Mandy Gardner

And Anne Sexton, who was not queer, she was a married lady, but she wrote poems about

lesbian desire about love.

She wrote a poem called Song for a Lady and put it in a book entitled Love Poems.

And that little poem, that little scratch of a poem was so beautiful and it gave me a little glimpse of intimacy, of actual happiness that I could aspire to one day.

So yeah, in my early 20s, when I had the opportunity and the money, I went to Boston, and I went to go visit her grave.

But I could not find her.

So yeah, I stepped over that mop bucket, and I went inside that little office.

And luckily, no alarms went off.

And I found a guidebook, and I stole it.

And I ran outside and there was a map in there and it told me how to get there.

So I get to the grave and I'm disappointed again because she committed suicide in 1974, which was one year before I was born.

And her husband had apparently, I mean, she was a confessional poet.

She wrote about all kinds of taboo subjects.

So he had not put a line of her poetry on her grave.

It's her name and her date of birth and death, and that is it.

I recited some of her poetry and smoked a cigarette as a kind of burnt offering to her.

And then I was leaving.

And just as I was leaving, an old sedan pulled up with four teenage boys inside of it.

And I immediately got tense because I got bullied a lot by teenage boys.

And that's just a reaction that I still have.