Being a Flower and a Smile: A Reflection on Queerness, Embodiment, Trauma, Zen, and Unapologetic Burlesque

By Holli Hemlock

Image description: Holli Hemlock lies on her stomach, smiling and looking up, with her hands under her chin. She has blue hair, red lips, colorful tattoos and wears a black bra and a gold-and-black skirt.

Six years ago, I was fortunate to receive the life changing wisdom that to deal with the unbearable pain of existence, you had to ‘just let your heart break’. This is a wisdom anchored into my skin with needle and ink as a reminder to continually bring me back to the rawness of heartbreak. My broken heart tattoo has trans flowers growing out of it: a spell to remember and enact the beauty in that embracing. I call that day my ‘tranniversary’ because when I look back with the clearer eyes of being late in transition, I recognize a turning of the wheel in the Buddhist sense in that moment, a different phase of my seeking toward embodiment. For me, the journey feels bigger than gender or even these last six years; it’s been a lifelong, gradual opening into wholeness, where those things we call gender transition have been side effects, steps in the path. But six years ago, I started to crack my heart more intentionally and actively lean in. 

Part of my celebration of the day this year was EMDR therapy, in which I’m actively working on figuring out how to exist with the trauma anchored in my body from being in the world as a queer, trans, neurodivergent, autistic, disabled person – both in general because of the state of the world and specifically from trying to mask all of those things for so long without realizing what I was doing. EMDR is a wild, brain-hacky therapy modality; for some people it’s very heady, for me it is so deeply somatic. It’s an opening up of awareness to tension and pain rooted in my body, a curiosity around what will happen if it’s allowed to move, and a challenging and painful sitting with and listening to until I find how to let it flow. I’m noticing that religion gave me a core belief of intrinsic brokenness and an understanding that wholeness can only come from outside of me, and these beliefs have been continually reified by living in the systems of our world. They’ve had a significant long term impact in how I’ve been able to be in relationship to myself and to others. On this occasion, I noticed that the way that trauma is held in my body is very dis-integrated. I think this is the coping mechanism of dissociation and compartmentalization that my body learned to survive in the world, and I think the only way to liberate my body of that separation is a re-integration through somatic practice: through dance, physicality, sensuality, and exploring connection and awareness through embodiment. 

A tattoo of an anatomical heart with pink and blue flowers is shown on Holli's thigh. Her hands, with purple-painted nails, frame the tattoo.

Many years ago, I stumbled upon Andrea Gibson’s poetry while browsing the miles of books at the iconic Powell’s Bookstore. I had been exploring my own queerness with the insufficient tools I had at the time, and I found myself in the queer poetry section, not knowing that that was one of the tools I had been missing. Poetry is an art that invites us into a relationship of play with the incompleteness of words. Their imperfection as models for reality. Their malleability to break their bonds and reach at concepts more than they’ve been given to start. Their seeming fixedness that is actually co-created by us all, socially constructed as containers to hold concepts. But poetic play shows us that those containers can have beauty in their ability to stretch, expand, and hold bigger things, and there is such queerness in that. That particular day, I was really drawn to the beautiful heartbreak and expansion of a line from Gibson’s poem, ‘Royal Heart’: Just to be clear, I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered that there better be a thousand separate heavens for all my flying parts. I think this spoke to me in the words I needed at the time: it held space for my dis-integrated heart to see that it can be royal and holy and whole too. But now I think that the wholeness is to be found in re-integration, in finding ways to reach out and hold all those flying parts. 

Two stage photos show Holli in their Pills act. In one, crouched against a curtain under blue light; in the other, bent forward in a wide stance under spotlight. Text notes the act explores overwhelm, trauma, and connection. Photographer: Sam Zoe Grey

There is a poetry I’m finding in the body too, through things like EMDR and burlesque performance, through HRT and gender affirming surgery. The body has a poetic, magical capacity to grow and change and hold more than it’s been given, constructed, and told it can hold. There is a deeply liberating power in letting go of the categories, forms, and stories about our body and others’ that do not serve. Trauma sits in the body, but it doesn’t have to sit still. It can move, redistribute, and flow. We can learn to hold it in a different way than we were told we had to or conditioned into. Soma expands to fit what we practice with. 

I recently attended a wonderful book release event for Alison J. Carr and Lynn Sally’s new anthology, Sex on Stage: Performing the Body Politic. Amongst many beautiful readings and performances, Legs Malone shared a reflection on the first time she saw Dirty Martini perform: 

As I watched her, every single one of my self-hating, fat-shaming, body dysmorphic thoughts came up and turned to mist on the wind. My old limitations quietly imploded. I suddenly saw more than just Dirty at that moment. I saw a soul in motion in perfect alignment with sacred purpose, a heart radiant with expression, and a body lit up with joy. 

More than a mere performer, she became before my eyes a sacred channel of sensuality that spun joyous tassels in the face of all the systemic, practiced limitations that lay outside of this one brilliant moment.  

A glamorous performer in a sparkling green gown poses on stage, arms raised above their head holding feather fans. Caption notes this was the author’s first time seeing Dirty Martini perform.

In Sōtō Zen spaces, I’ve learned about enlightenment being inseparable from the practice of it, not in a sense where one has to make or build toward it, but rather as a way of being whole in activity. You are enacting enlightenment when you practice (or perform) a kind of radical embodiment, presence, and awareness with body-mind, and, when doing so, you can start to see the truth that an expansive wholeness, interconnectedness, and lack of separation were with you, and all of us, all along. One of the esoteric origin stories of Zen is called ‘The Flower Sermon’, and it relates a story of the Buddha holding up a single flower and the disciple Mahakashyapa witnessing and smiling back, sharing the interaction as an example of directly seeing and understanding this mutuality. It’s a connection and transmission of wisdom, not through words, but through embodied, somatic practice, awareness, and mutually witnessing. 

A wooden han board with a hand-painted inscription about birth, death, and not wasting life hangs on a rope against a wall. Below it sit a small clock, a vase of flowers, and wooden mallets on a table. Caption notes this was at the old location of the Brooklyn Zen Center.

I think this is the same sacred channel Legs Malone talks about in Dirty Martini’s performance, and when I think of burlesque and how I relate to performance, it’s like this too. It’s an enactment of trans magic and an opening to relationship, a worship of human connection. I feel a deep kinship in performance with the ancient Sumerian priesthood of Inanna, goddess of love, fertility, sensuality, war, and many other things. Her genderqueer/trans (as we might understand them today) priestesses and priests used ecstatic trance, lamentation, singing, drumming, and erotic connection to worship, bring people together, and deconstruct social reality around gender. In Eruptions of Inanna, Judy Grahn writes, ‘Inanna’s is a love that is and does; it’s not mandatory or enforced; other emotions can play as well, but when we are open to the love, it’s there. Or, after a while it’s there. Or, it’s always there and we fall in and out of connection, so it’s up to us’. 

Two black-and-white photos show scenes from a performance titled I Love Onions. On the left, a person in a chef’s coat and hat chops an onion at a small table. On the right, the same performer, now in casual clothes and cap, kneels dramatically on the floor, with onion pieces scattered around.

My burlesque performances to date have engaged with a lot of different themes: trans anger and joy, embodiment, slowness, misgendering passports, community catharsis and resistance, silly monster fuckery… But recently, after performing the strangest act I’ve done to date (wherein I chop up onions, rub them all over my body, feed them to myself and the audience, and generally lean into a cheeky/sexy mix of unapologetic joy and weirdness), I had a person come up to me and tell me that they had gender envy seeing me perform. This is probably the most direct comment I’ve ever experienced from a trans ‘egg’, typically they are less overt and more curious. As I responded in that moment, I tried to be a mirror to give her some encouragement. Envy is, in some senses, a disconnection, and I hope I was able to guide it slightly toward an opening into connection.  

A photo of five books: Sex on Stage, Moon in a Dewdrop, Eruptions of Inanna, Take Me With You, and Somatics for Rope Bottoms. The caption notes these were books the author consulted while writing.

Andrea Gibson died on July 14 of this year, and there’s no way that I can put this out into the world without holding some space for that. Their first poetry collection I encountered was entitled, Take Me With You, which I and uncountable others will do in our journeys with gender, mental health, self-love, and so many other other things. In addition to the quote above, they also once wrote, In the end, I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks. Maybe that’s what the tears in my broken heart are, those wounds that the heart heals stronger as the muscle grows. In Everyday Zen, the late teacher Charlotte Joko Beck talked about the practice of living as making oneself into ‘A Bigger Container’: 

What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me. At first this space is quite restricted, then it’s a bit bigger, and then it’s bigger still. It need never cease to grow. And the enlightened state is that enormous and compassionate space. But as long as we live we find there is a limit to our container’s size and it is at that point that we must practice. 

This is what I want my burlesque and my life and my practice to be: an ongoing spell for and practice of intrinsic, embodied wholeness and liberation until I, and we, can feel that it was always there the whole time. So when you see me on the stage, throwing my glitter to the audience, tassels twirling, rhinestones sparkling, know that the broken heart you see on my thigh is growing stretch marks, and I hope it helps with your stretch marks too. 

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Bio: Pretty and poisonous, Holli Hemlock (she/they) is a bouquet of deadly flowers bound up in jute. She bloomed into the burlesque scene in 2024, studying with GiGi Holliday and Jo Boobs Weldon at the New York School of Burlesque. Joyfully, vibrantly, unapologetically queer and trans, Holli’s performances grab hold of the normative gaze and turn it back on her own terms. It took them a while to grow into this body, and now they are excited to share it with the world in their anger and grief, joy and euphoria. You can follow Holli on Instagram: @hollihemlock