Ponyboy

by Eliot Duncan

I feel Dora this morning not Freud’s question mark closed parenthetical but my Dora my own scowl. See? I don’t hate people, I hate the politically allocated fictions that suffocate. I’m not a woman. I’m not American, but hear me talk about Iowa. I am not bipolar or chronically depressed, but feel the plastic conversation of state-issued pills in my pocket. I’m not, and that’s how Romanticism started, Blake and Sidney lying around and writing poems with their cocks. Bodies do write poems. I’ve written them myself. The “I am not this” of Romanticism is not so powerful a premise. It’s blank.

I do not choose to dwell in thresholds. I walk in and out and back and through and over and wide-stepped or crawling: I do move. My legs cross as my anchor, my pulse reading the ancient clenches that made poetry.

want to extinguish my own life. I’m vacant except for my need to end what has already expired: my living. But tonight. This wobbly morning: look, I’m erect in emptiness, face to the falsetto pastel of this very 05:58 sky. I look at the vial of blow and feel my body go, Yes. I take another smoke.

read myself as femmeboy, gender fuck, man in a dress.

I like you in a dress. I don’t speak. I drink deep. I close my eyes. I hear him order me another.

The photographer asked how I could consider myself trans. You’re equally invisible to me, I thought, smiling. I caught my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. My face lined with the living I chose.

No one but myself to know, to answer to. What an idiotic luxury, for the world to think of you as a person with things to say.

My intake is getting wider, more profound. There’s little space for anything else.

I don’t know the markings of our time because I’m still working my way back to utero, particle by particle. I want to go back and be called my name. I want to go back and then back out as a me people can see.

Gasped back into life, I woke in the hospital. I tried to reach Baby with my voice. I could smell her, lavender and paint. I wanted to sink my entire living into her, to show her the crux of me, of us, of how good I could be for her, how unlike myself I wanted to be.

Well done, sweetheart, you didn’t die. He hugged me.

Baby squeezed my hand. Dad looked kind of scared. The stillness of the room hurt. Can you turn off the lights? I asked, looking at the IV in my hand. My body felt weak; my head, empty. The shame was too big for voice. Still, I tried blinking back into life: I’m sorry.

I ignore her but am nervous too, particularly at the counter, the cashier scanning me a second too long. People think I’m one thing, then another and then the third thing they think I am confuses them and could mean I die. Years ago, Mom and I went to the grocery store and she told me she felt like she needed to protect me, with my shaved head. I wonder if that protection has postured into a fear too big to speak of.

I think about how this American grid urban planning is oppressive. Every walk is straight left right left right. How can my mind wander into anything at all here? There is no space for a lingering gaze, no park lawn to share beauty, joy and light.

I find out gay rehab doesn’t take my insurance. The insurance stranger tells me that it would only be covered if I was previously rejected from a treatment center for being transgendered. You don’t need to put me in the past tense, I think, I’m right here.

I imagine how hard it must have been, to be so young and so honest. To know you have a problem at eighteen and to do something about it.

I’m happy for the scars, ya know? They’re honest. I nod and look at the grimy pool. I say, Maybe my scars will be my favorite lines. Exactly, he replies. I nod, tearing up as I finish my cig, looking at the table and thinking, “Werde der du bist,” with my whole body.

Do you believe in afterlives? Reaching to the table for another cig, I smile. Isn’t this life, after?

In the meeting this morning, he wanted me to know I’m braver than he is because I’m not scared to be myself. I said thank you but didn’t feel brave, I just felt unhidden.

I was trans before I really knew it, but look, those things that happened to me don’t have anything to do with my gender or my sexuality. They were violent crimes. Attaching it to my gender assumes that those men marked me irredeemably, you’re giving them all the power, but I’m the one sitting across from you.

I’m glad to be in the world of the living. It’s hard here, but it’s different than oblivion. It’s all slower now, but I’m slower too. I wait and look and see. I don’t miss the world around me, the oozy sunset light or the sly grace of a good joke or the blank freedom of time or the way a song smells as it blooms from the other room.

I eyed the confessionals. I thought the priest might be so repressed that he needed to repress others to validate his own repression. Then I thought I could be totally wrong. The cape he wore was creamy and golden. His outfit is pretty, I whispered to Mom, watching the gown move behind him and catch light as he walked to the altar. Mom wanted me to take Communion. I said no, but I followed her to the altar. I laughed to myself, a relapse from Communion wine in a chalice before God. When it was my turn, I crossed my arms over my chest and someone in white gloves blessed me.

Unnamable sky. Oceans of corn, of soybeans. We liked the expanse, I know. We liked the quiet, wide roads. But we had to learn that there’s punishment here. There’s a tingling anxiety, the consequence of our chosen breath.

I never met you, Brandon. But your life lingers like a fiery exponent, always in my peripheral, illuminating new shapes of myself. I learn, with you, that my wingspan is greater than the threat of death.

I close my eyes and think about being a girl people called hot. If I hated myself enough privately, I could be admired publicly.

This is where I stand up inside myself. Dad and Juliette and June fall away and I’m left facing the boy of me. I take him by the hand. We laugh at my stupid fucking skirt.

The dress Mom chose makes me want to die in a slow, pixelated eruption. Out of context, I feel none of my girl/boy whimsy. I feel stupid for not wearing the suit.

there’s nothing that means more love than page and hand each line for sentence is liminal horizon I weep with

To my dad for showing me the shapes of the world not as nebulous and scary but as a joke to tell, a bad dance move to make, a reason to love.

To every trans person here and now, and all those before.