Ilioki’s writing explores spirituality and the queer body through poetry, prose and story. The writing emerges from their meditation and shamanic journeying as well as their embodied life experience, creating new mythologies for our world.
City of Infinite Gender
There is a city of infinite gender. All of humanity and all that is not human are welcome. For millennia people revelled there, joyfully, peacefully, creating, thriving, fucking, loving and magick abounded. But now gates of the city are seldom passed, at least by western men and women and, oh how they cling to those words. And tighter they cling so more tightly bound the city gates become because you can only pass through with open hand.
In the city there is a street where those who dream their gender live. Often, they call the same building their home for decades and then, at times, after an intense and visionary night’s sleep they will move to a different house and all their neighbours come to help them as it is a moment of celebration, not of crisis.
There is a district where partnerships of love and faithfulness gather: two, three, five or more. And each member of a group bound by love is assigned their gender by their lovers. Together they shape and mould their bodies so that they fit so intimately together, in triangles and pentacles and dodecahedrons with 12 genders each having their place in the whole.
There is an apartment block where all faces are covered, and all bodies exposed and a block where everyone paints a colour on their skin with each new day as they wait at dawn for their gender to flow from their soul for that moment. And a tower where they download their gender from the internet when they choose.
There is an alleyway where bodies shift and change. A new orifice may open flowing with fertile juices never tasted before. Or an appendage grows: a tentacle, a prehensile cock or two cocks or ten thousand. Or a cunt that opens in someone’s heart, gaping wide to make a portal to a brand new universe.
In the centre of the city is a garden of such beauty that teems with life. Flowers and seeds flourish with joyful fecundity. There are creeping things in the undergrowth, birds with iridescent wings, horned beasts and slithering beasts and all manner of magick. To walk in the garden is to open yourself up to the gift of a new gender and whichever creature chooses you, they bestow upon you their bestial gender and every person sees divinity in that primal shift without questioning or fearing the animal flow.
There is a house where to make love is to shred each other’s skin and a house where gender only exists at night when everyone is silent, and the lights are off. There is a gender that laughs at sunset, there is a gender that weeps blood as they cum.
The city has no need for “man” or “woman” because such words are too small to contain the magnitude of humanity.
And each way of being human is miraculous.
And each way of being human is gateway to a divine.