UC Riverside UCR Honors Capstones 2020-2021
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UC Riverside UCR Honors Capstones 2020-2021 Title Bestiary of Boys in Love Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16c1x596 Author Lopez, Claus Publication Date 2021-08-13 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California BESTIARY OF BOYS IN LOVE By Claus Lucas Lopez A capstone project submitted for Graduation with University Honors March 15, 2021 University Honors University of California, Riverside APPROVED Dr. Melissa M. Wilcox Department of Religious Studies Dr. Richard Cardullo, Howard H Hays Jr. Chair University Honors ABSTRACT The last couple of years have witnessed a boom in mobilization efforts within creative writing circles and institutions to bolster platforms for the production, publication, and analysis of literary works that accurately and powerfully represent historically marginalized and deprivileged communities, both as authors and as actors within their literary works. These communities traverse a vast spectrum of human qualities, including race, migration history and status, religious affiliation, physical and mental (dis)abilities, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and more. Due to their history of marginalization in various spheres of society, these communities have often had their identities subjected to political, moral, and spiritual scrutiny. One of the results of having their humanity doubted or undermined due to these particular qualities is the transformation of such qualities into powerful sources of identity that the individuals can then seek to highlight and advocate on behalf of. This collection of poetry explores how marginalized individuals develop and manage these identities through the medium of creative writing, including how they represent themselves and seek community with both members of their groups and outsiders. In other words, it will analyze how individuals develop a sense of identity in response to their experiences with marginalization and with communities within the marginalized groups they belong to, and how creative writing, and especially poetry, is a uniquely equipped vehicle through which such individuals can analyze and explore their own identities and then communicate their identities and experiences with others. I will be focusing especially on the unique experiences and struggles that LGBT people of color living with mental and/or physical disabilities confront in the intensely patriarchal, white-supremacist, and capitalist climate of the United States, as well as how these individuals have forged communities of support, growth, healing, and advocacy without relying on legal, medical, and government officials. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to my parents, Juan Manuel Lopez Mariscal and Andrea Lin Spears Kirkland, for raising and caring for me throughout these many years, and for encouraging me to pursue my passion for creative writing and poetry. My mother, although she did not live to see this, would surely be very proud of me, as I am of her and her memory. Many thanks as well to Melissa M. Wilcox, for agreeing to be my faculty mentor and for being a source of constant support and insight throughout my college career, as well as for always being willing to offer an attentive ear and comforting words in times of great stress. I would also like to thank Rachelle Cruz for hosting the creative writing classes and workshops in which the majority of these poems were first conceived and for providing valuable advice throughout the revision process. Finally, I owe the greatest thanks to my closest friends and found family members, who not only were the first readers of these poems and kindly provided their initial thoughts and feelings regarding them but have also helped keep me alive and in love with life: Zamir, Maya, Ariana, Wolfgang, Pom, and Vani. 3 CONTENTS TITLE ............................................................................................................................................ 1 ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 3 I – Ekphrasis ................................................................................................................................... 5 II – Still Life.................................................................................................................................... 7 III – Eidolon .................................................................................................................................. 10 IV – Metempsychosis ................................................................................................................... 12 V – Transfiguration ....................................................................................................................... 14 VI – Report From 06/20/2016 @ 11:50 PM; Incident: Disappearance ........................................ 18 VII – Report From 07/15/2017 @ 1:45 AM; Incident: Anniversary ............................................ 22 VIII – The Last Time I See You ................................................................................................... 26 IX – La Gargouille & el Nahual ................................................................................................... 31 X – How to Fall in Love in a Psychiatric Hospital ....................................................................... 36 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 38 4 I – Ekphrasis Permit me to paint you a poem: Your redemption arc grew in late, so I had to cleave open your shoulder blades with a survival knife to release your wings. Blood loaded the gossamer feathers with impotency, the stench of vulnerability’s homecoming attracting your ancient predators. But the plumule was lukewarm & there was room for me, finally, beneath & beside you. You said you loved how the white in my eyes scrambled at the sight of you, said it made you feel like an artist again. I believed you because anything a person says while dying is the absolute truth to them. In the director’s cut version of our life, I braid sweetbriar into all your loose ends & we settle down for dinner with both of our families at the end of each day. In the director’s cut version of our life, my biggest flaw is my fractured jawline & yours is still answering your mother’s phone calls. Doctors tried with us but the truth is no one has the time to sit in a dark room watching the reel of someone else’s life, while their own waits like a lover in time-out under the exit sign, & we needed everything examined & labeled, sorted into the proper boxes before we could even contemplate moving out of our minds. So there’s no director’s cut, but there is a brief B-side, & it sounds exactly like the concluding track to the first album to make you cry inside yourself. We prayed six times to Saint Winifred, 5 her severed head, the well of immortality that sprouted where it fell. Meanwhile, the Museum of Swallowed Objects received your baby teeth, neatly assembled into a friendship bracelet. Rich people used to pay to have their medicine rolled into capsules of gold & today a woman is instructing parents to feed their children bleach as a cure for autism, but somehow we still find avant-garde ways of going down in medical horror history. People are presented with art & say, “I see…” where nothing existed there before. You are presented with my feelings & say, “I see,” where nothing existed as far as I was concerned. We call all our art abstract because then no interpretation can be wrong or right. A degree in Art History did not prepare me for you. The perfect whorls of Van Gogh’s cyclones had wormed into the grooves of my amygdala, & you looked at that beautiful misery & spat: only an idiot dies for their art. A cruel stroke dealt by a kind & inexperienced brush. Oil paintings take hundreds of years to dry, so permit me to paint you an oil poem: I wish I could have grown up with you. I wish I could have given whoever sketched your blueprints some tips on composition, touched up on the symmetry & equal distribution of weights. Cropped out of the product accepted for publication: a super blood wolf moon waxing you into my most tender lover. When the Mona Lisa was stolen, shipwrecks of people threw their anchors to fast in the presence of her absence. That is the best I can hope for, once this moment is done. 6 II – Still Life Still life of Flow State: Still life of Necessity: Euneirophrenia ripples across your flank like the blur of artificial lights through an inattentive lens, sinks nascent incisors into your spine & bursts through your shoulder blade. A dislocated bone, skin peeled to flaunt pyroclastic flesh. The scales, like a gang of nervous, crimson beetles, scuttle back & forth in search of the safest pattern. Imbricate, each gnashes into its neighbors, regurgitates the acid coating of scarab opal. Tectonic tantrums. Tectonic concussions. Cognitive smog anoints you with a second silhouette, smoke bomb for when your ancient predators finally accuse you of being an enemy of the state. Are those my funeral lilies tucked into your breast pocket? Saying “no” to you is hard, like folding our birth certificates into origami tigers: too many steps to remember; too many opportunities for paper cuts. Which is to say,