In Praise of Not Standing for Anything

Puzzle boxes & lockets.

I like poetry! And extremely gay pulpits.

It was so fun to play some music & speak at Arlington Street Church’s Pride celebration! ASC has been a hub for Boston queer organizing for a long time - including the first queer prom & the first legal gay marriage in a church in the US - and it was thrilling to be in a room full of both first-time Pride-goers and folks who had been to 40+ Boston Prides. My talk hinged on a short excerpt from a gorgeous Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes poem, and I want to share a little about what I love about their work and some pointers to other poems of theirs… But first, some upcoming events & updates on recent (and not-so-recent by this point!) publications:

Picnics and other news & events!

Trans People’s Picnics are on for 7/6, 8/10, 9/7, and 10/12, 1-3pm on the Esplanade! Find us here:

Contact me for more info (or if the weather looks scary)!

Two other Boston things I’d love to see you at:

• The T4T reading series second Thursdays at Model Cafe in Allston has been just full of mind-bending, funny, moving stuff every time I go (and also you can often hear me at the open mic). The next is Thursday, July 11th.

• T4T organizer Calvin Gimpelevich, recent guest & author of the fabulous Girlfriends Emily Zhou, and Milo Todd are doing a panel on trans literary resistance at Grub Street on Wednesday, July 24th! Free in the Seaport. More info and RSVP.

And for people anywhere: my friends Heather Concannon and Allison Palm edited a book that just came out! Blessing It All is a book of rituals (that don’t assume any specific spiritual beliefs) for moments of change, from welcoming people out of prison / jail / detention, to blessing a temporary home after a disaster, to a planned hospital stay, to preparing for direct action. I’m a little in love with it: it’s currently living in my writing altar / tool kit next to enfleshed’s Sacred Incantations deck of rituals & reflections, Oliver Pickle’s She is Sitting in the Night (and a copy of Ruth West’s tarot deck that it enstories), and Shing Yin Khor’s Strange Beast Tarot. The magic these tools share is about shifting my attention - the tarot decks loosen it, and the rituals focus it. (I also use poetry to shift my attention, but not usually immediately before I want to write some!) I got to test-run a couple of the rituals in Blessing It All in real life while Heather and Allison were assembling them, and they’ve been lovely, but so far I’ve been using it the way I most often use the enfleshed rituals: as a source of rich prompts for writing & reflection, and as an entryway into big feelings.

Are you a trans woman / trans femme, have some way to make video art (like, say, a phone?), and want a good excuse to make some? Morgan Page (co-writer of Framing Agnes, host of trans history podcast One From the Vaults) is organizing a summer video postcard club (you make a little video art piece, send it along to another participant, and get one in return). Sign up by tomorrow, 6/28, make something by the end of July, and maybe you’ll get to see my piece, or vice versa!

Publications & Talks!

I have more to say about some of these (and the very cool work they’re published alongside!), but right now let’s just do the list thing:

• As of last week I have a couple of sonnets in Fruit Journal #7 - from a longer series about those loaded moments when you run into another trans woman in public, but, for one of seven thousand reasons, you don’t acknowledge each other. This one you can listen to me read! But really, check out the whole issue, full of deadly lines like “I am still alive and things might be improving,” and “I had simply been set on the right eye crying as many tears as the left,” and “placing queerness in a verby kinda way in resistance.” (Online.)

• “Zuihitsu-Cento of My Google Docs for Navigating Relationships” is a poem-in-spreadsheets (collaged, yes, out of my actual Google Docs for navigating relationships) that Fourteen Hills generously chose for this year’s Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, awarded to an inventive long poem. It’s out in Fourteen Hills #30. (Print, content note for relationship violence.)

• Star Trek was a gather-the-family-around-the-TV thing in my house growing up, but no episode has stuck with me since my teenagehood like “Darmok,” where our heroes run into aliens they need to talk to and the universal translator doesn’t seem to work. I won’t give away the schtick, it’s still worth seeing if you haven’t, but there’s a language featured in the episode that I kind of always wanted to flesh out into a fully usable constructed language you could speak with your nerd friends? I haven’t done that, but I have managed to publish a poem with a stanza in Tamarian, sort of: “Thirteen Ways I Might Misrepresent My Transfemininity to Suit a Heroic Narrative That Reassures Us Both,” out in manywor(l)ds #4. (Online.)

• I have a short poem in honor of Lou Sullivan, trans guy activist & historian, in Impossible Archetype #15: “In Which We Both Laughed in Pleasure Forgives You for Not Reading It Despite Sitting on Your Bedside Table Since June.” (Online.)

• There are two of mine in Fifth Wheel Press’s anthology Secrets in the Garden (check out the accompanying playlist!): a filial love poem “Do Nothing” and the oldest poem I’ve published, “The Burial of the Dead Has Been Postponed” - it’s not computationally-assisted itself, but I wrote its first draft as fodder for a custom language model in April of 2021. (Online.)

• And three in a journal with one of my favorite names, Troublemaker Firestarter #5: an aubade to self called “Before First Light I Prepare to Leave My Old Body as the Driver Tells Me What My Surgeon Likes in Cars (I Know Nothing About Cars),” an experimental piece from a simple hand-cranked pencil-and-paper language model (I picked words based on their frequency in a 2015 crawl of the public web, then formatted it to push it toward a hint of sense), “THEN DESIRE THE BATHYMETRIC ARMOUR OF SEATTLE,” and a short piece that emerged from studies of line breaks & spacing, “Last May I finally left after.” (Print, content note for relationship violence & organized transphobia.)

• The poetry world is both overwhelmingly full of cool stuff and wonderfully small and interwoven: manywor(l)ds editor Cavar generously awarded “Four Months to Coming Out Again” the 2023 Bennett Nieberg prize. Viewable online here. And in a neat coincidence, Elijah Guerra’s finalist poem for that prize — the earthy, delicate, sublimely morbid “Anatomy of a Deer in Decomposition” — is published alongside me in Fourteen Hills.

• For an extremely brief moment, I had a publishing acceptance rate of 100% (if you gloss over all the queries I sent to Dragon Magazine, Tor, & Del Rey as a kid…): the first proper poem I submitted to a proper journal was the sonnet in text messages “Sextet & Lieder,” published in x/y: a junk drawer of trans voices #2. (The format of this piece didn’t make things easy on my editors; there’s a duplicate text bubble in the printing that you can ignore. Print & online.)

• You can catch a slightly experimental sermon / poetry craft talk / Mary Oliver tribute that I gave at a few places this spring on YouTube.

• The Pride reflection I gave at Arlington Street Church is on YouTube as well. (But you really want to check out this video for the band!)

Check Out These Poems!

Speaking of that last talk, here’s the full version of the Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes poem "Life Cycle of Ephemeral Plants" that I quote: go check it out!!! (The journal it shows up in, Alocasia, is all queer plant poetry!!!)

So in school you might have been taught a thing that poems do: they use metaphors and similes to make one thing stand for something else. (Why anybody might want to do that I didn’t learn in school. I figured it was mostly to show off to get dates. (Which wasn’t totally wrong?)) You might have had to answer test questions about what something in a poem stood for. Maybe you took a very fancy class where you took very fancy tests about very fancy versions of one thing standing for another, like synecdoche or metalepsis or persona. (You will never need those words, don’t bother googling them.)

This a totally real thing — lots of poems (especially a bunch of heavily anthologized poems by long-dead people that facilitate teaching to curricular standards of what a metaphor is, but also some good ones), lean really hard into one thing standing for another, and put a lot of weight on the moment when the reader unravels the puzzle.

But actually… maybe… that’s kind of just language? Like, all language? When you really look at ordinary boring everyday functional speech, it is nothing but wall-to-wall metaphor. “I took the train this morning,” but I didn’t put any trains in my pocket. More than one physical train travels those tracks in a day, but I talk about “the train” like they were one thing. It’s a train because the word used to mean a line of people following each other (by metaphor to an important person’s long robe), and if you pretend train cars are people, that’s kind of what a train is like. “Morning” originally meant something more like Spanish madrugada, pre-sunrise, and that piece of the morning came to stand for everything before lunch. “Morning” comes from a root that meant twinkling, like stars just before sunrise in a place and a year where you could still see them, and the thing the sky was doing became a name for the time.¹ EVERY SINGLE WORD EVER is a bag of noises made by damp and slappy meat flaps, mostly the meat flaps we grew so we could eat, noises that if you do them one at a time in a first-grade classroom you get sent to the corner for telling poop jokes, noises that stand for something totally different.

When we read poems like they’re all metaphor puzzles we’re being challenged to decrypt, it’s easy to feel bad about ourselves when we don’t “know what they mean.” Or we feel like poems are bad when they don’t do a good job of giving us the right clues to “know what they mean.”

There can be satisfaction in cracking open a poem and it’s sometimes worth giving it a shot. But I find poetry much more rewarding if, for every minute I spend trying to crack open a poem, I spend four letting the poem crack me open.

In “Life Cycle of Ephemeral Plants,” flowers stand for queers. Got it. Poem solved.

But look at this moment of flourishing:

Say gay say gay say gay say gay. A proliferation.

The repetition brings to my mind a time-lapse movie of wildflowers sproing-ing out of the fields. Wait, is it actually queers that stand for flowers?

I think what’s happening here is not a puzzle where one thing stands for another. It’s more like a kind of double exposure, where you see two things at once and their overlap alters your perception of both. The flowers in this poem aren’t being used to send secret messages about queerness (or the other way around). Instead their merger with queerness for the duration of the poem changes the meaning of flowers for us. The little frisson of rooting-for that you feel when you spot a green shoot poking out of the dirt and the little frisson of rooting-for that you feel when you spot gay hand-holding in the suburbs: in the heat of this poem, they melt into each other. Our experience dealing with the looming threat of winter in November becomes a source of courage for dealing with this November. Instead of being a puzzle box that hides a treasure from us, the poem makes a locket of the world around us, imbuing objects and experiences we might run into later with little tokens of love and strength.

This double exposure, the unfocusing of the eyes that it requires, can be a way into poems that stack even more layers on top of one another. It’s frustrating to try to turn a poem like Wo Chan’s delicious sonnet “the smiley barista remembers my name,” that ping-pongs between an expensive sandwich and a magical door of forgiveness and Midori Ito underwear and the politics of cultured cheese, into just one unlocked box. To get a peek at the magic eye image, we have to relax our grip and let everything seep into everything else.

A bunch of Rhodes’ poems that I love use this doubleness to unhook words and concepts from their most common meanings and draw out deeper ones. “Til the Taste of Free in Our Mouths (Brown Baby Lullaby)” overlays the violence of traditional children’s songs & games onto the fight for racial justice, challenging the dominant idea that safety and care mean separation from a dangerous world and arguing that bringing one another into shared struggle is nurturing and protective. “across the river” and “the dream (the bed)” superimpose chronic illness and the language of adventure stories & love letters, and then superimpose it with resistance to empire, drawing out connections to history and community in experiences that are often spoken about as if they’re cut off from the world, only about a misbehaving body, necessarily solitary. “pitter / patter” merges queer & racialized solidarity with child-rearing, deepening the family in chosen family, and also calling to the world-repair that parenting can do.

You don’t have to mean just one thing. Neither do the poems you read or write.

~Callie

1. For clarity’s sake, I’m pretending that these etymologies are something anybody can know for sure, and also that I’m qualified to say anything about etymology. Neither of those things are true, and almost surely some of these stories about where words come from are wrong. But we can observe that metaphors are all up in language’s business without knowing for sure which metaphor caused a particular coinage.