This is the seventh post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.
“Some of my first memories are of eating dirt. Eating dirt with great joy.” – Melissa K. Nelson
i did this.
i ate dirt,
and fertilizer, and bricks, and chalk.
i ate dirt
in my white communion dress,
more interested in making earthly potions
rather than staying pretty like the proper girl
i should’ve been.
dirt was my communion — body and blood.
when i was a girl
i ran naked
and in my freedom
i found a tree
the willow
with arms outstretched
inviting me to dance
and so i grabbed on and began to swing
as the weight of my body
ripped off her leaves
my hands slid down her delicate branch
and i landed on my back
without air
i laid naked
unable to gasp a breath
i thought i was dying
maybe i was
why did the willow tree
betray me
i remember
i got a splinter as a child
and it ran so deep
it eventually turned into
a freckle
i had it for years
i was so curious by it
i was self-conscious of it
shameful even
it took several years before it disappeared,
my body reclaiming its own land,
decomposing the bits of wood.
i miss my earth freckle
and i love the memory even more.
i’d sit alone at the shore of my cottage,
uninterested in the hum of voices
And distorted symphonies of laughter
beyond the trees
patio lanterns barely discernible from bumbling fireflies
i imagined the latter
preferred it
more-than-human orbs of earthy magic
my fairy friends
the playful tide redirects my attention
an electric shock of evening cold on my thigh
i sat in silence with the earth and the water,
playing with clay as the gentle waves caressed my bare legs.
clay felt good.
i would dig and squish it between my fingers,
dripping from my fist to forearm like blood.
i would release the clay upon the wave,
and watch it disintegrate.
not vanished,
just in a different form,
soon to settle again on the soft surface of the shore.
the clay was red,
grey,
brown,
black.
i marvelled in its colourful generosity.
i bought a perfume
that resembles
the scent of bonfires
i love my french bulldog
dahlia
and hope her piss on the grass inspires a flower to grow
there is said to be
more stars in the universe
than there are grains of sand
sand is the product
of being broken down
eroded again and again
smashed
beaten
washed up
sand
a fraction of the mass it once was
boulders
rocks
mountains
shells
turned to dust
but sand collects
to be large again
a vast beach
soft between our toes
to dance on
and run
and build with
sandcastles
i am like sand
i will remain
despite erosion
i wanted to be the willow tree
colossal
solid
delicate
sunbeams twinkling through the blowing vines
i wanted to be the willow tree
sunbeams twinkling through my blowing hair
but i cannot be the willow tree
the willow tree cannot be me
and we both
did not ask to be danced with
i betrayed the willow
ripped its leaves
from its non-judgmental state of being
she did not asked to be danced with
but i did it anyway
regeneration
the willows leaves
will regrow
she barely noticed a couple leaves gone
the tree will regrow
as will i
but little did i know
the willow tree laughed
eyes closed, head back
dancing with me
because i noticed her
in a world of concrete and distractions
i noticed the earth
i celebrated the original
the willow tree laughs
with her fairy friend
a human orb of play, curiosity, wonder, awe
i am an ephemeral blip of existence
in her ancient lifespan
i am the fairy friend
and she is the dancing willow
the leaves and the land
will consume me
when i am gone
will consume everyone
stillness
silence
green
although, maybe the bed of earth will be more comfortable for me
in my afterlife
than those who do wrong
those who ignore the inherent beauty of the earth
those that ignore the inherent beauty of kin
of me
of mothers
of more-than-human
Some of my earliest memories are earthy and sensory: eating dirt, pressing clay between my fingers, swinging from a willow tree. Queer joy, for me, tends to locate itself in the more-than-human world.
The poetry above draws on Ela Przybyło’s framework of ace-ecologies to position intimacy with the natural world as a site of queer joy – not through romance or sexuality, but through curiosity, sensory wonder, and the radical ordinariness of noticing. Przybyło argues that asexual intimacies are “undefinable, slippery, and surprising,” resisting the norms of amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality that insist meaningful connection must be sexual or romantic in form.1
For me, that joy lives in moments of ecological encounter: marvelling at a wood splinter freckle, and sitting at the cottage shore building potions from red and grey clay. Melissa K. Nelson’s concept of eco-erotics names this as a recognition of being “a semipermeable membrane” within a world full of “fluid attractions and intimate encounters.”2 In “The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde insists the erotic is not decorative but “a source of power and information”: a deep, knowing feeling that transcends sexual definition.3 Together, these frameworks suggest that intimate, erotic, curious, ace-ecological embodied joy in nature is not peripheral to queer ecology – it is central to it. My poetry touches on themes of autonomy, boundaries, and consent related to Val Plumwood’s “logic of domination,” where humans impose control over the environment without regard for its autonomy or consent.4 By recognizing the willow’s silent refusal and ultimate regrowth, we confront not only our complicity in ecological harm but also the necessity of reimagining human-nature relationships through the lens of care, mutual respect, and consent.
This queer joy extends into craftivism. Last year, I contributed hand-embroidered vulva hoops to artist and activist Fran Bouwman’s Vulva Forest Walk, held at her forested home in Meaford, Ontario – bright, absurd, multicoloured labial forms nestled between mossy stumps and colossal trees. Drawing on Betsy Greer’s philosophy of craftivism (craft as creative, non-confrontational activism), these textiles rendered the shame-shadowed body visible in a public, natural setting.5 The forest became both gallery and sanctuary; the thread became, in Lorde’s terms, a reclamation of the erotic in its fullest sense: bodily, spiritual, and joyfully subversive.
Across the poetry and the photographs, this project is a meditation on what it means to find queer joy in a body and in an ecology simultaneously. To eat dirt in a communion dress. To embroider a vulva into the roots of a tree. To dance with the willow.
Feature Image: Willow tree surrealist artwork. Stockcake.
Notes
- Ela Przybyło, “Ace-Ecologies: The Asexual Erotics of Loving Kin,” Asexualities 1, no. 1 (2024): 42. ↩︎
- Melissa K. Nelson, “Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures,” in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 230. ↩︎
- Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 54. ↩︎
- Val Plumwood, “The Politics of Reason: Towards a Feminist Logic,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, no. 4 (1993): 442. ↩︎
- Betsy Greer, Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). ↩︎
Erin O'Brien