Category: Fall 2025

A central theme of this poem revolves around the speaker observing other women like them (lesbians) engaging in “masculine” activities”. Moreover, in this stanza, how similar the women are to them but more specifically how they don’t notice the differences (19-20). The men are referring to the women as one of them and don’t choose to reprimand. It is not just because both groups are attracted to women or share the same dismay for other men. It’s because the men see here a spectacle and choose to “marvel” at it because of how different it is. Even though the speaker might be wary of men for a lot of reasons, the group of men chooses to focus on the similarities in dealing with romantic relationships.

I believe not only this poem, but especially this stanza offers valuable insight into the question of identity and possibly the intersection with someone’s personal as well as their LGTBQ identity. In this stanza, the men don’t seem to acknowledge that the woman in front of them is a lesbian. It is not specified, but it could be that she is not presenting the stereotypical lesbian characteristics.  They can acknowledge that she is like them in a variety of ways, but because she is a woman, she is automatically put on a pedestal, regardless of her sexual orientation. This also makes me think of how this group of men would respond to a gay man. Even though they are both men, there might be a completely different direction because of the innate focus on the sexual orientation.

I think this can connect to a feeling common in the LGBTQ community of having to manage other’s perceptions of them separate from their gender identity. One identity can be focused on more than the other, which might lead to a sense of disconnect. The speaker might have been observing the respect from the men because of the female presenting identity, not necessarily from the lesbian identity. I think it comes back of how multiple ‘things’ can be true at once in the community and that being difficult for others outside to grasp (e.g someone being traditionally “fem” and being attracted to women).

In the fourth poem of the La Dazante section of Cheri Moraga’s works, the poem touches on the idea of concealing an identity and relationship, but I would like to focus on the second half of it. It’s in some ways rather blatant, at least in the world of poems. There is something intimate in all of this, the idea of being held in one’s arms, of being so close, yet still feel like dying; which highlights the personal intimacy and secrecy, followed later by ”and I enter you as deep and as hard as we want / because you were there too dying” (Moraga, 21, lines 7-8). It’s gentle, loving, without any regard for the society, or nation, around them, while acknowledging the pain of their reality. When they are not in a safe place, hidden away in a motel far from anyone they know, there is no room or possibility for their love due to its queerness.

In terms of the actual structure itself, the end of the poem notably runs counter to what comes before it. “We want to gather all the touch we can // before we go // back. (Moraga, lines 13-15)” The isolation of this poem is specific. When the speaker is with their lover, the poem is spaced differently, closer together and interwoven. Upon the mention of leaving, returning to a world that is not warm and welcoming to their love and relationship, even the words themselves begin to isolate.

The poem itself is about the inability to be queer in public, but embrace it in private. The idea that they must hide themselves before returning to their normal life, despite the clear tenderness and love that they hold for their lover. In a moment where it is just them, they are free to love and lust for each other, however, the moment they return to their nation, they must once again return to hiding.

Those who are considered different are faced with the unfortunate reality that they will never fully be accepted for who they are, and that they must hide their true selves from the public to avoid judgment. The text, “History, According to Boy” by Saeed Jones places an emphasis on the ideas of entrapment and conformity with a coming-of-age narrative. The main character, the boy, struggles to fit in with others his age and isn’t entirely masculine leaning. His homosexuality leads to him being othered, and his inability to fit into the image of a “proper boy” causes him harm. An interesting section of the text involves the boy’s dad beating him after he snuck out to go to a gay dance club. The text states that, “boy’s father’s fist comes down like a war no one bothers to call a war” (Jones 95). The physical abuse the father inflicts on the boy comes across as a method to try to “beat the gay” out of him (with the mentality that he’ll stop displaying or acting towards his attraction to men if he continues to get hurt over it). In a way, it seems like a twisted form of mental conditioning that uses harmful behavior to try and promote “normal” behavior. An intriguing part about this section of the text is how physical abuse is framed. The focus on the term “war” justifiably frames the abuse in a negative light, yet it seems there is debate over how the term “war” should be defined. Even though harming a child over their identity isn’t right, trying to enforce socially acceptable behavior is considered reasonable to most. If the harm done to the boy now will lead to his protection in the future, is it truly harming him at all?

“is only the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a / blue dress / out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea.” (3)

As I gave The Blue Dress more and more time during our in-class freewrite, I was surprised by the layers beneath the surface, and the fact that each one changed my fundamental emotional response to the characters mother. These lines represent my initial reading, but in order to complete that picture, I also have to pull from an earlier set of lines: “is a good-bye in a flooded, antique room, is good-bye in a room of / crystal bowls…” – At first I fixated on the flooded, antique room as a dissolution of family-tied (assumed heteronormative) tradition(s), a metaphor that accompanied the dress. Then, in the final lines “is only the moon… is my mother is a moon” I connected the mother to the light of the moon, and gave primarily positive connotations to this mother daughter relationship. This createed the picture of a mother standing beside her daughter, who is wearing this new dress, and stepping out to sea as part of a new generation, a new identity. (lesbian/queer.)

I wrote in my free-write that this “does not give the impression of judgement.” But I also admitted that something wasn’t quite right, and the language surrounding her mother didn’t quite give the impression of complete acceptance, either. As I sat with the poem longer, I was drawn to the repeated sentiments such as “out to sea” “floating through the streets” and “crystal bowls.” I would really appreciate someone’s take on the repition of crystal bowls, but for me, the other two sentiments were enough to change my perspective on the poem. Being “out to sea” can go either way in terms of positive or negative connotations, but I think for most people it’s closely related to being “lost at sea,” and the poem has such a dreamlike quality that to me is also a red flag – you don’t want to be falling asleep at the wheel of a boat. You also get the dreamlike quality from “bed” in line 13. “Floating through the streets” is very important, especially when compared with one of the primary drivers of the poem: being watched. I’m not sure if all my build up was necessary or if it was just confusing, but it’s important to note that the main character, while aware that they are floating through the streets, is only seen by the mother. What’s more, the mother sees past the dress, sees the corporeal form of “me”, and the word “floating” is attributed to the way the mother sees.

The more I think about this poem, the more jumbled my thoughts get, honestly, there’s just so much going on and so many potential connections. There’s so many words that stand out as well, like how the dress the character wears belongs (or belonged) to her mother. – Does her mother being in the moon mean that she has passed? There’s so many things to point to this, the good-byes, the tears, the leaks. And now I’m moving even beyond the train of thought that asks “was the mother supportive.” Now I’m back with the hurricane (that drowned house – line 11) with the death of a mother and the items the main character kept (are the crystal cups and bowls heirlooms she’s leaving behind?) And what about the one very specific place mentioned, the Mississippi river? There’s just so much more to this poem than I initially gave it credit for, and I liked it on the first read.

 

There is a similar line length throughout the poem that leaves it feeling enclosed and less free. This feels like having all your ducks in a row or a overly organized structure, with no freedom of movement or verse. There is a multiple examples where the author uses descriptions of both parts of the human body like hair, voice, legs, knees and having of parts of clothing. The descriptions of things are mostly literal until the last line that describes the burning house. That last line is sort of a turn from the literal nature of the organized poem, but it still is of a similar line structure as the rest. This makes me believe there is a turn from the rest of the poem, but not in the way I originally thought. The description of a burning house is still a metaphor, but not really. The authors feelings about this place overpass any standard metaphor and become more literal. The description of the burning house immediately made me believe this house feels like hell to the writer. The description of queer sex that happens in the woods, away from home or comfort right before this descriptions, leads me to believe the family is not comfortable with this part of their son’s life and wish to contain him. What I am really trying to say here is that I think these lines are showing how closed off the author feels from comfort, is forced to be in a uniformed line, and is uncomfortable with his home life due to his parent’s opinions on his sexual preferences.

When I’m up late at night, I think about all the things I should have done, all the things I shouldn’t have, all the things I wished happened and all the things I wished didn’t. Insomniac by Saeed Jones invokes those same thoughts when talking about a mother and her relationship with her child.

After reading this poem, I honed in on the 4th stanza, where the narrator refers to “the only inheritance of worth in your village of synapses”(1). I believe this quote references generational trauma and abuse the mother suffered at the hands of her own mother, and that she is the narrator. In this interpretation, the narrator is her internal thoughts, talking to herself, like many of us do (not just me hopefully) at night. Possibly coping with postpartum depression, she thinks of herself as a “mother of sorrows”(1), and that she tries to hide that side of herself from him. The regret she feels abusing the child manifests in the line, “Check the room you’ve locked him in” as she wants to fix her mistakes and be better.

One can also interpret the narrator as the child, all grown up, and reflecting on his childhood at night wishing he could change the past. Perhaps he’s trying to talk to his mother, begging her to just check on the “sweet little wreck”(1), in the hopes that it would lead to a better, different future. Shifting our focus to the 3rd stanza, the line “When he does not answer your latest call”(1) makes me think of how a mother suffering from PPD might use picturing the child all grown up as a coping mechanism. After begging the child to stop crying with no reply, she must do this to visualize how her child might turn out if she continues this cycle of abuse, or if she breaks it.

Even after writing this post, I’m not entirely sure which interpretation I believe , or if there’s even more interpretations that I am yet to think of. But the one thing I’m sure of is that whether it is the mother or the son speaking, they both want to change her legacy.

Saeed Jones’ “Last Call” describes a narrator’s conflicting desire for a relationship with another man despite internal and societal barriers. Through imagery that emphasizes external darkness, Jones situates queerness with nighttime and smoke, evoking a sense of danger and scandal. In the beginning of the poem, he portrays the “night’s” mouth as a gun, implying a potential for physical harm within their relationship. Despite this perceived risk, the narrator cannot help but be drawn toward the danger when he physically pulls the man back into him, initiating their sexual relationship despite his conflicting feelings. In the middle of the poem, the lines “I’ve got more hunger than my body can hold. Bloated with want” (16) portray the narrator’s desire as intense and consuming, using hunger as a metaphor for sexual desire. The word “bloated” also implies that the narrator has consumed or is asking for too much in their relationship; his desire has reached the point of greed. This imagery positions the queer relationship at the center of the poem in a negative light, an element supported by continued imagery of darkness and drowning in the second half of the poem.

Throughout the poem, Jones hints at the forces preventing the narrator from fulfilling his desires to be with the other man. Societal pressure to conform is implied through the narrator’s need to “wait for the moon to drown” (16), implying that he must wait until all light is gone so that no one can see him before acting on his desire. The narrator’s final act of being pulled down into a lake to be with the other man is both muddy, which symbolizes the emotional sense of being “dirty” for being in a homosexual relationship, and serves as a metaphor for being pulled down to hell, a potential reaction to homosexuality being considered a sin. The poem ends by implying that, despite the portrayal of this relationship as negative from the beginning, there is a “city” beneath the surface of the lake – a sense of hope beneath the surface of the narrator’s hesitance and self-hatred – which he is on his way towards.

Daedalus after Icarus, a poem by Saeed Jones in his 2014 collection Prelude to Bruise, begins with a description of Daedalus on a beach being followed by a group of young boys pretending to be birds. The title already evokes a sense of loss, referring to the death of Daedalus’s son. The boys are described as carefree and clumsy, but a dramatic weight follows them. Their footsteps are described as burning holes in the sand, and, when they imitate flying in reference to Daedalus’ wax wings, the sand is described as tugging at their feet, pulling them back to the earth. The children are shrouded by a vague sense of imprisonment, much like Daedalus and his son were imprisoned in the Greek myth. Daedalus himself is hardly described at all in this sequence, as it is almost entirely focused on the boys. It isn’t until one of the mothers of the boys shouts out, joking her son should ask Daedalus to make her wings so she could leave her husband, that Daedalus stops his march and sprints into the sea. The boys follow him excitedly, and declare they no longer want to be birds. Instead, the boys declare they want to be fish. Throughout the poem, the children do not understand Daedalus, viewing him with a childish wonder, unaware of Daedalus’ true emotions or his past.

Daedalus is subtly portrayed as a fearful and unwilling father figure, never acknowledging the children and literally running away at the idea that he might contribute to a family. Perhaps he is traumatized from the loss of his own son, or perhaps the poem wants us to use that loss as a means to assume he is a bad father. Tragically, all the characters are bound together. Daedalus cannot fly away, and the boys continue to follow him. It is implied by the mother’s comments that they come from possibly abusive homes and fathers. The boys cling to Daedalus as an escape, not only is he a potential father figure, but he also provides a literal and figurative means of escape in his wax wings and the whimsy they bring to the boys. The poem, at least in my interpretation, ultimately portrays themes of the naivety of children and how it comes into contact with neglectful or abusive parents.

Whenever I read poems, the first thing I do is look at the title and try to decipher its meaning. Then, I read the poem and try to figure out how it applies, since titles are also supposed to be meaningful. From context gained through reading the poem, it appears that the narrator is in a secret relationship where there is little to no care or even solidarity. Post-coital, the narrator is left alone “to pick pine needles / from [their] hair, to brush brown / leaves off [their] shirt” (Saeed). This imagery conveys the narrator’s loneliness as they try to right themselves, putting themselves back together without any help. Themes of loneliness are not only present in this poem, but are relevant throughout this entire collection.

Thinking back to the title, being on the “…Edge of Woods” could be interpreted in multiple ways. In the most literal sense, the title refers to the location in which the narrator is having relations: at the edge of the woods. Although, my first thought was that the woods were a metaphor for sexuality, which is fitting in my opinion as the woods are often seen as wild and overgrow by some, but bring peace and a connection to life for others. Given this interpretation, I think that the narrator feels like they’re on the edge of their sexuality, in that they can’t experience or fully come to terms with the sexuality they identify with. This sentiment could be the reason why the narrator is in a secret relationship and/or the secret relationship could be reinforcing this feeling. Community also plays a large part in sexuality and the narrator may feel like they’re on the edge of their community because they feel like an imposter or they’re unable to accept or come to terms with their sexual identity.