Also, I’ve Slept in the Backyard for the Last Five Weeks

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. TC Tolbert’s poems “T” and “My Melissa,” appear in the May 2020 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

From the porch, above the noise of the fan on high, I hear a swarm of bees in and around the mesquite tree next door. If there is a word for being absolutely permeated by equal parts wonder and fear, I do not know it. But that doesn’t constrain the experience. It’s not yet May but today in Tucson we are reminded of that particular pinnacle of breathing in 100 degrees. I feel protective of the swarm while also certain that it (the group functioning as a single entity, or even just a few members of the group, should they break off) has the capacity to kill me in less time than it would take for me to get back inside. But I’m not going anywhere. The sound of all these bodies moving as one body is loud enough to arrive inside my own skin as a kind of kindness—a threat, first, then the possibility of decency—everything I know about touch. 

In ways both unique and entirely common, being alive during this pandemic is re-iterating me. I’m simultaneously surprised, and not, by what I repeat and what I attempt that is new: the subtle introductions, the sudden ones; trying to recognize what is still with us, even as it is leaving; horizons of unresolved grief; words I’ve just learned that already feel old; integrations we never consented to.

Last Thursday I finished building a DIY flagstone patio. I’d been stacking up flagstone bits for years from give-away piles across town. When Nanaw (my eighty-one-year-old grandmother) entered the hospital on April 2 with stroke symptoms, pneumonia, and a collapsed lung, I took a pickax to the backyard around the shed. Yard is a strong word. I live in the Sonoran desert. The ground doesn’t give easily here. I wouldn’t call it soil, and it’s considerably more hard-packed than what I know of dirt. The pain and lack of control over anything and everything—our entire family being cut off from Nanaw, four deaths in the last month by suicide in my friend groups, the realization that my teaching job will soon be cut, watching the COVID-19 death tolls rise while the president spends another briefing gaslighting the nation—it’s more than I know how to feel. I’ve been scrolling a lot and building patios. This was actually my second one in a month. 

People often compliment me for this kind of activity, and I appreciate their thoughtfulness. But I’ve learned recently that this is nothing more than a trauma response—flight, which sounds so much more lovely than its impetus—moving quickly from trigger or terror to work. I’m one of millions. From what I can tell, long before this pandemic, we were a nation beset with complex PTSD, turning to workaholism to cope with chronic ethical abandonment by those in power. How safe capitalism must feel here, where so many of us think we’re fighters. (Po biz may have arrived later to the party but now it’s dancing to the same music, drinking from the same red SOLO cups.) Writing this essay, these are the first two days I’ve been quiet with myself. And then, suddenly, I see my reflection in the mass fear of feeling (powerless)—protesting to go back to work. 

—

I’ve been writing poems for the last four years or so to the person I was—or the person I think I was, the person I am certain I only partially remember—before I started testosterone. Her name was Melissa, which means my name, also, used to be Melissa. During childhood, I was Missy and, to this day, to Nanaw and Papaw I am Missy Moe. When I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2001, I was given the trail name TigerCakes. I didn’t understand it as one of many gender transition choices at the time, but I wouldn’t return to being Melissa again. From TigerCakes grew TC. Years later, it took a judge and $200 to embed Melissa in the middle of my name and make TC the official first. I understood I could remove Melissa and/or my other middle name, Dawn. But I decided to keep them both. 

Last week, after Poetry tweeted a glance at the table of contents for the May issue, Colette Arrand asked me if “My Melissa,” was part of a series of letters to myself. Inside what sounds like an almost technical question lies this: how does this poem relate to (including but not limited to pushing off from or against) what is in its orbit? This is the generous (and generative) nature of a genuine inquiry. Who is the reader this poem needs to exist? 

Because my poems are always light years ahead of me, it was only when Colette asked this question that I began to understand how the shift from address (“Dear Melissa”) to possessive (“My Melissa”) indicated a shift in who Melissa is to me now. Quite simply, she’s no longer external to my understanding of myself. I don’t need Melissa to exist only in past tense, as someone I write to and can never reach, for TC also to fully exist. “T” is the other poem in this issue. In trans discourse, testosterone, which I inject once a week and have for over a decade, is shortened to T. It is a strange and lucky ritual, making tiny holes in my thigh in which to pour light and breath. Both of these poems were, I see now, a practice of writing alongside and with Melissa, experimenting with how it felt to love our body, to let it take up space, to celebrate our capaciousness while tracing the contours of our existence at every scale, every rupture, every seam.