Infinite Branches: Speculative Queer Disability Poetry in Conversation
A Round-Robin Series Guest Edited by Toby MacNutt
Table of Contents for This Page
Image created by Holly Lyn Walrath, Interstellar Flight Press
Blackberry Ball
by
Petra Kuppers
by
Petra Kuppers
First the pink land felt sterile, fallow after devastation.
Now they come again to dance. Blossom without cultivation, drift
lavender song of vibration to crack through lava, ashes, rust.
No lines in bramble thought, here strangers twirl in fecund wind.
Curvilinear patterns drag blue earth into whirlpool, swagger
watch that glorious dyke of matter
mix a mud-hot earth against the axe.
Unique familiars cure the devil’s fire.
Tarts burn uncanny ecologies into patterns that hex sweet soil.
Eat the green spell, spit the thorn-defended shrub
until this queer ass brain twitches into screams,
velvet-magenta jouissance, held by land guardians’ arms
globular bursts gild orchid’s tongues
Come, come here, get that cake
We’ll bake a yellow home here
embroider “emotional intimacy”
into all edges, rheumatoid thumbs
knead with electric care
this newly dark brown hopefulness
white rootlets explore
exes—trunks long gone--
hold orange circle
house mothers bring nitrite glitter
limping feet crumble
earth for pores
toward red slippage
for all
for all
indigo mini-caves
let’s house our shimmer disco ball
Now they come again to dance. Blossom without cultivation, drift
lavender song of vibration to crack through lava, ashes, rust.
No lines in bramble thought, here strangers twirl in fecund wind.
Curvilinear patterns drag blue earth into whirlpool, swagger
watch that glorious dyke of matter
mix a mud-hot earth against the axe.
Unique familiars cure the devil’s fire.
Tarts burn uncanny ecologies into patterns that hex sweet soil.
Eat the green spell, spit the thorn-defended shrub
until this queer ass brain twitches into screams,
velvet-magenta jouissance, held by land guardians’ arms
globular bursts gild orchid’s tongues
Come, come here, get that cake
We’ll bake a yellow home here
embroider “emotional intimacy”
into all edges, rheumatoid thumbs
knead with electric care
this newly dark brown hopefulness
white rootlets explore
exes—trunks long gone--
hold orange circle
house mothers bring nitrite glitter
limping feet crumble
earth for pores
toward red slippage
for all
for all
indigo mini-caves
let’s house our shimmer disco ball
Formatting Description for Accessibility
Left-aligned text, in stanzas of irregular, meandering length, often allowing line-initial capitalization to fall away.
Author’s Statement on "Blackberry Ball"
I chose this poem to start off our poets’ group because it sings with rural queer love, because it disco dances in fields. It takes over ground given up as worthless with panache, swing, and kindness, without forgetting the reasons why the ground was disturbed, without leaving our (ableist, racist, misogynistic, and trans/homo-phobic) past behind. How can we dance and love one another, in the embrace of land, water, and air?
This poem happened because I was deliciously snared by another poet — Divya Victor. One afternoon, I lay on my bed in Turtle Disco, the disability-culture-focused somatic writing studio on Anishinaabe Territory, colonially known as the little rust-belt town of Ypsilanti, Michigan. I co-run Turtle Disco with my wife — poet, dancer, and mad activist Stephanie Heit. That day, Stephanie and I zoomed into a craft talk Divya Victor was giving at the University of Michigan, my place of employment. We were both too tired to go in person, so we appreciated this alternative access. We took out our notebooks to engage in the kind of active listening with which we participate in many poetry readings or talks: snatching phrases, thinking along, with our hands active in poetic stimming practice.
Victor centered her craft talk on brambles, on the blackberry plant. She unfolded a rich thicket of associations, from her childhood memories being told as a Tamil American child that the plant is cursed, reading about the plant’s sacredness in Ireland and its association with fairy folk, to hearing the word as an anti-Black epithet, then finding out about German Nazi’s blood and land purity histories. There’s something disturbing about the blackberry and its brambles.
Listening to Victor’s weaving, I began to collect words that eventually led me to this poem, and its celebration of the lowly, the earth fairy, those that enter disturbed ground and make a party happen.
I mixed the blackberry images with the rainbow colors, thinking about all the juicy delight of rural queer happenings. And so the poem came together, bit by bit.
I am someone who spends a lot of time in gardens, on sidewalks, and the edges of forests, often sitting down while more mobile people go on walks and take the dogs out. I love being outdoors. Old-school lesbian images imagine highly able outdoor ramblers and hikers, but I am my own radical forest fairy: caressing the world with gazes and touches in a small wingspan, leading dream journeys into the soil, or using pen or watercolor to hold onto glorious moments of wild imaginations beyond the veil of the real. This is what I want to infuse into this poem: my own queer imagination of celebrating crip parties in the wild, with all the dangers that come with that word, “wild.” I hope readers take from my poem a sense of abundance, a juicy berry deliciousness, a brambly crip persistence, a funky fairy sacredness, a tender-footed loving.
About the Author
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a German disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and she uses somatics, performance, media, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She leads the Olimpias, a loose association of international disability culture artists, and co-runs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, dancer and poet Stephanie Heit, out of their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In 2024, she received the Visionary Trailblazer Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for her life-long work in community performance.
Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters(UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access).
Her Crip/Mad Archive Dances, an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists' Film Award of the international Together! Disability Film Festival in 2024, and a presentation based on the project won the Calgary Artistic Research Award from Performance Studies International (2024).
Her latest poetry collection is Diver Beneath the Street (2024), which investigates connections between true crime, soil, and the membranes of life and death.
She was a 2021 Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow, a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She runs weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research.
www.petrakuppers.com
About the Series “Infinite Branches: Queer Speculative Disability Poetry in Conversation” — Guest Edited by Toby MacNutt
Infinite Branches is a round-robin anthology of queer disabled poets. Poets choose their own poems in response to the poet preceding them, and each group of poets concludes with a discussion of their work in the context of each other. Facilitation for choices, statements, and discussion was done by Toby MacNutt.
