Jesse Smith
calling myself jem
cw: mentions of death
i’ve been thinking that the right pronoun might be able to kill.
in a good way. sorry, i just haven’t been able to get this scene out of my head
where a dying guy says or more purrs with the last of himself this feels great*
& i’ve been wanting it. wanting it the way he wanted death
to spread through him like silk for blood, which feels so feminine
at first, but then i let myself run it down the translucence of my forearm & of course,
get it in the moonlight & it can be nothing but enby. i just need to stop
squeezing it into my skin & just take it as breath, take a deep breath
& risk ending me. so often i choke on the premise of self
thinking it has to hit you in one blow, displace you like a vase within your body
but i know you can drip, i just know that i’ll want everything.
i’ll want to feel great. i want to feel the way my mouth feels when the words are in italics
& speaking them feels decadent. like silk. the words don’t feel Not Mine but
shunted, like a knife between the ribs & you go Oh,
that’s my heart. crack my body into place
& let my gender spread like the neon of a glowstick yes i’m getting to the point
which is i may have found the pronouns to do that. finally shunt all that feminine
-seeming out my lungs & leave me irrespectively enby.
i take the opening of my name like a mouth & let the usual pronoun echo.
i’m not the same nonbinary you’ll find in anyone else
& i need you to know that from when you hear of me. i’m jey. i’m jem.
i’m this particular twist of the knife so you know who got you.
i move in jeir ways. i jun, i jive, i’m jellicle & so i think
even that way it would fit right to call me jer, even that
hits such a spot between my ribs
at that angle that only shines enby.
* Osamu Dazai in the anime movie Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple (Bones, 2018).
corrector
cw: panic symptoms, gender dysphoria, psychological and physical childhood abuse, body horror
As a body was embalmed and enfolded, it was being transfigured into something worthy of
veneration. –Kassia St Clair**
Although the simile is employed, the fusion of both elements completes the action in my mind’s eye.
–Ocean Vuong***
Do not make me tell this story without a forked tongue –greathouse
she says, slipping her dysphoria through the sleeve
of that anciently abused mouth, that body, its twist
into survival – so what if they don’t see it as more
human. I always thought a simile was a kind of hat –
a brief wear of not-my-body that suits me, right?
But I’d speak my anxiety into an avalanche, those digs
of my fingers into the slipping earth fusing to every
trying breath and nothing changed. They were mirrors
face to face finding new reflections in themselves
the more they looked. What made you realise you weren’t
just... female? Jessica typed. The other margin
replied: I just wasn’t in tune with the female of my body.
I’d forget I have this chest, anything ‘up’ down there.
When I put the binder on, I realised: all this time, that’s
where I was. As if I donned my hat and –Eileen Myles
found a head. And when I read ‘The Queer Trans Girl
Writes Her Estranged Mother a Letter’ it dripped a –greathouse
morning rain to my parched heart, as I opened my mouth
in its shapes I grew to my body. I stopped thinking
clothes were like speech marks with every they
these trousers got me, when every they dug – no,
excavated more of that body-ambivalent being that
flattens their chest behind their eyes but still
makes no space between their legs. When every she
warps my face in the mirror round eyes glistening
girl. greathouse makes her father’s fist a scrunch
of paper, hurt a kind of poem-in-wait. The smacks
then drip off me like petals, their fall to the water
publication. I do not want to become digestible***
to those who scrape my begging off their soles.
In the press of my binder I think of my clothes
italicising. Do not make me step outside without
boyish body. I want to wear myself like a wound
turned inside out. A trans girl gifts her tongue Lily
and blooms.
** Instagram, @ocean_vuong, “Metaphors” saved Story Highlight (2021).
*** The Golden Thread: How fabric changed history (John Murray, 2018).
jesse smith (they/he) is a queer poet and reviewer from the uk, with an MA Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of East Anglia. their poems and reviews are published with Stone of Madness, Delicate Friend, honeyfire lit, just femme & dandy and more. they are the founder and poetry reader of the gamut mag. find them on twitter and instagram @jessesmithpoet.