Ember Babiak

As someone who has long identified myself as a butterfly/hummingbird gardener, back when I was publishing poems and getting ready to publish my book, it tickled me that poets exposing their work to the world for the first time were considered to be “emerging,” since that’s what we call it when butterflies exit their chrysalis.

What do we call it when a poet, after a self-imposed exile of more than a decade, decides to re-enter the poetry world? There is no parallel in the life-cycle of the butterfly. But that’s what I’m doing. Here’s what happened.

I suffered a religious derangement. (Being a mystic has its hazards.)

Not long after the publication of my book of poems, Conspiracy of Leaves (2010, Plain View Press), which posits that it’s time to abandon traditional religious beliefs as they are clearly leading the world to a dark place, and probably due to fear of religious extremists (Salmon Rushdie had recently been attacked), my brain heaved up an interior locution that rocked my conviction and led me to re-embrace the Christian faith of my childhood. And deeply regret the blasphemy of my book. Yikes.

Fast forward sixteen years and we’re arrived in that dark place, Christian Nationalism and Zionism very close to triggering a nuclear holocaust, and now my deepest regret is that I abandoned my book which might have, like a butterfly’s wing in the rainforest leading to weather on the other side of the globe, nudged the world in a different direction. And so, even though the world has only gotten more dangerous for mouthy political poets, I’m emerging, again.

And I’m doing it here, at WordPress, where I blogged anonymously from Shreveport, the Buckle of the Bible Belt and home to that avatar of hypocrisy, Mike Johnson, nefarious Speaker of the House and Trump’s favorite toadie, who, I am given to understand, as a bachelor in his 30’s “adopted” a Black boy. Hmm. Birds of a feather and all. I had a blog called Enough Is Enough, I called myself honestpoet, and did my best to call out the foolishness of Christian Dominionism, the Tea Party and its Islamophobia, the militarization of the police, and white supremacy, as they all seemed to rise up like noxious mushrooms after rain in the post-9/11 world.

I even, on a post about Obama’s candidacy, had occasion to witness and counter anti-semitic conspiracism in my comment section, when someone asked, regarding my analysis, “What about the Jew?,” a character I admit I had had no idea existed as someone I needed to consider. This was before talk of George Soros paying anyone for anything. That glimpse at that species of insanity probably inspired the title for the title poem of my book, Conspiracy of Leaves. But the conspiracy I’m participating in is a plot for peace, and my co-conspirators are everyone who values life over profit (which, obviously, includes all our more-than-human kin, including those leaves in the title). Which also tells you whom I consider to be my enemies.

And I’m doing it today, on Trans Day of Visibility, because in the intervening years, I’ve come out as 2-Spirit, which means I’m non-binary, which, yes, falls under the trans umbrella. (I lost my breasts to cancer at the beginning of the pandemic, and my response to that taught me this thing about myself, an epiphany eased by the fact that my eldest daughter had come out trans around the same time.) If you know me, you know a trans person, and the mother of a trans person, so please keep that in mind when you’re voting, and when you hear people saying terrible things about our community. Know that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention gave the warning years ago that a genocide against trans people was in the works. If you’re against trans people participating in society, please consider that you have been subjected to a decade of transphobic propaganda. Fascists use trans people as the tip of the wedge (because we’re such a tiny minority, we have a lifetime of media experiences laughing at the “bloke in a dress,” and because the gender binary is a necessary construct to uphold in their hierarchy in which they dole out rights according to the recipient’s position); they never stop with us. You know the poem.

So yes, poems. I’m back at them. Painfully, I had to reacquire the habit of writing them. I have yet to try very hard to get any more published, but that, too, will happen. (It’s not a process I relish, as I experience rejection-sensitive dysphoria as part of my neurodivergence, another identity I share and have embraced and am coming to grips with.) I have been doing readings, and have even gotten back into performing (declaiming) them, which is so much fun. And I’m going to be doing that soon, at a festival I’ll make a separate post about, when I’m ready. I’ve also appeared twice on a cool local radio show, MindMeadow, on WRFI, and now its host is a valued member in the cohort of young friends I’ve been cultivating as part of my antifascist efforts to build community. (Their miniature dachshund daughter is buds with my little Oscar, and is so tiny that she makes HIM the Big Dog. With any luck I’ll be able to post videos of them playing chase in the backyard playground I’m building for them.) I may be able to host recordings of my appearances here. I’ve yet to investigate that, but if it’s possible, it will happen.

So yes, I’m back. Here to stay, as long as life allows it. Grateful for every day. Grateful for every chance to wonder, to share, to savor syllables both sweet and spicy (with meaning that sticks to the ribs), to smile at or embrace or embolden my co-conspirators. Please join us.