Our section editors chose some of their favorite published submissions from past issues to feature on our blog. This piece is from Issue 41, selected by Maddy Chriest, our current Poetry Editor.
i.
When I was 12, I wanted to paint my walls blue—seafoam, sky blue; I was
tinted something murky from a young age,
yet pink was always my favorite color.
With my belt buckle strapped, my mom asks me
[in the grocery store parking lot],
“Did you suffer?”
It’s Friday—five-PM heat in June; I want
to rip my heart out and throw it
at her face—plaster the blood
across her Kia's window—I feel the glass
shudder when she asks me: “How did I not know?”
“... I feel like I would have known, if
you wanted—If you felt—” and words
escape her, sucked out of
the car with the summer sun.
My mother doesn’t know how to say,
“If you thought you were a man”, and I
want to help her, guide her to the
conclusion, hold her hand to the
crosswalk: say back to her,
“If I felt like a queer”. [like a fag.]
How could she have known?; [Pink was always my favorite color.]
what else was there to say?
ii.
I stir peaches into syrup. it’s July, now,
and my phone rings in the empty
house: I am still sleeping in
my childhood bedroom. I did not suffer.
I do so now. Welts bubble up
on my chest where tape pulls at the skin; my binder
seals the tissue to my ribs; that
underwire elicits an undercurrent of nausea. I’m
learning to recognize the dissonance; recognize the guilt in my chest
when I choose yes or no, like my therapist teaches me.
He looks like me: talks like me. Tinted that same shade of
sickening pink-blue. He teaches me how to
hold myself—how to ask myself for
permission to change. He brings me back
to my body, the peach-ringed flesh,
bruising at the seams: but it’s still too easy to be ma’am-ed at the gas station,
and my childhood name fits as well as the childhood bedroom,
or the second-hand sister-clothes—it all amounts to the
trash bags in the living room. To that
Kia in summer heat. [I cringe at the echo of
my voice on the telephone.]
August is the earliest death wish, the soonest ocean wave:
I stand, alone, slicing the peaches in a pot with a wooden spoon.
I hang up with shaky hands;
lick sugar off my thumb.
iii.
Often endings and beginnings are
tied: there is no end of the
twine without the bit stuck to the
spool. Right now, I am pressing my finger into the
middle of a knot and hoping
it comes out tight. I am stirring peaches until they
coagulate into jam—like blood in a
gushing wound, or the smear across a windshield. Time sits
[cross-legged,] on the floor, untangling this thread around him:
I choke in therapy, I struggle to stay afloat:
I drown in the impermanent sea of this current body,
uncertainty like a vulture or a nesting albatross around my neck.
This hormone, like the best things,
is creation and recreation: it’s a
serum of rebirth and a lethal dose all in one go;
come August I'll be the corpseman and the
corpse—this corpse is rose-tinged;
wears cat ears and sticks bandaids to her upper lip. She is beloved by
my mother and my sister and the things I
try so desperately to hide from. she is laughing somewhere inside of
me while I untangle her dimpled fingers from my spindly own,
just to let the medicine go down easy. I’ll drop her into the sea
with my old favorite color and my mother’s doubt and my voice alongside it—
hear her laughter, breathe in her joy, and feel not an ounce of regret.
This is a polar plunge into something that I never thought could exist for me—
this is the funeral march
before the summer-fruit banquet
at the end of the line.
iv.
In a blue-walled room, cozy and new-familiar,
tears run down my face and I struggle
to tell him, this man,
some reflection of me, “I’m
not sure I can stand hearing someone else on the
other end of this dialtone, but
I think
it’s all I want to listen for.”
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