"Simple hands"
I never said no, not once, not that I can remember, anyway, which is funny (by which I mean not funny) because one of the things I find most upsetting is listening to people in movies or on TV beg, say no no no please no. I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between poetry and prose. If this was a poem this would be the place where I let myself fall through the cracks between one thought and the next, taking each impact squarely so that when I landed I could show you the bruises and say, here, see, feel the way I feel. Live in my bones, my blood, feel the shape I’m in and the world that made it so. Triangulate my contusions. But because it is prose I must leap from one floating fragment of loose sidewalk to the next, landing on my feet or at least my knees, to show the way. Either you are reading this and thinking, so what, lots of people don’t say no, or you are reading it and thinking he never told me that before, or I can’t read your mind. You could be thinking anything. Anyway, this isn’t a poem.
I’ve read a lot of poetry lately, some good, some bad; Brendan Joyce’s collection Character Limit was good. Leila Chatti’s collection Deluge was good. Abi Palmer’s maybe-collection Sanatorium was good. Maryse Meijer’s maybe-collection Northwood was good. I don’t talk about most of the books I don’t think are good for a few reasons. One of them is that whenever someone else disparages something I like as if their opinion is objective fact, I feel small and stupid for liking it at all, and I don’t want to make anyone else feel that way, because I think that for the most part liking things is objectively good and makes the world a better place. Another is that I don’t want to make an ass of myself, like if I say that something is bad and it’s objectively good, or if I disparage it in a way that makes you think I’m a pretentious prick or a tasteless ignoramus, that thought also makes me feel small and stupid sometimes. I used to not care about that kind of thing, which I think made me both a better and a worse person. I still enjoy talking about the ways that something is bad if it’s maliciously or avoidably so. (Largely this applies to transphobic op-eds written and edited by cis people.) I prefer to like things, though, because it is easier for me to be disparaging than it is to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known through my preferences: I am twelve and my father has spent the last seven years making fun of me for liking my pre-K teacher. I am fifteen and my father takes the books I bring home from the school library and throws them in the recycling. I am twenty and I don’t introduce my friends to my family anymore because my father doesn’t like anybody with the bad taste to like me. Wanting, I learn, is fruitless. Tantalus reaches for the grapes and watches them wither on the vine.
My feelings have always been so immense that I find them a little frightening. More often than not, this has been a liability rather than an advantage. I have died on so many hills that, if you wanted, you could build a new Rome on them. This is why I like poetry, glossolalia on the page, the language of gods and teenagers who are newly aware of the ways that their feelings have outgrown their bodies (which is to say gods). This is why I write, to bleed off the excess, to leave it drying on the page. To get it out of the back of my throat, where it rises like salt. Here’s a joke. A man goes to his therapist and says, my heart, it’s like a fucking rabbit, it bolts at the first sign of danger, and the rest of me isn’t doing so great either, see how I’m trembling, like a rabbit’s ribcage. He says, I’ve got this space inside of me that fills up with blood and it just keeps on filling and filling until I can hear it roaring in my ears. He says, Do you have more tissues? The joke is that he does this every week and he isn’t dead yet. The joke is that for years I loved jokes about how there’s nothing tougher than something that bleeds for a week out of every month and doesn’t die. The joke is that I haven’t bled like that for almost a year and so now all I have left is the metaphor.
Once a week I sit with my therapist for an hour and this week she asked me a question that made me remember a time when all I could think was no no no please no, which made me think about other times I might have thought that, so now I am here drawing myself a map. They say if you want to understand someone you should put yourself in their shoes. They say that understanding can lead to forgiveness. I stand over my own body, limp as a stunned bird, and I just get angrier. I stand over my own body knowing what I didn’t say, and smoke starts to rise from my throat. I stand over my own body and watch myself try to crawl away, and I understand that sometimes forgiveness isn’t and shouldn’t be possible. Blood is thicker than water, by which some mean that family is more important than anything else — I am twelve and fifteen and twenty and my father tells me that family is all I have, the only people who will always be there for me — and by which some mean that those we choose are more important than those we are born to, but what I mean is that a year and a half ago a stranger told me that it doesn’t have to be a bad thing that I can’t change the past, that I keep stepping on cracks, that I can’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth. Your wounds are your history, she said, and this still isn’t a poem, but that’s some lyric shit if I’ve ever seen it.
—R.