from “The Cruising Utopia Sonnets”

By Billy-Ray Belcourt

Art by Michelle Campos Castillo

A man is a good idea when the lights are out and
your life feels amazingly painful. Oh faith, that
dysfunctional little house with shiny windows. Irony:
the last place I want to be is in a room full of men.
What if Muñoz is right and the world really is a degraded
zone of random violence? What shape must our poems
take? Maybe a sonnet can be a gay space that is weirdly
liberating. We all live on after our “dematerializations 
as a transformed materiality.” Our longings are so
rarely pure and simple. I love the small gestures that
permit us, I love being intent to be lost, I love how
much queer sense we make even when we’re sad
and defeated. I have an articulate message for all
of you: at worst, to exist is painfully amazing.

❀

Notes:

This is one of a sequence of sonnets made by gathering keywords and phrases in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity and building around them. The aim wasn’t merely to replicate Muñoz’s language (though at times I do), but rather and more difficultly to collaborate with the text so as to make something distinct, so as to create a plural voice with a mixed autobiography.

❀

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, and A Minor Chorus.