On Distortion

Every doctor’s appointment
is a game.

[Two truths & a lie.] I lie
only as a backdoor

to treatment. To trick
my way past a kept gate.

▼

[SSI limits the maximum savings of each disabled
person to $2000. A threshold which, once passed,
cancels their state support.]

▼

Until the decade before
I was born, queerness was a lock
on gender’s door. Transition impossible
without proof—or deception—;

impossible unless a doctor believed
that you were straight.

▼

My love & I can’t pass
as anything
predictably.
Our genders—two coins spun
& flickering
[now faggots, now dykes,
next straight, next question marks
crooked into the curve of each other].

▼

Distortion means, literally,
a twisting out of shape.
Like vines, like steel, like a question.
My skin worn like a funhouse mirror.

▼

[For married couples in which both partners receive SSI benefits, the limit is just $3000. The Social Security Administration reserves the right to audit anyone receiving SSI and if a common law marriage is suspected, their benefits may be canceled or suspended.]

▼

When I call my love
husband, this is a distortion
of the truth. The truth is

I cannot name them this,
in public, without putting our futures
at risk. Without the risk of—

a verb can carry many meanings,
here, the verb deem means:
One of us will be assumed the other’s

keeper; one of us will be
assumed a burden, even if
we can’t carry each other alone.

▼

If I told the auditor that we aren’t married
would they believe me?
Or think this was another distortion?

▼

Imagine: the wedding band, a ring
of salt, soft & glimmering charm to banish
the checks that might keep us
fed & clothed.

▼
All I want is this:
to have & to hold, & to be
held by the world without
earning our place in it.
▼

& still, there are states that will refuse
to wed us.

Where we can’t kiss, or piss, or walk
hand-in-hand in peace.

▼

We sprawl across the bed, a song
blaring tinny through my phone’s

shitty speaker, distortion throttling
a sound wave’s impossible throat.

The singer screams, “I don’t want to be equal
’cause I know I’m fuckin’ better than you!”

I spin the wedding band chained
to my neck—reminder of a future
I can’t hold.

▼

They’ll make us decide
between love & survival.
But survival
just means to grow more diligent in the soft art
of touch in a sharp economy. To take each other
in sickness,
but not in wealth.

▼

Sometimes, I dream of our wedding day
& all this might cost us.

This dream—
our failed epithalamium.

Our love—
an anti-dowry.

Source: Poetry (November 2022)