The Bug Pinner (How To Build Tomorrow)
Sebastian Vance
SEBASTIAN VANCE (he/him) is a transgender poet pursuing English: Creative Writing and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington. Many of his works deal with the transmasculine experience and the way it intersects with life changes, familial concerns, and love. He is enamored by humanity, finds joy in connection, and is generally a fan of a very good dogs. Previous publications include the Berkeley Poetry Review (In My Grandmother’s Cookbook) and the upcoming issue of University of Washington’s Bricolage (Intramuscular Summers, for laika). He thanks you for reading his work and hopes you find safety, hope, and comfort in it too.
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This piece is one that I've been working on for almost two years at this point——it's gone through so many different iterations, so many different metaphors, that I felt like it fit for the idea of "quilted". It's patchy on the page, stitched together by itself, and deals with the segmented, patchwork feeling of being a trans man. Being transgender means finding yourself at odds in every room you walk into: how will I fit in here? What version of myself do I have to be, to stay safe? To stay loved? To balance these desires while still staying happy? It's hard, especially now, to imagine a future that is anything but terrifying——but I think that its up to US, up to you, up to me, to fight to make tomorrow a more tangible, precious thing: we have to make tomorrow worth searching for.
Tomorrow waits for me, shining. There’s no way out
but through. In the February air, I dance around myself——leave an imprint on the glass
surrounding my life. I weave webs I can’t find the end of, tear legs off past selves
and dunk them unceremoniously in ethanol. I don’t know how to preserve what matters.
I just can’t fathom that.
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It’s easy to get lost when I’m relearning how to be: most men learn this at age 13.
When you manufacture boyhood through hand sanitizer or jabbing a thigh,
no one tells you how easy it is to lose sight of what it means to be human. Puberty when
you’re old enough to drink makes your decisions fuzzy: I don’t know if the
self-doubt is part of this metamorphosis or something that has always stabbed through me.
My limbs feel heavy. Muscle collects in places it never lived before. My body is
segmented: a mother’s hips, a girl’s thighs. A man’s face, boy teeth. Beetle-winged heart.
In my hopeful, distant future,
all I do is chase a narrative: pick apart the frame, the light,
the walls it all will bounce off of. This studio full of corpses,
floodlight on the porch. Like a moth, I’m drawn toward it.
But I don’t know what it means
to chase this fucking light! I don’t know what it means to do anything:
no stories are told about the future for boys like me. We don’t grow up
spreading cooties or eating dirt—— so we can’t know what tomorrow looks like either.
There’s no real method to this madness: tomorrow seems miles away.
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But here, picture it with me anyway—— picture Tomorrow:
picture a matboard with a thousand empty spaces labelled invasive species. Picture buying the
wrong milkweed for monarchs, in an act of goodwill. Picture a praying mantis ripping the
head off her mate, but there is no mate, and it’s all the same bug, fighting itself, forever, as
the weather turns to spring. I’ll stand there at sunrise, no garden in sight. My skin crawls.
I wait for it: the start of something new. I hear it in the air:
there’s luck for me, somewhere in time: so there has to be light out there too.