DANTE FUOCO: If I remember correctly, you commented before reading your poetry that you were excited to wear an outfit for the colder weather—one you couldn’t wear when it’s warmer. A green velvet number? I remember thinking you were fashionable. As poets ought to be! I honestly sometimes go to readings just for the outfits.
I’ve been thinking about clothes and fashion more–an everyday habit that can be transformed away from chore and into aesthetic. It always felt like a chore when I “was” a cishet man. Clothing, a tarp. Now fashion– it feels like something else.
I had these thoughts in mind, and then when I returned to your poem “Scalp” I was shook because — there it was! Fashion— in spring no less!: “thank you for reminding me it’s Spring / my hair will be arched - / hovering - a scalp bound heron / my dress loose and beige.” I love how the gratitude of season tumbles into body and fashion manifestations. Also how birds enter (not just the heron, but the city dove).
I wonder if you’d want to share how this poem came to be.
GIA SHAKUR: Interestingly enough I have been sporting a similar champagne velvet number since yesterday. Water, ports and boats are of great interest now. As such, I’ve been wrapping myself in the color chamber: beige (sand), navy (night water), green (day water). My writing project has me in Poseidon’s realm.
I, too, have been investigating my relationship to clothes. In particular, that bit from Morrison’s Beloved when Sethe tells her soon-to-be lover Paul D he “looks good” to which he responds “Devil’s confusion. He lets me look good as long as I feel bad.” It is interesting how people use clothes as bandages, or a salve of fabrics.
I trust that there is a spirit-culture reckoning that will dismantle and begin to transmogrify the way humans treat each other and the Earth. “Scalp” is a triptych sister that is related to “Smile” and “The Women are Turning into Creatures” (upcoming in Italic Mines). The unnamed bard is an unseen every-woman who is navigating life, neurodivergence, her relations to people and the odd, charming and horrific exchanges within.
Returning to these poems now - yikes. I was going through a death and rebirth period. I think of 2023 being a winter of sorts; I had fallen out with my best friend, my adoptive mother, and was being street harassed daily, including by one person who was recently profiled on the news for assaulting women.
The heron is a fresh water bird that in some cultures means birth and others death. Perhaps I clung to that image to stay abound when my life was feeling low.
In addition to being a writer and culture worker, you’re also a swimming instructor. Is there any way that navigating water with your body has informed your work? And could you give me more words on the “chore” of fashion?
DF: I love that you’re in Poseidon’s realm. I’ve spent much of my life there, or somewhere close to it. I was a competitive swimmer from the ages of 7 to 21. My solo show, SEAL, is a meditation on water, especially how it operates much like my gender, sexuality: fluid; taking the shape of the container that holds it. Because so much of that piece is a reckoning with (the failures of) memory (home video anchors the piece), one particular Toni Morrison quote informed the process and product of the play: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” I love this quote for so many reasons, especially now, at a time of such profound ecological collapse, not to mention genocide—where even rainwater is controlled by Israel.
Lately, the chore of fashion feels entangled with water. I still swim often, though I have to be honest: I no longer like being wet! Or at least, the way one is after an hour in chlorine. My hair is the longest it’s ever been, which has been fun fashion, I guess, but also has shifted my life. Even as I type this, my hair is dripping from a rather extensive detangling moment—clean, yes, but also such a hassle. That said, I do very much love the new swim cap I bought, along with the lime green swimsuit I treated myself to.
photo of Dante Fuoco by Desdemona Dallas
“Devil’s confusion. He lets me look good as long as I feel bad”—I love that. Honestly, fashion becomes less a chore for me when I feel sexy, slutty, embodied. It’s been awhile since I’ve read Beloved, and that distance makes me curious about all the different ways one can “feel bad.” Shame and sorrow and hurt and and and—yes, there’s that. The kind of bad I like best is, of course, that of disobedience, of wearing clothes I was told my whole life were too promiscuous, too girly, too [fill in the blank]. When biking last week, I got called the f-slur by a driver who almost hit me. The insult came only after I was “badly behaved”: I screamed at him and flicked him off. I guess I felt bad in that moment (i.e. scared, furious). But I also felt triumphant. Years ago, a guy stopped me on the street, gestured toward my short-shorts, and said, “If my daughter was here I’d beat the shit out of you.” That only made me want to be sluttier and badder and femmer. Surviving that moment felt like an invitation to piss off more men like him, who are so steeped in self-hatred and so plagued by a lack of imagination they resort to…what do we even call it? Violence, yes. But also cowardice. And such uninspired verbal interactions! Every one of those moments makes me closer to the Devil, maybe.
I’m so sorry to hear that 2023 was so rough, filled with such difficulty. I am glad to hear about the heron—I wasn’t aware of the symbolism, not to mention the amazing duality. I love how, in that one image + your 2023, you’re perhaps framing death/birth not as binary but as interconnected, part of the same circular process. Do I have that right?
To that end, I want to hear more about the triptych! What has your process been managing three parts—or even “sisters,” as you say—together and separate?
GS: You have that right. Watching egos play out in violence has been a common theme locally and abroad. Without getting too woo-woo with astrology; as a Pisces, I believe dying and rebirth are not events but processions linked at the tail and head.
A sort of meditation happened with your poem “Straight Friend Buys A House”. Carpenter bees will return to old nests and rebuild them. As a self-proclaimed isolophiliac, the part about drilling holes, claiming wood and staying out of the way stayed with me:
Actually. The bees
won’t eat your home
just drill its wood. Claims hole
for life. Loners. No hive.
No honey.
Last Summer, I’d been hired to rebuild a nest of sorts within a pseudo-familial setting. While there, blowing off steam on the roof of my job, I began collecting the carcasses of bees who’d built a nest nearby. The plan was to make a collage of a “stung woman” to serve as visual component to a micro-novella and a poetry collection, thus creating a triptych.
After several instances of homophobia, transphobia, pro-police rantings, and, to be frank, dumb shit; I left the job in August. Never completed the collage. I’d amassed a collection of bee remains and was so annoyed about the events leading to my resignation I decided to write a novel to cool my head.
I no longer have the desire to rebuild nests.
Could you give me more words on “Straight Friend Buys A House”?
DF: Oh, I love Pisces and Piscean thinking. I appreciate you saying that about death and rebirth—less a line, more a circle. I’m a Scorpio moon, so I am often preoccupied with death, transformation, shadows…
That job sounds terrible. I’m sorry you had to go through it and I’m glad you got out. Obsessed with the bee carcass collection and even more drawn to how you wrote a novel in response! I’ve never thought about writing a novel as a “cooling” activity, but I can imagine, as an isolophiliac, the solitude of writing a whole book offers some peace?
When I came out at 26 I foolishly thought my friends of my straight past would join me in my evolution. Sadly, most of them didn’t. That discovery has been heartbreaking and freeing. Now that I’ve been out (and increasingly jaded) for almost a decade, I’m like — duh, of course they can’t see me (respect me), because the truth is they never did. We became friends when I was lying about my life, what I wanted most, all that queer desire and hunger and longing. And that’s not totally on them.
“Straight Friend Buys a House” reflects that heartbreak and anger. It came from a conversation I had with a college friend who is, I guess, not really a friend anymore. No profound falling out, he’s not a bad person. Just distance - which is sort of sadder? He really did buy a house next to neighbors with carpenter bees, a dilemma he detailed to me. This felt very annoying to me, as someone who had very little money at the time, someone who really could care less about owning a home. Writing the poem revealed how my allegiance was with the bees, not him.
That house—I’ve been invited to it, but never visited. Initially I wrote the piece in the future tense (“You will show me your garden “), but my friend, the poet Elisha Mykelti, pointed out that this tense lacked momentum. Embedded in this final draft is the love and insight of her, a new friend, a person who really sees me. Her feedback also was invitation to honor not only my imagination but what I’ve endured. I’ve never been to the house, but then again– I have. I have walked the halls of that house for so long.