like a field > 2024 > Spring > Aeon Ginsberg > A Return to Queering The Map

A Return to Queering The Map


I said that the map is not clean and I mean it still today. Show me a map that is not inked in the blood of my companions and I will still call it dirty. There are one thousand stories of loves lost to written borders and there will be one thousand more when we try to claim the land in anyone’s name. When I said I’m against queering the map I was never saying that I don’t wish for the party to go on. Ask a dyke. Ask a fag. Ask a tranny and if you can hang there’s an address we can go to, and if you can’t you wouldn’t find your way to begin with. I draw out the shape of my nostalgia with flechette rounds. I run on punk time because I have to. I write poetry that’s violent because the map I’ve been raised to look at is violent.

Yes, I am still against queering the map

but for the sake of hearing you out I’ll indulge that very map.


Point to the map where neutrality exists.

(Another think piece is written)

Show me on the map a place

where there is no discord or where there is harmony.

(Another article divorcing the humanity from the dead)

My harmony has no borders.

My queerness has no borders.

(My community has no borders)

There is no place on a map or otherwise where neutrality exists

because the choice to be neutral isn’t an equal choice.


I don’t write poetry to be neutral

because poetry is never neutral.

My poems are an incantation against oppression.

Poetry is the ammunition that charts a scatterplot for the people.


Never do I want to advocate that people refuse to share their love,

lost and otherwise, with the world.

What I want is for that love to exist,

globally, as much as our grief exists.

What I want, what I think is tenable,

is for grief and love to exist in equal stride.

(I see several stories from the website, different people noting the times they experienced love in the arms of another, queer love, dyke love, fag love, tranny love. Love that exists outside of borders. Love that can only be marked on an open source web-app in an adjacent-anonymous way because those very borders solidify the same violence we fight against)

We want to love and be loved and there’s violence.

We want to love and be loved and there are bullets.

We want to love and be loved and there is a police state or several.

We want to love and be loved and they name their bombs neutrality.

We want to love and be loved and so we do, and they call us violent..


The only time I want your blood on my hands

is when you choose to give it to me in our perverted way.


The world never needed a new apocalypse because we never finished the old apocalypse. In the poem I name the new apocalypse after us because I’m searching for what I can only assume is the Map’s joy, which is the color of violence. In the poem I talk in abstract ways because those are the only ways I thought I could talk. All things will die one day, but not everything gets the same opportunity to live and that’s my issue with the map at its core.

Point to the place on the globe where we can experience serenity and I will tell you the ways in which the earthworm will enter a decaying body and return it into the ground.


So I’ll take a lesson from the worms in the dirt,

even they with enough prodding will plot revenge.

My poems are worms in the dirt.

I’m plotting my revenge.


On the map I see,

         I’m against putting a blanket over the puddles of blood

         that have stained the dirt and the dust.

On the map I see, the one I see now,

         I’m watching my country sop up the liquid

         with whatever fabric they can find.

On the map I see, the one we all see,

         I see more stories about loves lost than loves had.


I’m against queering the map not because I am a simple hater

(I’m a hater, but not before I’m a dyke. A fag. A tranny. I’m all these things and more)


I’m against queering the map because it isn’t big enough,

             or open enough

to capture a sky, clear or otherwise,

that people are able to look up at

without wondering how long there is left to love.