Although it is much too premature to announce that my 14th book might become reality. a book about an exceptional man that I was lucky enough to call my father,
a former student now an editor, Jason Kirk told me how he liked the part he has read, and he was kind enough to make room for me today, a visit I surely needed in a time of enormous upheaval in my life. It was not my mother who understood me and tried to make sure that I existed in a world where any opportunity could be mine as long as it was in human possibility.
I will not say more as I would not like to spoil the book.
It was my father. 100% Daddy’s girl right here although I am 63 years old.
If there is any kind of justice in this world, then the book about my father will be book #14 for me. Unfortunately, my father died before the most important things happened, the birth of my own genetic son, the only person other than myself who has the gift of his DNA.
I wrote this book to show my father the greatest happinesses in my life, the highest highs, all of which he missed. I wanted my father, my son also, to know what it is like for me to really be in love. I wanted to introduce my father to the real man behind Thomas Robert Higginson, but I guess Thomas Robert is not ready for that level of TRUTH,, so instead I introduce him to a proxy Thomas Robert Higginson (proxy images above), but in my heart, and I hope that in Thomas Robert’s heart also, he is aware, and likes that it is him.
I myself am so thankful and grateful that Jason Kirk, He knows a great deal about Limited Fork.
He was there when I was learning that theory myself. I will be learning it for the rest of my life. It is that important and transformative.
so far Jason likes the book! –and that means everything tonight. The book is a way that more people can get to know this man. And I wanted to introduce the persons most important to me to him. The gist of my ambition.
allow me please to comment that this will be the second edition of this poetry encounter, that last year gathered 22 poets from the five continents and more than 120 from the Mexico City and other regions of Mexico. This is a link:
This year we’ve invited some 30 international poets, and it is our desire to approach the urgent issues as the frontiers (not only the geopoliticals, but also between media, genres).
So we ‘d like to propose you’d do a reading accompanied by your video poems. We’re interested in the experimental aspects of your work, though of course we’re open to your suggestions and we’d like to comply to your wishes.
About the hotels, very soon we’ll let you know.
The events will take place at several locations in Mexico City, like the Mexican Library and some other cultural centers. Our staff will accompany you to your planned activities so that you can be sure to arrive there.
About your books, could you please inform us if your have a publisher in Spanish, and in that case, give us their contact?
In order to start planning your participation, we’d kindly ask you to send us the following information:
– a short paragraph (10 – 15 lines) in order to present you to Mexican public (biography data, titles published, languages that your work has been translated into )
– high-resolution photo portrait (with the photographer’s credit, if any)
– a poem and also a translation into Spanish (if there’s one) . Please indicate whether is an inedit piece or, if it has been already published, please provide info. about the publication source.
– links to social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, …)
II) TRIP and HOTEL
– City / airport of departure:
– Food preference (vegetarian…):
– Please attach scanned copy of passport :
Should you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to write to us.
Warm regards,
Marianna
They want my video poems! I am even more delighted knowing this!
Three prose poams from my LFMK collection of Prose poams: “Looking For My Killer: Where Controversy Breeds” currently being considered by Jamii, a publisher (I am hoping for the best possible outcome, and for women taking back the night; what sacrfice this woman is.
“Earthquake Vash (Predicted by the Seismograph in the Heart)”
“Small Virtue And Gimme Some A+Bliss
“Status Report on Slinky Lust “and the video poam that reveals the public service that the narrator provides in this video poam: “Looking for My Killer, Where Controversy Breeds”
Words written by, sung by, text cheorography by Thylias Moss in an attempt to save other woman from such assaults and slayings. I also made the film itself, filmed myself walking streets of Saline, Michigan.
Why not there? Isn’t that the point? Women may be brutalized anywhere, even in their homes.
Music composed and performed byAnsted Moss; I arranged the music for this video poam and for the book itself.
Between October 2013 and the end of this September, according to international reports gathered by the European group Transrespect versus Transphobia (TvT), 226 transgender people were murdered around the world. Most were trans women of color. Those numbers were gathered by painstakingly raking through news articles and by reports submitted through partner organizations in places like Honduras and Thailand.
The website for Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoF) has its own list of names of the dead, featuring some 700 trans people—mostly women of color, again—brutally murdered in recent years. TDoF’s list goes back all the way to 1970, but the bulk of the homicides took place between 2000 and 2012.
Both lists offer a horrifying record of hate. No murder is pleasant, but the killings of trans women tend to be particularly sick. Victims are dragged behind a car, burned alive, stoned to death, skinned, or—far too often—beaten to death in the middle of a crowded street or party.
It’s clear from the descriptions of these homicides that transgender women, especially low-income trans women of color, face an epidemic of violence and murder.
When two black trans women were murdered just six weeks apart in Baltimore this summer, trans women in the community told reporters they were terrified to go outside for fear of both the usual police harassment, and what appeared to them to be a targeted attack on their identities.
“It’s scary trusting anyone,” Baltimore’s LaSia Wade told the Guardian in August. “That bus driver, he could be the killer; that taxi man, he could be looking at me and thinking: ‘That’s a transgender woman, I’m going to knock her off.'”
So why do police keep arresting trans women of color who defend themselves during violent attacks? And why do so many murders of trans women not only go unsolved and remain under-investigated, but not even tagged by law enforcement as hate crimes?
“Usually what we see is homicides of low income trans women of color are the ones where police don’t respond as fast as they should with the forcefulness that they should. It’s not just a trans issue, then, but an issue of income and color,” Osman Ahmed, research and education coordinator for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), said in an interview with VICE today.
NCAVP tracks violence data through 54 member organizations in 24 US states and Canada. Because the Department of Justice doesn’t currently track data on gender and sexual orientation, it can be frustrating to try and gather homicide statistics through law enforcement agencies.
In addition, the FBI’s annual Hate Crimes report is inherently flawed due to low participation. Critics cried foul in 2011 when the state of Mississippi reported only one hate crime, while cities like New York that have entire divisions devoted to tracking and investigating hate crimes consistently report more.
“In terms of the hate crimes stats the FBI publishes every year, it’s not a complete national picture,” said Ahmed, whose organization works directly with law enforcement agencies to increase both sensitivity and accountability when dealing with LGBTQ victims. “Whatever they are reporting is lower than what’s really going on. Especially with low-income trans women of color: they go missing and there’s no follow up, there’s no investigation.”
Ahmed told VICE that law enforcement doesn’t arbitrarily decide not to care about the homicides of transgender women. Instead, this is a deeply layered problem that has just as much to do with a history of police violence and community mistrust.
“Trans women of color are very much more likely to experience police violence after reporting hate violence,” said Ahmed. “Friends and family members of victims are less likely to approach police because of this kind of victim blaming as well as mis-gendering and transphobia.”
In fact, when transgender women of color go to police to report a violent attack, they are often themselves charged with a crime and jailed.
Take the case of CeCe McDonald, a young, black trans fashion design student who went to jail for manslaughter. Her crime? While in the midst of being attacked by a homophobic Neo-Nazi amped up on meth in Minneapolis, McDonald took a pair of fabric scissors out of her purse and held them in front of her. Her attacker ran toward her anyway, and later died from the stab wound.
McDonald was finally freed after 19 months of a 41-month sentence in a men’s prison, a place she never should have gone in the first place regardless of her conviction. Her release was on terms of good behavior, but the international protests and support of Orange Is The New Black actress Laverne Cox certainly didn’t hurt.
If only Eisha Love could be so lucky.
Love and friend Tiffany Gooden stopped to get gas at a station in Chicago when men began yelling slurs at the two black transgender women. One of the men punched Love in the face, and after realizing they were under attack, the two women got in the car and attempted to drive away, only to be pinned from behind by one of the men’s cars while the other tried to open the driver’s side door. Terrified, Love maneuvered the car around and hit one of the attackers, severely injuring his leg.
The two women escaped with their lives. But when Love went to file a police report detailing the attack, she was arrested.
Love is still in jail, charged with first-degree attempted murder. Her passenger Tiffany Gooden had no such luck—two months after the attack, she was murdered in the very neighborhood where the attack occurred.
Gooden’s mother has since told reporters that threats were made against her daughter. “They were saying they was going to kill her. They were saying they were going to get ‘his’ ass because ‘he’ was riding in the car.”
Chicago police are severely fucking this up. If law enforcement had investigated the attack on Love and Gooden instead of bizarrely throwing Love in jail, Gooden might be alive today.
Likewise, Orange County police fucked up Zoraida Reyes’ murder probe this June, at first claiming there were no signs of foul play even though her body was found in a dumpster behind a dairy queen. After regular community protests, OC cops later ‘fessed up that Reyes had been choked to death, and her killer was found in October. But even then, police refused to acknowledge the death was most likely a hate crime.
“For many, the lives of transgender people don’t matter and they’re viewed as disposable,” Reyes’ friend Jorge Gutierrez told the Los Angeles Times. “We know that her identity as a trans woman was a huge factor, whether the police want to acknowledge it or not.”
After four trans women were murdered over a 20-month period in Ohio, community members became frustrated with what they said was a refusal on the part of police to view the murders as even potential hate crimes.
“We hear from police departments that there is no reason to believe a crime is hate-motivated,” Aaron Eckhardt of the Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) told Buzzfeed. “For us in the community, that sounds like an affront. Prior to any real investigation happening, it is used to deflect conversation. We would like to hear that they are investigating all possibilities.”
When law enforcement agencies refuse to take murders of transgender women seriously enough to recognize them as hate crimes, it perpetuates a community mistrust that comes full circle when and if police do seek answers in murder investigations.
“Very often, from the beginning of investigations into the deaths of trans women, there is a lot of transphobia coming in to play, and that translates into the alienation of community members who would otherwise be able to help,” Ahmed told VICE.
The woman was arrested by the officer after the confrontation
The officer asks Craig: “Why don’t you teach your son not to litter?”“He can’t prove to me that my son littered,” she responded. “But it doesn’t matter if he did or didn’t, it doesn’t give him the right to put his hands on him.”
The officer replied: “Why not?”
Next, Craig is seen getting closer to the officer and angrily shouting at him before her 15-year-old daughter attempts to stand between them.
The officer next wrestles Craig to the floor and handcuffs her before pointing his Taser at the daughter forcing her to lay on the ground.
Craig’s 19-year-old daughter Brea Hymond, who is thought to have filmed the incident, was also arrested.
STAR TELEGRAM
One of the daughters got in the way of the officer and her mother before she was pushed out the way
Hymond were charged with resisting arrest, search or transport and interfering with public duties, they were released from jail Thursday.
Craig’s 15-year-old daughter was also taken into custody but was later released.The Fort Worth police department released a statement which said: “The investigators worked throughout the night and into the morning interviewing witnesses and reviewing video evidence; including video from a body own camera that was active during the incident.
“The involved officer has been placed on restricted duty status by the Chief of Police pending the outcome of the internal investigation.
STAR TELEGRAM
The young daughter had a taser pointed at her before she was arrested by police
“As this is an internal investigation, state law limits the information that may be released, including the officer’s body cam footage.”About 100 protesters are thought to have gathered outside the old Tarrant Country Courthouse on Thursday night calling for the officer to be fired.
At a news conference earlier on Thursday evening, Star Telegram report that Lee Merritt, an attorney representing the family, said: “It’s not a situation where someone used a racial slur, but racism is still all over it.”
“If a white mother had called police about their son being choked, I guarantee that the officer would not have bypassed the suspect and arrested the mother.”
The man accused of assaulting the seven-year-old boy has not been arrested however police are still investigating the incident.
and here the video poem I made that is source of the title of the collection, my 11th book:
So I still await that, and though “Wannabe’s “jacket professes this:
“This career-spanning volume by Thylias Moss, one of America’s most revered literary innovators, conveys the dazzling spectrum of her hypnotic poetic output, written over the past thirty-five years and including selections from each previous book as well as previously unpublished new poems.”
This collection of New & Selected Poetry DOES NOT contain selections from all of my published collections of poetry, “Small Congregations” , a previous “New & Selected” colection is NOT represented in “Wannabe”, so not “each” previous book, but “many” previous books, “some” previous books, or “most” previous books, but not:”each” for that is a lie.
I remind you how important it is to tell the truth.
“Wannabe” will be my final book publication wth Persea, so if any of you publishers out there, or f you know of a publisher who might be interested in my poetry, and would like to represent my work, please contact me, leave a message on this post or look me up through various means.
Let’s just say that after 25 years with Persea, it has become necessary, for various reasons, to part company.
**Please read any contracts carefully! –I didn’t and you wouldn’t believe what happened to me, because I failed to be vigilant and observant in the past, but I have learned my lesson.
For my poetry, I seek a publisher for my subsequent books.
I am very excited about my forthcoming –just days now, volume of new and selected poetry! “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code“! (from Persea Books!)
I haven’t had a new book since 2006, and Tokyo Butter!
Tokyo Butter – a search for forms of Dierdre (really my late cousin Hilda).
The cover image is really a 50X USB microscpe scan I made of flowers from Hilda’s Funneral in 2002. I grew up with Hilda as if she were my sister… A terrible loss for me…
I wonder what she would be like now? She was only 3 months older than me, born 25 November 1953; I was born 27 February 1954. “Tokyo Butter” explores some of that… I couldn’t believe that all of Hilda (“Deirdre” in the book) was gone from the world, and “Tokyo Butter” is the outcome of my (as yet incomplete) search for her.
Here is a version of a video piece I made about a poem in “Tokyo Butter“: The Cultue of Snowmen”:
Also here “Me and Bubble Went to Memphis” here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio/detail/76019
The Glory Prelude video poam here (music composed and performed by Graphic Artist Ansted Moss, Vocals by Thylias Moss who also made the vide poam; contains footage of my mother who has recently been visited by “The Angel of the Lord” –whatever that means. I cannot compete with “The Angel of the Lord” –noone can):
(my mother is unaware that this footage was captured)
Please don’t tell her, unless you are “The Angel of the Lord”.
she already told me that she’s coming to get me… –I am going to be haunted after her death, so if I make no further posts, you will know that:
I am dead
My mother got me.
My mother succeeded at what Houdini couldn’t
A mother’s love
How mama looks now, as she waits for The Angel of the Lord (to come back in ways my deceased father can’t):
(She loves Popeye’s chicken, but isn’t supposed to eat it. Diabetes, Hypertension, Glaucoma, Thyroid problems, loss of the ability to grasp physical objects (with her right hand especially) and to remember anything, Dementia; loss of hearing, loss of eyesight, unless looking at and/or listening to: “The Angel of the Lord”, but she’s coming back to get me, a promise she has made to the “Angel of the Lord” –I take this most seriously, because she saw “The Angel of the Lord” as real as anything she has ever seen..
“The Glory Prelude to a Widow Shrine System” is for her, the widow since the death of my father in July 1980. She says “the only man I need is Jesus”, so I called a man I liked a lot, before I loved him as I do now, “Jésus”. My mama with dementia, (I love her, but she still doesn’t know. Just wanted to tell her that I had found a good man; I thought that maybe she would like that. But no.
I’ve been divorced since 2013, but makes no difference… Even if nothing goes any furher, I just wanted her to know that I had found someone much better, who doesn’t lie to me, a man I can trust to tell me the truth, whether or not I like it. He will not deceive me, the most trustworthy man I know.
and “Hypnosis at the Bird Factory ” (also in “Wannabe”) as a video poam right here:
and Tornado Pi, video poem version of the print poem “Tornados“also in “Wannabe“:
A significant new poem from this collection is: “Higginson Matters in Magnificent Culture of Myopia” and I perform this signture poem from this collection here
(the unnatural emphasis on the word “moss” comes from a niece of my ex, telling me that I could hardly be moving on with my life, since I still had their name, a name they did not copyright, a name they did not intiate; there are many other “Mosses”; they have no valid claim to the exclusivity of that name:
Speaking of things “trustworthy”, I was all set to believe that an unfortunae sitution with my publisher was greatly improved; I’m still all set for that, but I was disappointed when I saw on the publisher’s website for my book; a quote about me, this mixed-race woman who would never choose a partner based on his color, or a partner who would choose a woman based on her color; I would not exist without mixing…
and although the quote which offends me now and all that I’ve tried to accomplish in my writing is gone from the book jacket, I still name, on the website, “the black truths behind white lies” and am still a writer “who speaks bitterness”… I was disappoined to see that, because of the inaccuracy, and immediaetely wote an email to my poetry editor
That is not who I am; I speak TRUTH, no matter what color it is. And if “black” (a part of me but not all of me) is so powerful that whatever is “black” at all, even a tiny potent, powerful drop; if so powerful that I can not avoid using a black lens to interpret everything, then everything I see automatically becomes “black” because I see it, and everything I say automatically become “black” because I say it, and everything I hear automatically becomes “black” because I hear it, and everything I do, automatically becomes “black” because I do it, and everything I touch automatically becomes “black” because I “touch” it, and everything I feel automatically becomes “black,”because I feel it, and everthing I eat automatically becomes “black” because I eat it,
then there is no need for me to preface anything I think; anything I feel, anything I do with “black” since I cannot do anything that is not black, so when I think of quantum phyiscs, quantum physics becomes black; every form of math, everything I’ve written here is black; that’s how potent black is, one drop and black heaven is the reward!
I continue to think these black thoughts, as I thought them at the University of new Hampshire where in a class for those teaching English composition, the subject was “How To Eliminate Vagueness” in student wiring, and one TA observed that when a sudent writes the word, “black”, the student likely means something else, such as, and this was agreed upon (worth noting that I was the ony visibly “black” person in the room); agreed upon that the student meant “irreversible damage” , so I wrote this poem, for instructors of English 401 at the University of New Hampshire, originally published in Callaloo, then in my book, Pyramid of Bone, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award:
Although many of Moss’s poems discuss race and gender, these subjects are, explains scholar Langdon Hammer, simply “starting points for her work…her poetry makes such facts of identity seem unfamiliar, their meanings not to be predicted, unavailable to the naked eye.” Known for startling metaphors and vivid imagery, Moss’s work demonstrates an expansive imagination that seeks to connect at times wildly disparate subjects”
Book by Thylias Moss
“To Eliminate Vagueness”
instructions: substitute irreversible damage for black wherever it occurs
In the red-legged locust’s black raids upon midwest soybeans,
in their illicit transmission of tapeworms and parasites
to quail, turkeys, and guinea fowl,
in all the black calendar days that are supposed
to indicate the ordinary.
In operating rooms body parts black with gangrene
are excised and trash cans seem to fill with dead crows.
There’s a black crust two miles thick in Soweto, some on bread,
around eyes, most on the streets where blood dried
into its own monument.
Then my mother’s black face nothing can soften, the sweating,
the forgetting to sleep, the solidarity with anyone troubling,
the compassion only I knew she felt hugging a radio, singing
spirituals, sequestering herself in her widow’s bedroom
praying for women unable to pray.
And what of Europeans, what of Asians and Latinos who are
irreversibly
damaged, whose gangrened minds should be excised but who are
not black?
One day I noticed my mother had poured her face onto mine
and had given me spirituals and lullabies.
I sang them when baskets of black clouds dumped
their transparent flowers over the convent
and the nuns’ basic black didn’t get wet
and they carted the flowers home in wheelbarrows
and arranged them like lullabies
and wept silently
as we were weeping, mother and daughter together
in my father’s old rocker, the damage already done.
And I am particularly sensitive to those small accomplishments that really are huge; those tiny steps that took tremendous effort to make.
I celebrate them!
I try to take nothing for granted; a kind word goes a long way with me.
And an ability to trust and be trusted goes even further, for an ability to love and to be loved requires a foundation of trust.
Nothing can take the place of being trustworthy.
Being good for your word is everything. Everything; I am most serious about this. Breaking trust to me is a form of killing; the slaying of what should be the best of the human spirit.
Maybe I haven’t lived long enough to become jaded; but I can tell you this, when I love, I love purely. If I love you, it is a real and honest thing.
This is not what I demand in others; this is what I demand in myself.
And I seek reasons to love rather than reasons to denigrate and despise.
I hope that what may be said about me is that I’m good for my word,
My word means something! If I say it, I really mean it. If I feel something, I really feel it.
And I do not want to waste feeling on lies and breaking trust, for some things can not be reconstructed well, especially if they were erected upon lies.
Those structures will topple, but those structures built with love have a much better chance of enduring.
To demand more of others, we must also demand more of ourselves, and
We must, must be honest… Honest
HONEST
Those Little Things!
Just a bird’s nest. Just a cloud, just a swirl of dust dancing as I still can, just a hand held, just my head in the bend of an arm, belonging there, just a taste of my friend’s ice cream cone, styling the swirls of flavor like frosty hair, the elegant and special work of tongues, the luxury of the comfort tongues can deliver when they say the right things, arousing the taste buds, (hm, that must be a kiss), and they can, just a little walk, just the comfort of being alive, matters who I’m with, surrounded by honesty and trust, drooping garlands of weeping willow tassels like green beaded doorways, and a heart that understands this need to be true, the song and music of this, –oh the comfort! –oh the love!… an open door, music of pots and pans, the taste of the spinach with peppers and pecans, and the most wonderful simple dressing, honey and mustard, plenty of pepper, black and cayenne, my son cooking a chicken thigh for me (I tried not to remember the pet chick I had that died from the fumes of painting our attic apartment when I was five), splashing in puddles to simulate oceans; the pasta swelling to my delight (cooking is so very sexy); I loved watching boiling through sides of glass pots, initial small turbulence that progresses as things will, tickles of excitement as penne pasta began to dance, frenetic waves of this –oh the frolic in a pot of sperm!– Such little, microscopic things, such life-giving, life-fulfilling things, orgasm in my pot on my stove last night….
Little Things
For those of you who have been waiting for good news about my forthcoming poetry, although a contract dispute still rages, for I have discovered some dishonesty I didn’t know was there. in the making o fmy contracts, apparently for all these years.
I feel betrayed, that business must trump compassion; that such feelings are secondary to the corporation, even in poetry, poetry the bastion of truth.
But that is me; for whom love is everything. I do not play with love. I don’t feel love easily, and if I feel it, it is real, and the loved one is worthy of this love. No; it doesn’t have a monetary value. It is much more than that… For if I love you, then you are trustworthy, and the more trustworthy you are, the more I can love you.
As simple as that.
NOW
FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE WANTED A TASTE OF THE POEMS forthcoming very soon in “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code, NEW AND SELECTED POETRY
THREE OF THE NEW POEMS HAVE BEEN RECORDED FOR POETS AND WRITERS, IN FACT,
Melissa Faliveno of POETS AND WRITERS has loaded my readings of three poemsfrom “Wannabe” here:
Thylias Moss Writing 