An Ugly Poem Once, I searched for softness on my tongue, ground my father's anger, sour mash cavities from my teeth. I just wanted to talk pretty enough to be mistaken for what I was. Hot flush of girlish blood. I edited all my ugly out, made a perfect poem of my soft & lacquered mouth. Now, I'm looking for the ugly of my tongue lolling serpent curled in the slick of my jaw, searching for its own teeth. I'm a noisy bitch. All Bark! Snap! Growl! My voice still heavy with boy-ghost. Cottonmouth & gun -powder. My Eve's apple the flint to my blunderbuss throat. I'm all buckteeth & ulcer, enamel a stained-glass of nicotine & lip gloss. The brokeback Madonna, arms tucked around all the empty air I could imagine a child. Wombless Mary. Patron saint of the ingrown hair, the bedsore & three-day eyeliner revival. I rise, a slutty Messiah, from the six-day depression sweat & the good fuck that ends it. I'm a one-girl armageddon. Nails--cracked. Polish--chipped. Walk--crooked. Call me Freakish -de-Milo, my body too a crumbling goddess, unlimbed, stone-cold. This body: holy-trickster. Sacred punchline. Sometimes, a strange man calls me BITCH when I will not shift for the "big-dick" of his stride & this is a conjuring, a spell, a blessing. Sometimes, this is the most woman I feel all day. They Leave Nothing for the Morning Zephaniah 3:3 I watch from the fence's perimeter, two coyotes circling as they make of their hungers a wicked game, a slow dance of devouring. Between them a bantam hen, soft blurt of fear, copper coin slurring into a planet between four open palms. The bird litters a panic of its blood, ruby crumbs darkening the ground. I stand there quiet & do not stop their game. I am nine & do not yet know this feeling. To become a thing of play & then a meal. But I will learn. A woman will howl into me like the silence of a bell. I will mistake her for a teacher. Will awaken to my skin now currency I do not hold, sex the unwilling barter of a body. My lips, the tender veins of my neck, the delicacy of my tongue, passed between teeth, from mouth to mouth, & I'm taught to find value in the making of my body a meal, in my devouring, boy broken as bread, or a wishbone's sharp division. Then, I was innocent as an animal, unmarked as a fresh lain egg. Come morning, I hose the red away, pluck feathers like small blooms from the frost -choked dirt. Think of the hen, how it could not have foreseen its own opening, its becoming a stain, washed away. How it first entered into the world, drenched, body sticky & golden with light. When My Gender is First Named Disorder Do they mean this as a synonym for disorganization ? Machine with excess parts? If I called the parts of me I no longer want vestigial this would imply they were the vestige of a once-boy. Remnant of a never-was. Or perhaps they mean it as disruption in the neat arrangement of a system? Misplaced chromosome. Missing rib. Screw balded as a knuckle. First cell to metastasize. Our language unable to speak my gender out of disease. Breasts growing like tumors from a lab rat's spleen. Cells in disarray . Gender as etymology of abrupted skin. As melanoma severed. The scar a creeping ulcer leaves. My clutter of apoplectic nerves. Spine a chaos of misplaced bone. Trace vestigial back to its oldest root & you will find a footprint in the dust. Trace my gender back to its oldest root & you will find my father's footprint on my chest, sinking all the way down to my blood. Excerpted from 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry Winner by torrin a. greathouse All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
