Embracing Reclusiveness

Seclusion as (Psychological) Resistance?

Last night, I found myself alone on my bed nursing a migraine rather than at the poetry mag launch I was slated to attend, followed by the annual QPOC Pride dance party to which I bought tickets. Normally, I’d curse how my illnesses limit me. This time, even though the overnight thunderstorm cobwebbed my head, I was oddly grateful to be able to bail. All of Pride month, I’ve failed to find a celebratory mood. I emerged into “pushing 30” in mid-June joking about the shits I no longer have to give, how now I get to embrace my crankiness and become even more reclusive. I didn’t know, at the time, that I wasn’t really kidding. I spend more and more of my weekends saying no, choosing to cook, clean, nourish, and lend order to my body and home rather than be out and about. I thought my growing domesticity and reluctance to socialize was as a matter of age, or perhaps a symptom of ongoing depression (The number of times a month at least one friend asks, “Ashna, are you not leaving the house again?), but reading Lara Atallah’s meditation on how mediated experiences of genocide affect living in one’s own body helped me understand that I’m quietly somatizing a reality that I’m being told should not affect me.

037: 64 miles, 35,000 feet

As much as being in community heals—especially in contexts like the actions that disrupted the New York corporate Pride parade yesterday—withdrawal seems like a reasonable response to an exponentially violent world, especially as it insists on denying and normalizing its hostility. There are limbless, burned, starved, and desperate children on my phone adjacent to advertisements for 28-day wall Pilates challenges and air fryers. All of the children look like they could easily be my own: brown, long-limbed, innocent. I can’t reach through the screen to hold a single one to my chest. I can get an air fryer to my house in under 24 hours.

Forgive the litany, but I think it matters: The House just banned the State Department from citing Palestinian death tolls. The Supreme Court made houselessness a crime. The continuous onslaught against queer and trans youth in this country makes them 120% more likely to become houseless. The ongoing spread of COVID is underreported, and home tests are inconsistently effective against new strains. Illness, inflation, unemployment, and eliminated social safety nets produce larger numbers of houseless, addicted, disabled, and/or otherwise at-risk people, and The Supreme Court just criminalized not having steady work and shelter.

Every single one of us can become houseless or disabled at any time—just as I did—but here, these are considered moral failings for which individuals are personally responsible. The moral lens through which basic human existence is becoming punishable has been articulated into Project 2025, a terrifying, highly organized vision of Conservative Christian America that we may very well see unfold. And no, this is not the moment where I implore you to vote for Biden despite his responsibility for genocide. Watching two verbally challenged genocidal fascist rapists argue about golf and porn stars in a debate meant to help voting citizens understand policy goals should be inspiring us to not only throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to rip the tub from the floor and take a sledgehammer to the walls.

Governor Hochul is considering instituting a mask ban on the New York City subway system during a COVID spike, citing antisemitic hate. This move explicitly frames immunocompromised and disabled people as disposable, erasing the serious consequences of contracting new strains of COVID that at-home tests detect inconsistently and that our current vaccines may not protect against. The rhetorical weaponization and inflation of anti-Semitism is an insult to Jews who suffer genuine hate and who must now watch that trauma become a talking point to quell outrage against genocide. I can’t think about anything else on the subway, now. Like Lara, I am newly aware of walking the streets like a hunted thing, my world shrinking to an array of differently-sized screens across which reality is composed of so many lies that all I know is how much I must not know.

So, this year, I didn’t do shit for Pride. I cooked meals from scratch from my farm share haul, fed friends and roommates, and called more friends on the phone. That felt plenty gay. I’ve been proudly queer every moment of every day for many years, but this year, for all the merriment and collective power, there’s terror in my marrow I can’t shake. Friends, I’m chain-smoking again. And I’m staying the fuck home.

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Announcements:

Disability Intimacy Anthology and Reading

It’s my profound honor to have my poem “Top Secret Club Abjection,” originally published in a folio curated by Kay Ulanday Barrett in Zoeglossia, in Disability Intimacy, the sequel to the seminal anthology, Disability Visibility, edited by one of the great mothers of disability justice, Alice Wong. The pieces in this book expansively address the notion of intimacy defined within and far beyond sexual intimacy. Within the disability world, we often discuss access intimacy, a term coined by Mia Mingus to describe a particular kind of mutual understanding and care that allows one to be bodies in the same space without anxiety.

These pieces are inspiring, funny, grief-laden, and otherwise stunning. I’m delightedly gobsmacked that my work shares space with the likes of Mia Mingus, Khadijah Queen, Grace Brilmyer, Travis Chi Wing Lau, and Claude Olson, the latter three of whom and I served on a panel and did a reading last week that you can access the recording of below. Whether you’re disabled, able-bodied, a caretaker, or simply curious, this book will teach you brand new things about what it means to be desiring, social animal in a precarious body among other precarious bodies. Buy HERE.

Priyo@Parlay, July 7
5:30 PM ET Doors, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM ET
Parlay, 4024 8th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232

Priyo@Parlay returns and this time, we’ve got our first ever prose writers, Manish Melwani (whose excellent work I recommended in my last Substack) and Tanaïs (whose incredible non-fiction work I reviewed in my first ever Substack post), our first ever drag performer, Noah Thing Deleuze, and the stunning musician, Deepali Zeer. Buy your tickets HERE.

Poems I’ve loved this week:

“Preserving an Ecosystem” by Christina Olivares
This poem considers the banality of evil by zooming into how cycles of reinforcement and reward function in systems entrenched in invisibilized violence—in this case, horticulture and farming. On pruning, she writes, “an invasive species is called that to make the culling easier.” How can we not think of Palestine, of how insidious Israeli ideology that frames Palestinians as non-human helps fuel its project of extermination? If I were to pair a film with this poem, like a wine with a meal, I’d choose Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.

“On the Wing” by Christina Rossetti
Though it was written long before our time, Rossetti’s poem recalls the feeling I held in my belly when watching a video of an IDF soldier talking about witnessing a queer Palestinian couple in an intimate moment and choosing to murder them for entertainment—the profound rage and helplessness, the looking around as if in hopes that someone might tell me I understood wrong. This is a slippery parallel because the aggressor in Rossetti’s poem is a bird of prey hunting for itself, which is, by contrast, a justified appetite, whereas sadistic murder as part of a larger genocide is unforgivably heinous. The helplessness, however, remains the same.

Recommendations:

Palestine x Disability Justice Syllabus from Alice Wong: Palestinian liberation is a disability issue and vice versa, and every essay on this list highlights how and why in a particular way. Must-reads.

Ross Gay and Bon Iver collaborated on an audio recording of Gay’s gorgeous poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” and it’s on Spotify. Consider starting your morning with it.

Until next time!