Postcard / March 2025
Postcard #1, sealed with a hiss
Dear Friend,
The cafe table is rickety on the pavement, so I make sure to just sit my coffee on it and not knock it or move it around more than that. I reorient myself towards Gabby Windey’s instagram story - she’s so hilarious. My legs are crossed in the gay way, knees stacked like novels with my right foot floating, freely, catching a breeze (through my breathable Brooks).
People I don’t know keep passing me, and I’m not anxious, so I don’t look up, or even really notice them as individuals - just as people, going by. I somehow know when the people I do know are passing by, though, and look up casually when they’re in a cool distance - not too close they’re on top of me, but not so far like I’m stalking them.
“Boo~”
Late-1990s-era Gloria Estefan [yes that one] sneaks up on me, and we catch up briefly. Beauty drips off her like sweat on this August day in the Rhinebeck. We talk about nothing, really, but we fold galaxies like cryangles with our conversation. Ancestral answers to questions that stops stock markets pool around us like sweat on a brow: thank god we don’t give a fuck about the stock market.
This is 90s-era Gloria Estefan. Tell me this isn’t iconic.
We last connected on a through-hike of the Appalchian Trail last summer. Late nights in a lean-to swatting mosquitoes and searing sausages over a Survivor fire, we became close as our days were spent plodding or shoes into the soul of the trail. The repetitive cadence of feet stomping was the necessary foil she needed to create her album gloria!, a non-stop disco-revival powerhouse of an album. One day, I’d meet her, at age 5, on the Today Show promoting this album. Me, small and bespectacled, looking up at her beauty in a high pony tail, the words to all sixteen songs were playing at once in my internal world: wrapped within the orbit of my glasses and dinosaur eyeglass strap was a three-in-the-morning stupor of emotion in a 2003 DUMBO warehouse; Heaven’s What I Feel is playing right now.
If you listen to the it closely, you’ll hear smoke dancing and cicadas singing.
If you listen to it closely, you’ll find an internal world, terrifying and sublime.
The condensation of the coffee drips through the table’s grates onto my bare knees and down my legs that are crossed the gay way. Each time the water drips, reaching for the center of our earth, my legs stop it and steal it away from its destination.
I think about the power in the pocket between my knees. A vulcan force of potential energy: my knees, which ran 62 miles in 92 degree heat through the radiant heat of Northern Queens; my knees, which I inherit from my mother that survived a fall that took out her hip; my knees, which got Conor McGregor in the kidney and sent him to hospital. Stacked crooked on this summer day, they rest, ready to deliver at a moment’s notice.
I notice a couple sitting at the table next to me talking about colonizing Mars and meme coins. I instantly turn them into stale bread and try to feed the seagulls, but they politely decline.
This postcard was sent from Cruising Utopia: The Then & There of Queer Futurity, by Jose Esteban Muñoz. It was written in queer time.
Keeping up with a personal commitment to writing monthly, even if I don’t have much to share. March was a busy month and a lot of exciting things are happening, but they’re still in the works.
As I mentioned in February, I will be in residency this summer at the Caumsett Foundation in Lloyd Neck, NY. Every weekend in July and August, come find me in the studios right at the entrance. I’ll be announcing some exciting programming that coincides with this residency.
In the meantime, I’d love to welcome friends new and old into my studio! Shoot me a text, message, or email if you want to journey to the Lower East Side and see what I have going on.