/TRANSFORMATIONS

I have a father.

DNA results confirmed it a few weeks ago. In the month since my blood was revealed to me through cheek swabs, charted phenotypes, and insomniac nights--things have been good. Hot and lethargic as Alabama summers dictate, but good is the word. I now have an eight-year old little sister. She collects broken glass and has smart blue eyes. The first night I spent with my new family, I didn't sleep at all. I lay awake in her room, bathed in pink light with plastic stars descending from the ceiling on strings. I wondered what she was dreaming. I wondered: how does one become a sister? How does one become a daughter?

It's been surreal, to say the very least. And awkward and sweet and very--human? Can't say precisely what I mean by that. I'm making haste if not progress I'm racking up all my lost rites at once. My father even caught me smoking and pretended to be disappointed.

Back in Tuscaloosa, I spend a lot of time drinking and night-swimming. How my small town sadness perseveres. In other cities, men fish girls out from the bottoms of their glasses. In other cities, jinn emerge from the ends of lit cigarettes. In other cities I am a sailor I am a crook of the word I am published and oft-quoted. In other cities strangers are dancing to radio static that cannot reach me as I drive in silence through the inky trajectory of another nothing night.

Been sneaking into a local pub for kicks, though I never buy drinks. Being underage in a Tuscaloosa bar does not an outlaw make. Mostly I just watch my friends take on the guises of barflies. Patrick & Bruce arguing absurd hypotheticals: Foucault & Derrida fight for sovereignty of language. What kind of fight? I ask. They look at me and all the light reflects off their eyes, taking nothing in. Curious trick that may or may not be singular to bar light. A cagematch, they answer. As if it were the most obvious thing.

Thinking worlds are made and unmade in these back rooms. Latticework of smoke overhead, churning into primordial soup. Taking on spiral arms. Birds-nest, Horsehead. Progressions and lack thereof: drink, nicotine, denouement-with-hands.

I failed in my summer endeavor to write a poem a day. Not miserably, but notably. Note to self: Ambition and discipline ought to be weighed equally. And I have to write about something other than bodies.

Perhaps I need a new hobby besides all this word-hoarding. Einstein played the violin. Django Reinhardt made flowers out of cellophane. Edward II dug ditches. Peter the Great pulled teeth. Vladimir Lenin sharpened pencils. Poseidon created horses out from seafoam. St. Francis preached to the birds. Cleopatra pricked the breasts of her slave girls with golden pins. Leonardo da Vinci had no hobbies.

But mostly it's too hot to do much. Sun of claiming. Everywhere the sound of dogs panting. Days like this I wish I was a man so I could walk bare-chested through the streets as if to say: my heart is only a fist away. This heat which makes all my hungers feel overfull...everytime I turn to speak to He-who-lingers-in-my-bed-and-breast, the mirage dissolves. Now he's a saguaro now he's a citadel. Old trick, Helios.

Today is my last day as a teenager. Come midnight, I will be two decades old. Thinking I'll spend it in some dark field with hibiscus gin and Lyrids.

The Figure of Woman: HOW NOW?

The same questions are following me around. Just finished an extensive analysis of the female nude in art. In South Asian lit, I'm learning about Hijras and the third sex. A whole paper on the femme fatale. Back at home, I'm reading up on Tiresias: hey pal, no one ever made duality look so sex-y. And then there's the fact that I'm dating a girl without even knowing if I'm straight or not.

I'm feeling especially ambiguous lately. The questions are piling up in the backroom of things-I'm-avoiding-coming-to-terms-with. Lately, my head's populated with women: distinctions like devoted mother/devouring mother; an estranged best friend in Chicago for whom I feel real heartbreak; this mean girl that Stephen may or may not be seeing; this girl whose bed I keep waking up in without any of my confusion answered.

Staring at department store mannequins and seeing classical nudes.
Staring at piles of bones in anthropological digs and wondering what's a mother.
Staring at one girl's naked body and noting the dissimilarities to my own.
Staring at Serra Paylin clad only in the American flag.
How now how now how now?

Simone de Beavoir: Do women exist as a natural kind? Is it desirable that they should exist?

Last night, I went to my seven-year-old cousin's birthday party. Some kid's mother froze when I walked in. She just stared at me with big, wary eyes. I know whose child you are, she muttered. You are your mother's clone. I couldn't help but be disdainful. I practically spat my reply ("Not. Quite.") and left the room. Nothing gets me so angry as being compared to her--even though this woman only meant for a superficial comparison. Even though my mother's beautiful. In my dreams, I disfigure the parts of me that look like her. I think it was also the way this stranger worded it: "I know whose child you are." No. She does not know whose child I am. That's the problem. No one does.

As for the Body of Woman, I'm cutting away my origins. I'm stripping the fount. I lay my head on S's breast the same way I used to lay my head against my mother's chest as a small child. But that's all done with.

So what with studies of transgressive sexuality, ongoing practice in bicuriosity, and more than a few instances of hot-and-cold rage---it would appear that ambiguity's my thing.