To my Lovely Onlookers: an Introduction!

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Hello, my name is Lane! I've been known to call myself a jack of all trades, but my heart's been set on authorship since the tender age of two.

Now, while my lifespan development textbooks like to call that premature identity foreclosure, I call it a dream. I'm creating this blog to archive my past and future works. What can initially be expected is a lot of poetry as well as some short prose pieces. The goal has always been to eventually work up to brick-length novels, but lately all I've got is poems pouring out of my ears. I'm composing them in my sleep. A lot of what I've written so far is about chronic pain, sapphism, transitional experiences, childhood, and trauma. Not every poem or prose piece is meant to be taken as a literal reflection of something that happened to me, but a lot of what I've written over the last few years have been in order to process my experiences. I find that I communicate best in rhetorical devices than in ordinary speech. This is extra funny (an inside joke to myself) because I spent the first fourteen years of my life as a self-declared poetry hater, despite my life long declaration of wanting to write. There were several things that caused me to reevaluate this stance, the primary three being: 1) If I didn't graduate high school I was never getting out of that horribly isolated, middle of nowhere town. 2) Writing was the only thing I knew I could be passionate about both in a personally fulfilling way, but also in a work way. Now, the only way I could successfully do that would be by forcing myself to engage with the entire other half of it I'd convinced myself I hated out of inadequate education. 3) Reading Maya Angelou's book, Poems (1981). We were given a large analysis project of one poet's whole collected works (or the closest edition we could find) and I chose Angelou because I remembered an excerpt from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969) being read aloud to my 7th grade class. It was her rhythm, rhetorical depth, and her humor that reformed my entire approach to the genre. I can't thank her enough.

"So," one might be asking, "Where does The Peach With Teeth fit into this, though?" And ohohohoh! The Peach With Teeth is several things. Primarily, I spent five months painstakingly embroidering it to be the cover of a hand-bound poetry chapbook. At this point, however, I'm thinking more of a compendium for the amount of poems I have, and for how many I'll write before I learn how to book bind. So, in that meantime the Peach is the cover of this blog.

The Peach is also a poem that I wrote in September of 2022, which is included below. That peach was deprived of teeth, tongue, and uvula, but had a more grounded horror within.

The Peach

I rinse the fuzz off, gently In the sink. The skin is a sunset of yellow, Magenta, pink. The first bite is honey sweet, The flesh slippery, My teeth peel away the skin I eat.

A bitter taste begins in my periphery And I see brown spreading around, Like a core. The tender sweet flesh peels away From its darkened sore.

Disgust rises in my body but I persist I eat the dripping good parts, I eat until the bad parts come too And they come veined with blue The pit itself, peeled back Is dusted with mold.

The poem is both a literal thing that happened—I did eat a moldy peach even though I saw an off patch on its skin and I could have stopped—also a metaphor. It's about seeing the signs that this won't end well, but needing another bite of sweetness to satiate that ache. It's about overconfidence and ignoring one's instincts. After a long while of hunger, the bitterness gets easier to ignore. That Peach and the Peach With Teeth, and many other Peaches can be expected to appear in my work. It's not my fault, I swear: my family had a peach tree in the backyard growing up. And if you, my darling reader, haven't tasted a sun-warmed peach right off the branch in late summer: I'm so sorry. The ones in the grocery store just don't compare when they're picked early to be shipped across country and thusly chemically ripened. They never get so thoroughly sweet through injected ethylene as by sunlight. It's only the skin that turns pink and softens, with the inside remaining hard, crisp, off-yellow. That these peaches are the only kind I can eat now, meaning I don't eat peaches, are part of what informed the teeth. Finally, the Peach With Teeth and her cousin The Peach poem have to be acknowledged for their sensual, even sexual, elements. 7/10 friends who I have shown The Peach With Teeth to have said "that looks like a vulva." Now, this was utterly unintentional, but when all your pretty queer friends say it enough times, you start to give up examine the metaphor closer. It's been said often that peaches and this girl right here 🍑 are used as euphemisms for the vulva/vagina. Now, when people are reduced to just their genitals, that's objectification. Not to say that the euphemism always is, as I can imagine some sappy sapphic love note tucked to sleep on a shelf somewhere. When I designed my embroidery pattern, I chose teeth for a core because of the utter contrast between the soft sweet flesh and the hard bone-bite of a chipped tooth. I was imagining it biting back and drawing blood. This is where my accident, the final image reading far more sensually than originally planned, synthesizes the ideas that have been rolling around in my head this whole time. It's about visceral misperception, of leaning to close to the lantern's gentle glow only for the grinning monster holding it to bite your head clean off. It becomes a euphemism flipped on its head: no more soft, sweet, hairless, harmless peaches. What we've got are teeth and tongues, a jaw unhinged but ready to snap right down at any time. Now, of course, to many of my 7/10 friends, this is still sexy.