Theory
Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.
—Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble”
Yes they chased me Yes it was spring It was spring It was spring
It was spring all day and night All the trees leaning
into light their fuzzy buds and calyxes The grass greener
than whatever’s greenest The daffodils
yellow and yellow and yellow and cream
This telling will be different I swear from when I was 18 and described
the perfect springiness of the grass
under my high tops Fuck the lyric mountains and the air
I had just turned ten We were playing capture the flag
when the boys in my class and their older brothers turned
In the mock Olympic games I’d won javelin shot put and wrestling
Came second in long jump but that didn’t matter now
They chased me I fled past the echoing concrete
of the pavilion past barrel trash cans fizzing with flies
past the short field over the edge of Ragged Mountain
That’s the real name of it I say the real names of things
when I know them Maybe somebody said a name then
Maybe to Ethan lithe as a deer Ethan my friend
who’d given me a folding knife for my birthday smiling quietly
Or otherwise their blood moved them like magnets like swallows
or certain bugs that hang together like nets fly like they’re woven
together Maybe someone said “dyke” or “goy”
their names for me A boy who had just started shaving gave a whistle
gestured with his arm My body pressed against the mountain’s
steepness They are so high above me
I can see the soles of their shoes when they lift them up to kick
dirt and leaves in my face Zigzag swoosh honeycomb
head of a fanged roaring wildcat They stone me stone stone stone
stonestone When I wrote of this before I focused on the rocks
gave their scientific names suggested I was becoming one
Naming things feels good cataloging has great colonial power
and so distracting A way of looking away
They threw and threw All the roly-polys
from under the rocks revealed and scurrying
No one came No one stopped them They stopped maybe
because they got bored At first they got farther away as they threw
Someone heel-dragged a line in the grass and they stood
behind it Humans in a field Men in the man-made ground
keeping at bay below the treeline’s dark dangling edge
something else Something not made like them
or unmade abject and profane I heard a sound from my body
like a growl heat poured off my head I felt my personness
evaporating as the boys laughed upright in the mown field
I bellied up with millipedes snails
last year’s leaves rotting and skeletal
The body lost human speech then But somewhere someone
was writing I know that now at a desk in a cool room
shining-haired You can’t see them now you in the bloody torn jeans
covered with mountain-stuff but you will They are
explaining it That these boys Ethan
Noah Shawn big blonde Jeff who once picked you up and
stuffed your whole body in a trash barrel
in a week’s worth of discarded lunches maggots broken glass
and who claimed to have seen a movie called
Carnal Knowledge but wouldn’t describe it
They are explaining it all in a book They are saying
you are a person who came first
not a copy They are saying these boys
are fictions stoning other fictions These are the punishments
that attend These are ghosts throwing at nothing
Source: Poetry (February 2023)