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I Kind of Have to Disappear to Become My Vagina

by Elizabeth Mikesch

I don’t know what a Litmus test is, so I’ll blurt it out. The things is that it does two things. It sucks, and it spits. If you try to stick even a pinky in it, which would horrify me, a part that makes me sore would stick out a bit for you. Buy me ice cream cones from within your car for my trouble because it really fucking hurts and it’s mostly your thing.

You’ll hear teeth crack the cone. It’ll spritz. You’ll never not see me bleeding in the front seat on your palm.

Could I forgive you if you could make me do one part of what it is I do, which is to disappear? I kind of have to disappear to become my vagina, and that is what will bring us together out of basements, Buicks, motels to someplace better than whatever we’ve bought not looking for what’s after or what we had a little of before easing into the parade. 

The recoil, My Land!

It’s just tinier and has cricks that inflate, and it softly ruins parties. 

I’ll have to lock myself away from even myself. It will be remarkably medical again. Each person has gone mentally ill from still feeling the clutch. Such burdens I lug. The grouping of them thank me with a thank you card. 

All of us get into wheelchairs in a terrible chain or train, whichever, and open our gowns. We eat tapioca with stevia. When you come down, you can gurgle the wet glue.

We’re fucked!

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Review of Stephen Burt’s ALL-SEASON STEPHANIE

by Callum Angus

Somewhere out there is a version of myself who avoided the difficult conversations that surround coming out to friends and family as a trans man. She’ll never build up a tolerance for needles through weekly hormone injections. But she might give birth and be a mother, and out of that she’ll sculpt some new way of being a woman that I hadn’t thought of before.

Stephen Burt’s persona poems in her new chapbook All-Season Stephanie are the first I’ve read that address this double-self of the trans person with the extended attention it deserves. Burt is one of the few high-profile people living, in her own words, a “two-gendered life”: she openly refers to herself using both male and female pronouns while teaching English at Harvard, writing books of poetry, writing criticism for The New Yorker, and raising a family. (Per Burt’s request of this author, female pronouns have been used throughout. Her written work appears under Stephen Burt.)

Stephanie is imagined by Burt as the girl she never got to be, and each poem from All-Season Stephanie is a meditation or scene from childhood through adolescence. But Burt goes beyond a simple reimagining; she uses this collection to allow her alter ego her own identity crises. In the poem “School Day Stephanie” Burt writes:

I don’t want my mommy; I want to be a mommy, to pretend to be a mommy and to fail

In these lines and throughout all of these poems it’s vital to Burt that Stephanie does not manifest as a fully-formed, confident Judy Blume character. Stephanie has her own conflicts about gender and as she grows up over the course of the chapbook these grow more complex in a familiar confrontation between the desired other and the self we desire to be, like the poem “Skylight Stephanie” where she “can’t figure out if I want/ to conceal myself, or display myself, or display/ myself as somebody else, or/ both”. Every poem is another version of Stephanie as she grows into teenagerdom, and it’s refreshing to see a young alter ego given so much leeway by her creator to explore her own gender and identity.

Other poems depict memories like learning to swim, playing board games on snow days, stealing cucumber lipgloss from the CVS—they inject light-hearted fun into what is, after all, an imagined childhood. But there are flashes of sorrow, especially when Stephanie’s own adult self begins to crystallize. In “Funeral Stephanie” she confronts death for the first time and realizes with a shock that “I was used to believing in more than one of me”. We’re left with the uncanny sensation of a switcheroo—that perhaps Stephen Burt is one of these imagined Stephanies that floated off to forge a different, wildly successful, future.  

In a coda to the book, Burt describes these poems as coming from “a girl who is both me and not me: they come from the life, or lives, that I could have lived, had I been born and raised and grown up a girl.” For many reasons, most of us live realities where it is not possible to live as more than one gender at once. In lieu of that, Burt has given us All-Season Stephanie: a radical permission slip for us to feel the loss of one kind of gendered life, and a reminder of the beauty to be found in inhabiting and reclaiming that identity anyway.

Purchase All-Season Stephanie here.

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from The Plot (Poems)

by Ben Roylance 

6

And it’s all in there? The eleven-temple swelling, From square to circle again. Ghostberry, redroot, angel-axe, Alive to see the list bend back. My new tutor is hardly unreliable. And that’s the story of lucky. He struck gold then we cut him out. You aren’t feeling sorry are you?

12

Did you even smile? It’s been a military Christmas, I admit. Let’s call it a lesson in civil ufology. I grip a leathern cup behind my back. When I tilt it toward the lecturing moon, Your mood crispens to a yellow coal. A stomach is a good indication, Though I can’t control instinct. Visitors at this hour? 15 I’m to believe we were left unchanged? Now the flicked-open sun says Its first words and they are big ones. My detective was a happy young man. Beams like poles of eve corner him. Hydrodesulfurizing, twin mercuries. Mistakes studied to ready ends, We’ll reclaim tonight noon’s plot. What did you say I buried there?

16

Can we interpret the marks? A man in black is named by the hour. The next portion will be horror. Had it only been hunger. It was after all a form of kiss. No one enters the mouth alone. Steam distorted by sun, I ask for that dollar again. May I have that dollar?

21

Will you lower me into my plot? I have never been so accustomed. Unlicensed initiation is just fine. The other Ben is gone. We hadn’t planned far enough ahead. At the end of a dark alley, without fog. Hundreds, each unable to settle, Lifted from the earth as if lifelike. But were you lifelike at all?

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Two Poems

by Margaret K. Foley

Whiskey Baths

The elephant in my ribs is named Harold and he is sweet He tells me stories, and tucks me in under blankets, he is sensible, and sensitive, and still a little rough around the lungs, But Harold, stuck between my ribs, is sweet and drunk on the breath of God And Harold is big, and friends with my father, and proper and a traitor to no one and he tells me I hurt him with my true stories, but I have to.

Periscope Sometimes, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington help me travel through time. They return me to when, as I was only a child, you were not a monster. Rubber-coated vice grips of digging it pick me up safely by the shoulders and place me in soft sunny Sundays spent in the blue City, a sober expressway, a wandering cloud, hovering above happiness. I want to call you, desperately.

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Four Short Poems That Depend On Having Hands

by Nick Maione

PASTIME 

The woman in an orange apron ferries wine bottles down the street against her chest, and lets out only a light sigh when the broken moment tries to cut her. My next breath is not my best but no one will ever love at all if it isn't okay doing one thing too many all the time pretty well. CAREFUL WHAT YOU'RE GOOD AT 

For instance this rock climber. The thing is, you could do that too but then you would have to have the kind of hands that could do that as your hands. LESSON ON POLLINATION 

One child can't help calling out his own important fact: my brover was thtung by a bee on hith butt And the children exaggerate their laughter as they lean and reach for one another  WE ANNOUNCE 

Flames compared to flames in the sunlight. Sweet from applewood, or burning plastic. To each his lonesomeness. I have a friend who feels that as her hands.

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THIS SUNDAY!!! 

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The Ambassador

by Jane Dykema

The ambassador has veneers and a lawn full of guests. He’s tired. Tonight, he lets his deputy, whose tone is too grateful, address the visitors, whose eyes search for circling trays of wine. The guests and the ambassador make a show of honoring and being honored. They take turns clapping for each other. They mess up the timing and clap for themselves. The ambassador knows he is his country’s trophy wife, one of thousands. He knows he’s dull, that his dullness got him the job; categorically, ambassadors ought to be dull. He’s good at it, and he used to feel good about being good at it. To put people at ease is a skill. His own wife, the wife of the wife of the country, a satellite of a satellite,has aged much more rapidly than he, but it’s not her job to be beautiful and dull, it’s his. She stands behind the wine tray carriers. Tonight, the ambassador is mad about Twitter. His vice president’s son has died of cancer, and though the ambassador is 3,562 miles away, not on the A-team, he feels the loss acutely. It feels bad to care more than you’re cared for. A futile energy building inside him, the ambassador has been up two nights and a day reading the biography of John Adams. The biography details Adams’ friendship, estrangement, and gradual reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson, a reconciliation born through long letters exchanged over the death of a son. The ambassador looks up when he thinks about it, two men writing long letters. He looks for the same sky they saw. The New York Times posted tweets, responses to the death of the vice president’s son from around the world. It was bad timing for the ambassador to read the biography and then read the tweets. Each tweet weakens the way great men ought to mourn their sons, like swords in the back of a bull. Twitter will turn letters into horses. “You can ride a horse today,” the ambassador tells a guest urgently, “but you don’t have to.” The guests admire the lawn, pet the ambassador’s dog, squint in the low, dreamy sun. Leaves click together in a light breeze. Slowly, the line of guests sighs out through the gates. The ambassador flashes his teeth, thanking them, thanking them.

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The new Industrial Lunch is here, featuring a host of UMass alums and other glorious junk. Get yours today! 

INDUSTRIAL LUNCH NO. 4 IS HERE!

BEAUTY | POETRY | PROBLEMS | A SECOND YEAR OF GLORIOUS JUNK

GET YOURS BEFORE ANYONE ELSE EVEN HAS THE OPPORTUNITY (NOW)

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Valley folks! Check out recent MFA grads/superstars Jon Ruseski and Christopher Lott this Thursday in Florence.

More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1580989725482679/

Come send Wall of Ears good vibes before they begin a three-week interstate tour!

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My poem “The Song of the Terrible Fire” appears in the new issue of TINGE, alongside some other great pieces! 

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During my eighth-grade year, my CCD class prepared us for confirmation, the last of three sacraments of initiation. This would seal our commitment to the Catholic Church, mark our full participation as adults in the communion of saints, and bestow upon us the gifts of the Holy Spirit. An abbot anointed our foreheads with a holy oil called Chrism, which yes does sound like jism (especially if you are twelve), and which we whispered was cut with Crisco. This oil was also at the same time the Holy Spirit itself: both fully vegetable shortening and the flame of belief. But this is just the stuff of Catholicism. We were long accustomed to the duality of everyday objects.

Both/And: Finding Grace in Flannery O'Connor | Brooklyn Magazine

Excited that starting this week I’ll be contributing regularly to Brooklyn Magazine on the subject of books ‘n’ things. Here’s my first piece, an essay on CATHOLICISM and LITERATURE.

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JoAnna Novak reviews Dark Green in Diagram 15.2

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THIS IS TODAY

THIS IS ON FRIDAY

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UMass ULearn by Jono Tosch.

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Six Paintings by Ernest Williamson III

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F I N .

thanks to everyone who followed the nervous system this year. 

i’ve got some new comics and projects in the works for the summer and beyond (!) so please come say hi : www.colleenlouisebarry.com

lots of weird love,

c l b