GAS Featured Poet: Barbara Marie Minney

Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award winning poet and writer, speaker, teaching artist, guest reader/editor, and quiet activist.  She is the author of four poetry collections: If There’s No Heaven,  winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge (2021); Dance Naked With God (2023); and A Woman in Progress, winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award for Poetry Chapbook,  finalist for the Eric Hoffer de Vinci Eye Award, and a San Francisco Book Festival Runner Up.  Follow Barbara at https://www.barbaramarieminneypoetry.com.

Birdwatcher Too

(Containing words from the federal government banned words list)

                                                            ~after the Gospel of John

 

 

quoth the raven      “nevermore”

     so why is this shit      still happening

 

            in the beginning     there were words

            the word thinks he’s king       the word was 

            not king      with him     nothing was made

            darkness shines     in the light

            the light has not overcome it

            we are all witnesses     to the darkness

 

            true light     has not     come into the world

            he was in the world

            but not of the world

            and should not be received

 

            the word      made his dwelling

            among us

            we have seen his glory

            full of inelegance and falsity

            

assigned male      at birth

     self-generated      hate speech

 

directed at      my identity

     my own     self-expression

 

suicide a slow     climate-change death

     no science-based vaccine     in sight

 

cursed with     both a head and a heart

     face buried     in the tits of my soul

     

 i had      a gender abortion

     a fetus energy transition

 

of gender identity

     emissions of      lesbianism and bisexuality

    

 a queer     non-conforming activist

     quoth the raven      “nevermore”

Spravato

 

Esketamine surges     through my nose     rushes to my brain

pushes me     on a space-headed trip     to dissociative psychedelia

 

three feet

 

                two heads

 

floating          

 

           floating

 

                       floating 

 

through a spaceless sky     of bodymind

 

a kaleidoscope       of geometric waveforms 

promenade in the air 

 

to battle depressive dissonance 

 

afterimages of      demons and angels    devils and saints

thought parasites     shrivel and die

 

nightmares dissolve        into nothingness 

stars not so dark

 

moon shadows not so deep

emptiness erupts          into volcanic metacognition

 

          even nights         are better