Collapsing Toward Memory

Reconstructions, by Bradley Trumpfheller
Sibling Rivalry Press, $12.00

In his book How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch argues that “a certain kind of exemplary poem teaches you how to read it. It carries its own encoded instructions, enacting its subject, pointing to its own operation.” Poems are not unique—but perhaps are uniquely gifted—in their capacity to imagine new worlds. Each poem can become a location in the mind, a culture of thoughts with their own unique rules and customs.

Bradley Trumpfheller’s Reconstructions is a project obsessed with the capacity of imagination, with culture, and with—as the title suggests—remaking the world. It imagines a radical queer utopian South colliding with the complicated real-world history and material reality of existing there. At the same time, Trumpfheller challenges un-nuanced political notions about the contemporary South, troubling the conception that these states are not also home to vibrant, intergenerational queer communities. They know the adjacency that beauty can hold to violence, how it is impossible to reconstruct this landscape without showing the reader both its “nightjars & nightsticks.”

From the frontispiece, “Do you kiss your boyfriend with those verbs,” to the very last poem, Reconstructions is a book that instructs the reader, inviting them into the world of its lush idiolect and unconventional grammars. In this regard, the frontispiece acts as a cipher, a key to the language and physicality of the collection. If each poem in Reconstructions can be imagined as a landmark within Trumpfheller’s queered revision of the American South, then “Do you kiss your boyfriend with those verbs” is the sight of two lovers glanced necking in a truck cab beneath the welcome sign on the edge of town.

In this poem, “moons moon,” an arched back becomes a “snap bracelet shuddering,” and you must “never say heaven unless you mean the past//tense of to heave.” Language is treated with both playfulness and reverence in equal measure, like a pocketknife spun in the palm. Speech is centered as the site of lineage, (trans)gender, and the friction between the two. If a poem is capable of remaking the world then we too can remake ourselves, as the speaker announces to an ex-lover, “This time, I’ll be a girl & you can be anything/alive.”

The lexicon of Reconstructions is remarkably tender without ever becoming twee. It brims with small and sudden softnesses. In one poem, the subject is addressed, “You big good oak limb. I’m in such cute like w/ you today,” and later, apropos of nothing, the speaker announces, “I rediscovered kissing foreheads & it is so yes again.” These poems revel in minute joys, the wonder of living in a world where “Time is//so time” and a “zipper taste[s] like a zipper.”

There is a deceptive frankness to Trumpfheller’s voice, which engenders a deep sense of trust, no matter how many times their narratives double back in on themselves. This allows them to contradict, correct, and reimagine themselves in the span of a breath. How one poem can enter its narrative “there’s the night/I put on my lover’s dress & it fit me like a renaissance,” but end:

                                       I learned speech first
as distance, second as costume jewelry. I don’t have

a lover. Any poem I wear anything gorgeous out of
is a lie. Who would remember me myself otherwise?
—From Spectacular, Spectacular

Trumpfheller is incredibly adept at applying this particular torque to their poems, most notably within the titular, recurring sequences “from Reconstructions.” These fragments shimmer tenuously between reality and a utopian imagination, joy and fear existing only a line break apart. They invite the reader to exist with them in the mess of this space, to “picture this:/downriver a man guns/his truck. everything smells like wings.” There is danger in the line hinging upon “gun,” something gorgeous but terrible in the scent of wings.

In the next line, though, Trumpfheller instructs us “now one morn- ing picture him & he’s/wearing skirts like stunted light. no, less.” There is both divinity and eroticism in this queering of gender. The violence of a performed masculinity replaced by—quite literally—naked vulnerability. But the transformative imagination is only ever temporary. It flickers bright and is gone. Later in the poem, Trumpfheller writes, “in the town my grandmothers are buried under/the collective noun for faggots is also a murder.” This line arrives like a bolt of lightning—brilliant, awful, and absolute. There is a remarkable ease with which the poems in Reconstructions arc between these spaces, immerse the reader in a memory flush with softness, then crack it open. They are the kind of poems that will pass you a salt shaker and say that it’s sugar. A different poet might end on this devastating line, but Trumpfheller continues, questioning the nature of memory and their body’s relationship to desire. Violence exists tangibly in these poems, but it is also just another part of the landscape.

In acknowledging these dichotomies, Reconstructions refuses the reductive understanding of the South commonly invoked in current political discourse. It pushes back on the way the South is framed as fundamentally opposed to queerness, erasing those who call it home. In the poem “Asphyxia,” Trumpfheller recounts how:

                                 According to my uncle, the word redneck comes
from coal miners in West Virginia who wore blood-red handkerchiefs
around their collars when they shot cops for the right to unionize.
When I say this to the man making an exit of me at the club, he asks
why I care about people who want me dead.

It’s to this statement that they trace their lineage, both familial and political. These are not just a people, rather, they are Trumpfheller’s people, and when they are bigoted they are not unique in their bigotry. Indeed, Trumpfheller takes care to remind us that the history of US violence is not uniquely Southern. America as a nation does not exist guiltlessly, “there was never a landscape until it was stolen & written//into song.”

Later in “Asphyxia,” Trumpfheller asks the man—and by extension the reader—to show them “the place no one wants me dead.” The abuse of queer people & trans people in America is omnipresent, and comes at the hands of civilians, but more so by the police and the state. If, in the wake of this violence, the project of Reconstructions is to imagine a queer utopia in the South, then it must be one where these histories are not ignored or erased, but rewritten entirely. They encapsulate this sentiment best in the poem “Monument”:

I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying
to write a history of us
without writing a history of us
being harmed.

Forefronted here is the labor of this writing, the way such a project fails us, as well as the distance between one “us” and another, both of which Trumpfheller inhabits. Despite the clarity with which they shape the utopian world of Reconstructions, despite all the joy and wonder comprised in these poems, they do not wish for the reader to be seduced by the imagined ease of such a notion. These poems are as much about the limitations of this imagination as they are about the utopia itself.

This is why the poems loop in on themselves, collapsing toward memory. The world Trumpfheller wants us to join them in constructing is not, can not, be any world but our own. This is why, even as they build a haven within their poems, they impel us:

Do not mistake me—
                          there are worlds where all of this is true
             & we still do not survive.
—From Reconstructions