The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

How can the words not be good enough?

What if where I am is what I need?

Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).

As if I did not know that, in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end—

Indeed, one of the gifts of genderqueer family making— and animal loving—is the revelation of caretaking as detachable from—and attachable to—any gender, any sentient being.

As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.

And so we go on, our bodies finding each other again and again, even as they—we—have also been right here, all along.

Radical intimacy, radical difference.

But because it makes the brutal tender, which I’ve since learned is one of your principal gifts.

But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.