A Cup of Molten Granite
I am a pseudo-forest.
I am a pseudo-suave forest, always burning down
Always lighting myself aflame for tiresome old haunts
You are a quietly brightening Arctic mass
Always melting yourself for my hand.
I would let my stubborn mittens cover you
They’d evaporate your veins
We’d let a droll and shaky back-and-forth
Become a one-way transfer of reins.
With a blood-sharpened ring and the hint of engagement
We’d propose interruption and call it entertainment
In a TV dinner world, we’re a cup of molten granite
It burns, and it sears, and at last, it’s inanimate.
Because all the worlds I ever saw were in you
And all the fires I ignited burned us blue
Communication gave way to a fluorescent kiss
And such an act was but a tarp over an abyss.
I am losing again, darling.
I am hopelessly fading into my own inertia.
I am the abyss.
CAROLYN VIRGINIA
is a dyke to watch out for.
For Today, I Was a Boy
The Kinks’ “Lola” was my first transwoman.
She was a radio staple on those pre-iPod car rides
Where I took up reading to avoid presumed parental interrogation.
I’d cut Harry Potter rereads with Garfield treasuries and dust-coated music biographies
A gold-star intellectual even then, clearly.
But now and then,
Amidst the dire, the dour, and the Dire Straits
I’d hear those out-and-open guitar chords ring aloud
And I’d quietly close my book.
I was admiring her - “Lola”
As she danced less-than-gracefully
But oh-so-luminously
From the fuzzy speakers to my burnt-out head.
And yet
My sex-cocooned, chromosome-confuzzled,
Uncracked egg of a youth-stuck self
Simply saw “Lola” as “Lola.”
Another name for another girl
Free from queerness, somehow
But free nonetheless.
My second transwoman, to my own shame,
Was Caitlyn “Disrupter” Jenner
A “watershed” moment for some, a cultural war cry for others.
And yet, Apollo’s arrow flew right by me here
As I saw Caitlyn as so fashionably distant from me
That she could not have been anything at all like me.
I dismiss “brutish cis folk” for their ignorance near-endlessly
Yet, with Caitlyn, I was - quite simply - impossibly thick
Real “didn’t see the obvious stop sign” energy, my gays.
Nowadays, though?
I recognize my mistake.
Caitlyn was always elsewhere.
She was never for me.
Yes, she could have been for the non-queers
Like the short-fused skeptics and the worn-out grandparents
But my most confident guess, naturally
Is that she was always for herself.
She was for Caitlyn.
Caitlyn was Caitlyn for Caitlyn
Just as “Lola” was “Lola” for “Lola”
And Carolyn was, and still is, Carolyn for Carolyn.