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2023: Some personal highlights

"Accomplishments" is a little much but a year's a year

Got my sex changed at the DMV

This sounds like an absurdist boardwalk shirt, but is a real errand I'd been putting off for a while, mainly because the office in College Point is such a pain to get to if you don’t have a car. The day of my appointment, I had some leftover temporary tattoos from my roommate’s birthday party, so I applied a tasteful phases-of-the-moon design to my neck for the photo. What were they gonna do, make me wash it off? Nobody did, and the new ID shipped out a couple of weeks later with the gender marked X and sort of an indistinct dark blob below my chin that might be a tattoo and might be a large, suggestive bruise. I remain thrilled with every part of this outcome.

Briefly appeared in an ad for a major lesbian dating app but don’t look it up, haha, nothing to see there, just take my word for it on this one

I am not a physically graceful person. When I played sports, I had speed, stamina, and general pesky persistence going for me, but nobody would have called my gameplay “beautiful” any more than they’d call a chihuahua with the zoomies “majestic.” I also don’t tend to learn complex movements easily from the kind of coaching where someone extremely skilled gives a vague overview of the motions, demonstrates at a level you can’t possibly replicate, and leaves you to figure it out. I got a B- in square dancing once. I know these things are not my strengths. So I didn’t go to queer gymnastics night expecting to dazzle the room with my elegance on the beam, or take to the uneven bars like a prodigy after a quick tutorial from some nice college kid who’s been doing this since she was three, or really look glamorous or sexy or dignified to anyone in any way I'd want documented or reproduced. But hell, I love a trampoline, and it was something to do on a weekend for less than $30.

I had to sign a few waivers, some standard life-and-limb liability stuff, some about filming and photography, all of which was fine by me, though I didn’t know what the film project was. The project was a promotional video for that one lesbian dating app (yes, that one). Something about organizing community events being one of the things you can do on the app, besides AOL Away Message-core aimless text posting and looking for Xanax? Anyway, I appear in it briefly. Which is kind of cool, I think! You definitely do not need to find it or watch it or learn anything more about it, though. Does not need to be viewed for this to be a good anecdote. Don't even look into it. It was a nice time, all in all. Afterwards, a bunch of us got drinks next door, and someone brought around a partially eaten sheet cake that was clearly left over from some kind of office or children’s party, I never found out what. I’m not even sure that person was from gymnastics. Of course I ate the cake.

Started playing the synthesizer

I’m not very good at it, but I’m having a lot of fun, and since it's all in my headphones my neighbors can't be mad at me!

Wrote several hundred sonnets

I do all my best writing on garbage. I appreciate the sensual pleasures of a premium notebook — love the good paper, love to see what you all are doing with those dot-grid layouts — but it’s not an environment where I can get much work done. It’s partly an economic thing; if I’m going to get a draft out, I need to feel free to write what-fuckin’-ever whether I’m sure it’ll work or not, and I can’t do that if I feel like I’m wasting something expensive. Mostly, though, it’s psychological. I write one dumb or weird thing on too pretty a page and I feel like I’m in trouble — or, much worse, I worry I’m getting a little affected and pretentious (this is stuff I have to let happen in drafts sometimes, even if I’ll edit it later) and suddenly, like, see myself, with my little pen, and my little fancy notebook, and think: man, look at this jackass.

By comparison, the cheapness and anonymity of a plain old marble-front composition book is tremendously freeing. For daily life and day job stuff, I go through a lot of Muji notebooks, which hit a good balance between being nice to look at and negligible to stock up on. Whenever I’m really in my stride in a draft, though, or onto something I’m genuinely interested in and surprised by, chances are I’m writing in some crappy school notebook I got for less than a dollar. Walgreens, for example, tends to overprice their stationery for what it is, but once in a while they’ll put their mini comp books on sale, and I’ll usually grab a few. They’re a satisfying little object, phone- or deck of cards-sized, and 80 card-sized sheets (so, 160 pages) hold more text than you’d think. Coincidentally, they also have 14 lines per page, which is the standard line count (and about the usual line length) for sonnets in English.

Before this spring, I hadn’t written many poems at all since late 2019, the last school year of my poetry MFA. I wasn’t particularly agonized about this; these things ebb and flow, and, anyway, a break had been coming for a while. By the end of that program, I felt like I’d reached the end of the style I’d been working in: I could have the beginning of an idea and see pretty much immediately how it was going to take shape, what beats it would hit and in what arrangement, and I knew I could fix that up into a poem that everyone in workshop would basically agree was working. That’s not to suggest that big MFA was flattening out my voice or whatever (although I think Garth Greenwell is right that the workshop structure can falsely suggest that art succeeds when the greatest number of people in workshop agree it’s working, and I’m sure I’m as susceptible to that pressure as anyone), only that I’d been going at those poems for a long time, and was getting used to my own tricks, and a little bored with them. It was, for the time being, a game I felt like I'd beaten.

Sometimes the answer to that kind of creative restlessness is to dig deep into the work, but sometimes the answer is to just go do something else for a while. I moved around the country, read novels, wrote articles, edited recaps, slung boxes, read poems, wrote fiction, walked around, journaled at length, survived various crises and natural disasters. I lived life. I assumed I would fall back into writing poetry at some point, but I didn’t know what it would look like when I did. Then, with no particular forethought, I opened one of those mini comp books and started writing in lines. It felt fun and interesting. I was using characters’ voices rather than my own, which opened up a kind of looseness and room for surprise. The internal structure of a sonnet is divisible in several different ways (the major traditions are an eight-line section plus a six-line section or three four-line sections plus a two-line sendoff, but people play around with this), and I enjoyed bouncing those turns off each other, or hitting a certain line number and wondering what kind of twist could come in here. I had found the new game.

I filled three 80-sheet notebooks and counting like that, just playing, exploring, seeing what could happen next. I don't know what I'm doing with all of it, but statistically, at least some of it has to be good.

Ate an entire crawfish boil in a hotel bed without getting any juice on the sheets

In retrospect, this may be one of those stories where the feat is less striking than the recklessness, but I pulled it off as far as I could tell, and I did check pretty thoroughly, both before bed and again in the morning. I was in Providence for no good reason, especially considering that it was February and the only shoes I’d packed had zero traction in snow and ice (what living in a city that no longer has winter will do to a distractible person). I’d checked into the room around six, intending to rest up a bit after a core-and-quads-heavy day of basically snowboarding around College Hill before going back out for dinner or drinks, but it was New England winter dark and the snow was getting heavy, and the longer I sat on the mattress, the longer the odds grew that I'd go outside again. Then, the finishing blow: Road House was on IFC, the surest sign possible that you’re having an evening in. I accepted fate and started browsing ChowNow — first for something regionally on-theme, but I'd been talking with a Mardi Gras-going friend about Louisiana crawfish boils and could think of nothing else. Ultimately, I followed my heart and ordered a giant industrial plastic bag of crawfish, corn, and heavy seasoning to the hotel lobby. I took it upstairs. I put down a towel. I had a great night. Road House is a perfect movie.

Poem: “Carly Rae Jepsen – E•mo•tion” by Hanif Abdurraqib

There is more than one way to cover a temple in platinum. Maybe we both long for an era when there were less things to record death. In the interview, they asked if you believe in love at first sight. You said I think I have to. You didn’t say we are all one hard storm away from dissolving, vanishing into the frenzied dusk. But I get it. I know what it is to walk into the mouth of an unfamiliar morning and feel everything. I touch hands with a stranger who gives me my change at the market, and I already know their history. I suppose this is survival. I will love those who no one else thinks to remember. This is all that is promised: there will be a decade you are born, and a decade that you will not make it out of alive. All of the rooftops where the parties were in the year of my becoming are now dust. No one dances so close to the sky anymore. I say I, too, am a romantic, and I mean I never expected to survive this long. I have infinite skin. I keep dry when the rain comes. There will always be another era of bright suits that don’t quite fit, but must. There will always be a year where the cameras are hungry for whatever sins we can strangle out of the night. There will always be another spoon for boys to lick the sugar from.

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I'm reading: Agents and Books | Anxiety Shark | Ask a Fuck Up | Bitches Gotta Eat | The Breakside | Bring Me Giants | Channel 6 | Craft Talk | Defector | The Ed’s Up | Garbage Day | Hell Gate | ¡Hola Papi! | Hung Up | Life Is a Sacred Text | The Lost Songs Project | Making It | The Melt | Ordinary Plots | Pome | Rax King | SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE | The Small Bow | Something New | Starting Out | To a Green Thought | Unsnackable | Walk It Off | Welcome to Hell World

Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.