon and around her. It is an image of hope; it is a reflection of the women who are not defined by their environments or the brutality beyond the periphery. 

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976

Former editors and publishers:

Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson (1976–1981)

Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981–1983)

Michaele Uccella (1983–1984)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983–1987)

Elana Dykewomon (1987–1994)

Caryatis Cardea (1991–1994)

Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995–1997)

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997–2000)

Fran Day (2004–2010)

Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi (2010–2013)

Julie R. Enszer (2013–)

Copyright © 2021 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication.

Printed in the U. S. on recycled paper.

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Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Notes for a Special Issue

Writing Communities

Stephanie Andrea Allen

Better Off Dead

The Question

Truth

librecht baker

To Those Facing the Others Yelling a Variation of Go Back to Your Country

Staging a Stage – Making a Part

Kendra N. Bryant

Tanka | morning affirmation

Tanks | honest to God truth

Tanka | braving

Tanka | July 8

Lauren Cherelle

Wave of Memory

Jewelle Gomez

Bess, You Is My Woman Now

Coal

Coloured Lesbian Poem

Gilda Sings: Desire

Sheree L. Greer

The Community Garden

La Toya Hankins

Women Word Warriors

Nicole Shawan Junior

This Seat Is For You

Krystal A. Smith

Buoyancy

Collective, My Collective!

Not Now

Arisa White

Rule Maker: Dear Amira Shaunice, Creator, Writer, Director of the Webseries New York Girls

New Lesbian Writing

Dany Mangrove

Out, In Six Parts

Audra Puchalski

Radishes

Edges / Devotion / Atthis

Haley Cao

Embodying Sex

Hannah Soyer

Upon Realizing the Flowers Do Not Belong to Her

Bipedal Human, Legs Not Working

Diane Solis

Grief and Hoping

Breast Woman

Paula Molina Acosta

The Abortionist

Lourdes Dolores Follins

My Osun: Reworking of the Legend

Geri Gale

Between the Two of them

The Surviving Solitary Feminist

Julie Weiss

Holy Fucking Lipstick

aurora linnea

I. WASTELAND I

II. ALGAL//LITURGY

III. MORBID ANATOMY, A BADLANDS DAUGHTER

Mary Aviyah Farkas

That Still, Small Voice Inside

Sarah Cooper

Dublin, Without You

As a Carpenter’s Daughter

Let’s imagine there’s a way

Jenna Goldsmith

I request the institution develop a policy

Title IX

Paucity

Mourning and Melancholia

Haley Davis

Mirage

My Bodies Are Made of Many Things

July Westhale

The Concept Library

Makaila Aarin

Chai Latte

Corky Wick

Death Plan

Marina Kazakova

Ropewalking between your gentle consonants

Lisa Dordal

My Mother, Arriving

Meditations on My Mother’s Death

My Mother Speaks to Me

Madari Pendas

Believing and Knowing

Tiffany Washington

The Last of the Blue Plates

Ryan Rattliff

Hometown Familiar

Linda Stein

Covid Story: An Artist Sheltered in Place on the 31st Floor

Juanita Kirton

The Dress

Frances Clayton: Remembering Our Friend and Chosen Family

Clare Coss

Introduction

Frances Clayton, as told to Clare Coss

A Lesbian Life

Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins

Afterword—Frances Clayton, PhD: A True Parent

Snapshots of Lesbian Love Celebration

Book Reviews

Remembrances

Bonnie J. Morris

The Lesbian Language of Alix Dobkin: In Memoriam

Cassandra Grant, Paula Grant, Morgan Gwenwald, Sharon Lucas, Joan Nestle, Saskia Scheffer

In Memory of Irare Sabasu

Letter to Sinister Wisdom

Contributors

Notes for a Magazine

One of the delights of my research into lesbian print culture from the 1970s and the 1980s is understanding the amazing array of periodicals that lesbians, lesbian-feminists, and feminists published during these years. At every historical turn and geographic location, there are lesbian-feminist periodicals: Ain’t I a Woman (Iowa City), Lady Unique Inclination of the Night (Jersey City), Aché (San Francisco and Oakland), Azalea (New York), off our backs (Washington, DC), and so on. For those of us who were not adults during this extraordinary blossoming of lesbian print culture, we can look back on it with wistfulness and delight.

The rich publishing culture from those decades also inspires imagination for new periods of fertile lesbian publishing. For this reason, I always am delighted when new lesbian journals launch. Recently I have been savoring Lesbians are Miracles, a new journal and podcast, WMN, a lesbian zine based in New York, and a wonderful chapbook series called the Van Dykes produced by Devyn Galindo. I am awed by these new publications and by the energy women are bringing to the enterprise of writing and publishing by, for, and about lesbians.

The truth is: I want more lesbian periodicals. One reason that I want more is that a multiplicity of lesbian voices conveys to us all collectively and individually the marvelously diverse lesbian world that we live in—and that women continue to build through imagination, commitment, and physical, emotional, and mental labor. Lesbian periodicals—in their diversity and in their growing capaciousness—create space for wild imaginings of lesbian worlds today, as well as lesbian pasts and lesbian futures.

I love the vibrancy and luxuriousness of thick lesbian worlds. I also want more lesbian periodicals so that Sinister Wisdom does not have to carry all of the weight of the lesbian community. Recently, some women have been pushing back on the Sinister Wisdom call for an issue on transfeminism arguing, among other things, that dedicating an issue to trans themes steals space from lesbians. This concern is predicated on the idea that there are limited spaces for lesbians. For me, the response to limited space for lesbians is not limiting what we talk about in lesbian space, rather it is building and creating more lesbian spaces. I believe that the larger and more capacious we make lesbian spaces, the more possibilities we have for growing and nurturing lesbian communities. I am not interested in constrictions or containments of lesbian. I want us to expand and share or radical visions and aspirations with the world. I am interested in the words of the founding publishers of Sinister Wisdom, more to read on and feed on to nurture and support our lesbian lives.

So, I am delighted to see new lesbian publications—and I invite more lesbians to start publishing in every manner possible. What if we called into being a new renaissance of lesbian-feminist publishing? What would our futures look like if we saw another proliferation of lesbian periodicals, journals, magazines, and newspapers? What new wild possibilities could we achieve? Let’s dream it and make it happen.

Meanwhile, Sinister Wisdom continues to thrive. Thank you to all of the women who responded to our spring fundraising appeal and renewed their subscriptions and made donations to support Sinister Wisdom. I appreciate you all and love your notes of support and sisterhood.

Likely, you are reading this note in the fall when Sinister Wisdom will be fundraising again. In 2022, subscription prices will increase so I encourage everyone to lock in the 2021 rates by renewing before the end of the year (and renew for two years! I have so many amazing issues planned!) I’d love to have you as a sustainer starting at just $3 a month. Sustainers receive monthly updates about what is happening at the journal behind the scenes and once or twice a year, I send sustainers a little present to let them know how much I appreciate their support. You can sign up to be a sustainer at www.sinisterwisdom.org/sustainer. If you have a little extra this year and can support the work of Sinister Wisdom with a donation, please do. You can give by going to www.sinisterwisdom.org/donate. As you know, Sinister Wisdom is a volunteer operation. Your contributions support the production, printing, and distribution of the journal directly. Women continue to subscribe to Sinister Wisdom with a sliding scale model and we give free subscriptions and issues to women in prison and women held in institutions. In addition, as many of you have seen, we are doing more public programs on Zoom to lift up and celebrate lesbian literary culture. Your donations help to keep all of Sinister Wisdom’s activities happening. I thank you for your support.

In sisterhood,

Julie R Enszer, PhD

Fall 2021

Notes for a Special Issue

Back in 2017 when we created the call for this issue, we envisioned a cadre of Black lesbian writers extolling their experiences in writing groups and writing communities from all over the country. We wanted to read about their experiences, good and bad, in order to bolster our claim that Black lesbian writing communities MATTER. Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. The 2016 election and its unleashing of long-held animosities toward already marginalized groups, particularly Black, Brown, and queer folks; threats of war with foreign nations, which disproportionately affect Black and Brown folks and their families; the widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else; and today, a global pandemic that disproportionately impacts Black and Brown individuals and families and threatens to do irreparable harm to this country and others—all worked to stifle our creative output.

What were writers to do? When, at this very moment, social distancing has limited our ability to collaborate, convene, or be in community with each other? When the challenges of our everyday experiences, heightened by new and enduring threats, in all likelihood quashed our ability to write? Well, some of us are doing what Black lesbian writers have always done. We’ve found a way to connect, to write together to create the work that we want to read, to inspire each other to keep writing, even during the worst of times. The Black Lesbian Literary Collective has always used technology to connect with writers across the country, so the notion of going virtual is not new to us. However, like many others, we are using video calls and other technologies to continue our work of holding space for Black lesbian and queer women of color writers.

So after a few delays, we’d like to present to you a sampling of some of the best Black lesbian and queer writers around. These writers have shared their experiences with writing groups, their own struggles to get the word on the page, as well as how they’ve been inspired by other Black lesbian writers to keep pushing, even when the world only seems to want one of us at a time. Revel in the poetry of Jewelle Gomez, Krystal A. Smith, Kendra N. Bryant, and Stephanie Andrea Allen. Experience joy, resilience, community building, and a bit of speculative fun in the work of Sheree L. Greer, Lauren Cherelle, Nicole Shawan Junior, Librecht Baker, Arisa White, and La Toya Hankins.

All of these writers remind us of the power of community and the quintessential creativity of Black lesbian and queer women writers.

Stephanie Andrea Allen

Lauren Cherelle

Writing Communities

Better Off Dead

Stephanie Andrea Allen

Mama said she was better off dead.

Tired of being a burden,

Tired of being sick,

Tired of living.

Papa said no, I need you here with me.

Don’t you know how it would hurt me

If you were gone?

Mama wailed and keened,

Rocked and moaned.

She stopped suddenly and thought for a moment.

Okay, she said.

I’ll stay a while longer.

The Question

Stephanie Andrea Allen

I asked you if you liked my fluff:

Soft folds of flesh, brown and uneven

Scarred and pitted.

Languid and lush

Longing

For your hands fingers mouth.

Yes.

Truth

Stephanie Andrea Allen

You said your spirit was uneasy,

Or was it really your heart that was

Barren, bleak, bereft.

You said you were a free spirit,

Or could it be that your soul is just

Devoid of feeling, fervor, fire.

Weightless.

Are you well, now that you are

Unencumbered?

Or still pretending that your heart soul body mind are healthy,

When we both know that your smile is a façade?

To Those Facing the Others Yelling a Variation of Go Back to Your Country

librecht baker

No one is harmed by your presence; it’s their own shit that is violent, volatile, afraid, and fragile.

Their presence is a train of harm: a historical greeting, a predecessor to forthcoming high blood pressure, mental atrophy, etc.; it continuously pummels.

No one is being harmed by your presence. I hope you remember.

Maintain your presence as present often.

You harm no one while death, a variation of losses, has been intended through their presence that is volatile, grotesque, and a handful of generations removed from immigrant or colonizing settler while activating old DNA beliefs; they are responsible for their un-Americanness.

Maintain your presence as present often.

Harm has multiple faces; although it’s often glimmered as yours, harm needs a costume transition and intermission.

How shall we describe where you enter when you are made to enter before you enter the building?

Shall we dig into our shall, a possibility, or shall we dig into a shell?

How shall we cast your entrance? Tell we the bare bones. Tell us earlier before your death if we know a death is coming with a pace in mind, so we can misshape future’s back casting ripple to influence your safety, comfort, rightness as where you stand in your home place, which is here, now.

Maintain your presence as present often.

Remember you.

What is your name?

Say your name.

Let us hear you.

Staging a Stage – Making a Part

librecht baker

If staging exists, it’s speculative and fleshed in a condensed city, yolked inside its shell lighting its darkness, born to festivals of memories’ memories of coal black goat skin drums ricocheting rhythms, ancestral possessions, and rebellious slang, while knowing libraries are nature and forthcoming beings: cedar trees and newborns’ babbling, sky reaching mythologies and melanin galaxies. Believing is to be capable of accordion-ing our incapabilities to hatch inside a city cracking, while attempting to chlorinate the conjures of an unfettered love supreme and hold the steadfast of our capabilities as believable. A rote belief that we can Become our supremeness awakening. Still a stage dismantling a soul talkback while the tangible banshees. Envision ornamentation without city people’s heartbeat. What a quiet segregation; rage made behind department of city official doors of dread. Although sacrificing community spaces, renaming historical neighborhoods, and interjecting words like corridor and plaza into known neighborhoods, making it more tangibly welcoming, these contractual acrimonies cannot deteriorate who you have always been: celebratory, affectioning bodies, salt water, fire bodies, polyrhythmic, tender, and worshipped bodies, rare books and shea butter bodies; dandy, grand boubou, hoodies and fitted bodies, and slick sneaker-wearing, long white tees and creased jeans bodies; bald fade, mohawk, weaves, braids, curly hair, afro bodies; intellectually street and street-strolling intellect bodies; et cetera bodies. As flashing spirits inside a city trying to scalp and scrap away people who make it, break it, bend the city, remember to bend and work the stage to