Sometime in late 2011, I’m sitting in the doctor’s office with my pants slung around my ankles, being taught how to inject myself with testosterone, which will eventually lower my voice & thicken my limbs & make the veins in my forearms bulge like the raised parts of those 3D maps & put stubble on my chin that I’ll never really learn to shave & allow me to move in the world as male, at least mostly.
 
Weeks before this first lesson, I have to recount the history of living in my body to my doctor & two medical students that he is training in this kind of thing & who I’ll never see again. I answer more or less honestly: yes I have a history of depressive episodes & anxiety, yes I’ve been on meds for these, but not right now (though I will be again) & who hasn’t? My doctor—I feel I should mention that he is a white guy, a nice one—then, had told me that, in his experience, his patients generally feel “much better” after beginning hormones; less anxiety, more motivation to stick around. Much of it, he thinks, (& by “it” I assume he means feeling bad) is due to the stress of appearing to the world as what one is not & I smile though am, in fact, bewildered.
 
For as long as I’ve been aware that I exist, I’ve been the kind of person who feels somehow alien to the world of other people, for innumerable reasons or for no reason at all. So, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking this an odd prediction, that I will begin looking more like my father & then suddenly feel as though I can walk around at ease. This doctor, I think, was imagining the hormones as a kind of time travel device, as if they would undo my years as a black kid in a white majority city & then suburb; as an over-achieving child of academics who was consequently called upon by teachers to account for the academic “failure” of the other black kids in my school, even though we came, many of us, from different worlds & I was just a kid who didn’t know anything at all; as a girl who wasn’t quite one; as the child of a depressive who, consequently, paid far too much attention to the adult world & its incessant & mundane violences & who, like all girls (of all sexes), entered adolescence & then became intimately acquainted with the entitlement of men. As if everything that had gone into making me would dissipate & eventually disappear.
 
In 2011/2012, then, I was searching for other ways of thinking about gender, about having a past, about having been a little girl; I didn’t want to become unrecognizable to myself. Fortunately, sometime during this period, my will-be dear friend Sam read to me from Lauren Berry’s The Lifting Dress, which opens with a poem in which the protagonist (The Just-Bled Girl) is mute when faced with a doctor who is described as a “beautiful thing,” but seems instead dumbly comical & dangerous. The poem declares: “There must be hundreds / of ways to be a girl.” Indeed.
 
From here, we are pushed into “Notes on How to Love a Boy,” which is a poem I come back to whenever I find myself feeling somehow only adjacent to the rest of the human world. “Notes on How to Love a Boy” is about many things, but most obviously it is about identifying with the non-human world, a meditation on the gendered effects of having been ruined / of ruining. It tells the story of a neighborhood boy who is stung, terribly, by wasps in the protagonist’s backyard while she “indolent in a rusted lawn chair, did nothing.” But more than doing nothing, she is clearly delighted by how the boy is “Red. Wrecked.” perhaps because she understands that these wasps were defending themselves from his invasion, as she could not. Consequently, more than with her mother who pays the boy’s hospital bill & writes a note warning others to keep out, the girl identifies with the hive, imagines herself growing up to join them; on the edge of adolescence she wants “stingers instead of leg hair. Instead of legs.” After all, in the human world the boy is cared for at the mother’s expense & we have to understand that this “expense” is monetary, but that it is also much more general.
 
The Lifting Dress, in the most basic summary, is the story of a girl coming to understand the gendered world after having just been raped by “The Big Man” who lurks in the image of this boy. In his encounter with “The wasp world” however, the boy (who, remember, is the one who has entered the world of The Just-Bled Girl without invitation, who has disturbed the hive) isn’t cared for in the aftermath of his transgression, but comes away as red & wrecked as the little girl had been. However, rather than trying to create an all-female world (as the mother does when she hangs a sign warning the neighborhood boys to keep out), The Just-Bled Girl finds herself drawn to the world of men & boys: “The wasp world was one that loved boys / as wrong as I did. Why was it that our mission / was to make men less beautiful?” This is a queer (trans?) circuit of identification: the girl, by loving boys wrong, seeks to make them more like herself & in order to do this, she has to become something other than a woman. Or, at least, become a woman differently than her mother.
 
Of course, given wasp social structures, where most hives are organized around a single queen, it’s more than likely that these wasps were male, even though the girl sees them as “lady-wasps.” But, also, since the hive functions as more or less one organism, the male wasps are ladies, in a way. Here is a world where gender works differently, where male energy is organized in service of & not against the female body, which is why The Just-Bled Girl’s incessant identification with the non-human world (oleander trees, wasps, horses, wolves, carnations, a barrette, secondhand furniture, berries…) is both a symptom of her victimization & her resistance to it, her defiance of the logic of gender, her attempt to navigate the world on different terms: “Red. Wrecked. Those insects rushed to his eyelids / without fear. Of all the women / in the world, I find my sisters here.”
 
Though they love The Lifting Dress nearly as much as I do, my friends seem not to understand my intense identification with it—the book as a whole & this poem in particular—in part because Lauren Berry is a white cis woman from Florida & I am a black boi from the Midwest/East Coast: I’m certain we have very little in common. Still, for whatever reason, it is white female poets (Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Maggie Nelson, Lauren Berry, Anne Sexton, to name a few) who have given me the most robust language I have for understanding myself, for making sense of how the experience of having been a girl can produce a kind of perversity/strangeness that is like faggotry, but is not quite. Near the end of The Lifting Dress, there is a poem in which the protagonist, no longer just-bled, fantasizes about fucking an oleander tree, doing to it what had been done to her as a child, because they are so alike, because “it’s what I look like.” While the idea that little girls’ sense of self is somehow more permeable than little boys’ is a cliché & is too often used to justify the continual production of narratives in which girls grow up to repeat their mothers’ mistakes, the way that Berry works this idea produces something quite queer, in all its senses: a world the little girl I was can inhabit & from which I can emerge without leaving her behind.
 
Link to "Notes on House to Love a Boy" by Lauren Berry:
http://www.versedaily.org/2011/howtoloveaboy.shtml

​Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have appeared/are forthcoming in The Journal, Vinyl, The Seattle Review, cream city review and elsewhere. Cam is currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Find him at cawkwardrich.com.

“They would / Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees / Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder.”         

            — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Song”

I was once asked to discuss the “brutal experiences [my] poetic bodies suffer” and in hindsight, I think perhaps I dodged the intent of the question, discussing more the manner in which my work dresses up/spins the violence—less about the violence itself, where it comes from, why I choose to include it.

*

My father is a hunter. I was raised by death. At times we were markedly poor. When we finished the season’s kill my father had stocked away in the freezer and money ran thin before payday, my lunch was packed with creative wonders like crackers and mustard or carrots and spiced vinegar. Mother made do. Over time, I stopped eating meat altogether. It was easier. Cheaper. I didn’t have to kill anything.

*

When I was quite young, a neighbor girl made habit of crossing through our backyard to climb the fence into her own yard. One day I stopped her in the walkway, told her she couldn’t cut through anymore. She tried to pass anyway. I knocked her to the ground and said something awful. She told her mother. Who told my mother. Who smacked me. The girl never cut through our yard again.

*

Once, my grandmother found and gave to me a robin’s egg. Perfectly blue. I let it sit for weeks in a makeshift nest and call to its family. Then I cracked it open because I knew that it was no longer its mother’s. I marveled at its milky yellow yolk, perfect and miniature. When my mother found the halved shell, she smacked me.

*

In seventh grade, I was shy and gangly and awkward. That year, a girl intentionally kicked a soccer ball into my face and I sat still and bled all over the gym floor. That year, another girl body-slammed me into my locker, demanding I never set eyes on her again. I turned red and went to class. That year, a group of girls raided my gym locker. I’d forgotten my padlock. Afraid to take a fail for the day, I changed clothes, folded the brand new checkered fleece pullover my mom had spent months saving to buy me for Christmas, and prayed. After class, the locker was empty. Only paper and textbooks left on the floor. I wore dirty gym clothes to all my classes. Everyone noticed. Later that week, I spotted my fleece on a popular boy who was flanked by girls from my gym class. I did nothing. Everyone noticed.

*

Once, I rescued a wounded bird who’d been struck from her nest during a storm. Once, I rescued a feral kitten who was drenched in vomit. Once, I rescued an abandoned dog riddled with mange who was roaming the side of a highway. I write all my animals into brutality. I’m always trying to prove a point.

*

When I was 12, a boy I liked tied my wrists with a phone cord and raped me while eight of his friends watched and cheered. Then they ransacked our house. They fled when my father arrived. He asked if I was running a whorehouse.

*

I was introduced to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem, “Song” by my dear friend and poet, Scott Beal. Familiar with my compulsion to navigate violence through surrealism, he knew this poem would reach me. He knew that a goat’s severed head singing a sweet song into the night would reach me. He knew the poetic bodies of girl and goat and mischievous boys would reach me.

*

Once, I accidentally hurt a boy while skipping rocks in a creek. The blood was staggering. He told his mother. Who told my mother. I ran and hid. When she found me, she dragged me from my hiding spot, refused to hear the story. I offered my middle finger and she beat me.

*

Once, I was charged by a German shepherd. I stood my ground. I did not flinch. I did not run. He circled me and came to a halt. He let me touch him. Stroke his neck. Read his tags. I returned him to his family.

*

When I was 15, a boy I liked pressed a knife to my throat and described the sound of cutting through bone. He explained how easy it would be to kill me. I dared him to do it. When he couldn’t, I called him a coward.

*

Each time I introduce “Song” in workshop, I lose time to someone debating its place in the genre of poetry. Is this even a poem? It looks like prose. Reads like a fable. It’s called ‘Song,’ maybe it’s just a song? No stanzas? What is a poem at all? What is poetry? But I force my own patience. I know what will come. Awe of magic. Resistance to slaughter. Admiration of language. Empathy. Lament. Wonder. Grief. Solace in making magic from suffering.

*

Tucked somewhere in a family album on a shelf in someone’s living room there is a yellowing photograph of me as child holding a carving knife to the skinned haunches of a slaughtered antelope. I am smiling.

*

Once, my mother smacked me and I struck her back. She beat me to the floor. I covered the welts with makeup and went to school. 

*

Once, my mother’s boyfriend showed up drunk with a prizefighting pit bull. He locked the dog in the garage and disappeared for months. I kept her fed but she was impossibly vicious. Animal control killed her on-site after scarcely any questions. I still can’t forgive myself.

*

When I was in high school, I went to punk rock shows and slammed my body against other bodies over and over in the mosh pit because I had nowhere to place my rage.

*

When my mother turned up with a bruised lip, I threatened her boyfriend with a baseball bat.

*

The boy with the knife stalked me for a decade.

*

Once, I found a mutilated cat who’d fallen from the window of a high rise apartment. I knelt near him, ready to end his suffering with my own hands. A neighbor arrived just then, insisting she take him to a veterinarian. I told her he needed to be euthanized. I told her to hurry.

*

Once, during an argument, I leapt on the hood of a boyfriend’s car as he was driving off. I slammed my fists against the windshield over and over. My hands turned the color of charcoal.

*

When presenting “Song” at a recent workshop, an unfriendly woman looked me directly in the eyes and began to berate me—in third person, passively vicious: If she’s teaching poetry, shouldn’t she bring a poem? Shouldn’t she be able to define poetry? Why is she leading this? I suppressed the urge to choke her. Later that evening, I read my own violent poems and she bought my books and thanked me for telling her story. I suppressed the urge to choke her.

*

When I was 27, I was gang raped by four men for three hours.

*

Once, my father locked me in my room for some bratty adolescent transgression. When he came back to talk it over, I was so enraged about being trapped, I slammed my fists into his back.

*

Once, I spotted my mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend at a bar. I approached his table and reminded him who I was. Told his friends what he’d done. Taunted him. Dared him to touch me as he had her. When he finally erupted, I smiled. A brawl broke out. I struck and struck. Like a need.

*

When I was 36, a man I was dating attacked me in my sleep. Raped me in my own bed. I threatened to cut him. He called me crazy. Then didn’t. Then did. He confessed. Blamed a dubious psychiatric disorder. Apologized. Then didn’t. He threatened to ruin me. Started stalking me. My friends. He threatened them. Their children. Called us liars. Then didn’t. Then did.

*

Doctors say I have PTSD. I don’t sleep. I panic in rooms with too many men. I flinch in tight spaces. I keep my tongue. Then I riot. I keep calm. Then I ignite.

*

A more adequate answer to the brutality question might have been: Writing the violence not only allows me to release it, it allows me to haunt its agents.

*

I punched a hole in the bathroom wall at 12. Gashed furniture at 15. Seared tire marks into pavement at 22. Punched a taxicab window at 27. Dislocated a door at 31. Knocked a hole in my bedroom wall at 39. I bloodied my knuckles on a wall/table/door/window at 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 31, 39. I cut into my own arms. I beat bruises into my own body. I opened my own wrist. Because rage. And grief. And survive. Because there is nowhere to place all of this.

*

Once, I collapsed on the sidewalk in a town I do not know because the weight of violence was more than my bones could continue to bear. I crumbled like so much sand. And no one stopped. And no one helped. And I was that girl on the gymnasium floor again. Thirty-eight and still covered in my own blood. And I hauled myself up off the ground. And I hauled myself down the street and across all the miles back to New York City and into a police station and into an interrogation room and I told them how I got here. How a woman survives and survives until she doesn’t anymore. I told them about the boys and all of their hands. About their hearts beating harder.

*

Once, a friend showed me a poem about magic. A poem about loss. A beautiful poem about the brutal suffering of poetic bodies. A sweet goat who cried and struggled. A girl who loved a whole love and lost her love to a grisly stunt. A poem about grief. The fracture of irreparable grief. A poem where a heart can fly as a bird in the night sky. Where the massacred sing and go on signing. Where the tormenters learn to listen. Once, a sweet goat’s severed head reminded me how to sing. How to haunt.  

Link to "Song" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly: 
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/song#

JEANANN VERLEE is author of two books, Said the Manic to the Muse and Racing Hummingbirds, which earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in poetry. She has been awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Her work appears in failbetter, Yemassee, PANK, and Adroit, among others. Verlee wears polka dots and kisses Rottweilers. She believes in you. Find her at jeanannverlee.com.