July Westhale

2008

donoso is not writing my story

there is no mantra-less aviary in the margins

of the garden next door and though i write to you

as one who has clicked many dimes into the wires of phonebooths

i am not london calling

for the emancipation of chilean dykes everywhere am not

puddle diving into the swan song of exile unarmed

with my own nights turreted above the smog layer with my fins gilled

to something thicker than air

letters home under paper cranes watercoloring my own elegy

for a future suicide

i'd like to say that light switches saved me but

that's heresy when really it was headphones and

ten last dollars

tremendously well spent.

Anti-Poesía

july westhale is a poet, activist, archivist and femme shark with a weakness for botany and hot air balloons. In 2004 she won the Out! Redwood Lesbian Rainbow Literary Award for Prose. In August 2010, she was invited to participate in and publish with InterDisciplinary’s International Conference on Performance Theory in Prague with her article “Entrails and the Bedroom: Sexual and Geographical Borderlands in Queer Bodies”. Her poetry has been published in Spork Literary Press, Bitch You Left Me, Samizdat, Grad(e), Full of Crow, Love Letras, and Blood Lotus Review. Her fiction has published in Full of Crow. Her article "Staging Archive: Queering Borders, Bodies and Subjectivities in Performance" will be presented at the Mills 2011 Literary Conference. A graduate of Mills College, she lives and writes in an attic in Alameda with her sewing machines and her feline zoo.