Small Press Traffic
from NORMAL GIRLS
In 1996, they looked up and said, these kids are uglier to us than other ones. Let’s
wager everyone feels the same
That’s the scientific field of sexology
I read about it in a tweet
University students, masked to group status, judged the physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity disorder and clinical and normal control girls, whose photographs were taken at the time of assessment (mean age, 6.6 years)
More recently, Anne Carson translated Ibykos’ fragment 286, first into English, then into a more limited pool of language: the “wrong words” of other people’s texts
The sexologists found that pathologized children were uglier on average to the adults enlisted as aestheticians
They wondered if this had something to do with an objective face
Reading, I said, let’s get our friends together and make sexologists talk with our ugly tongues
Don’t get me wrong, I did write a Personals ad ISO the Herakles to my Geryon (pick me up as you get off the bus from hell, and make it hot fast and full of feeling), which yielded one hour of unsatisfying sex and a pen pal in Australia
Not ashamed to say I loved / him for his beauty / As I would again / If he came near
Beauty tempts, doesn’t it. It would mean they were wrong about us
On the other hand, Carson hasn’t been a reliable friend. For one thing, she has a habit of bringing up Venus Xtravaganza when she has a point to make about men (Gabriel, 2018)
It may be tempting to explain her away as one of us, unrealized, too reluctant to touch the heat of wanting to literally be Oscar Wilde to her cold cheek. I suspect she’s more interested in being so unlike other girls that she had to swallow a hot gay ghost and try to stomach him
Her crisis stalls at the evaporating edge of ~ female ~: before it can burn off, she licks essentialism from her lips
That’s that, and yet it isn’t. I like her methods of wrongbeing. I take them back to the social, to citation’s study of shared life
These ugly little kids were my contemporaries and as weird-looking as I, or maybe –delightfully – more so. I want to find out how ugly we can grow up to be
An old guy did ask some pretty dumb questions. He hesitates.
On people like me. My life + feeling. Considerably masculine
+ substantially feminine. Bath oil, boxing matches, a sense of
humor. Measure my interest in women, girls. My female
trouble is structural. He didn’t deny (masculine!)
understanding (feminine!). Pretty, how the hell. Normal, GOD.
Oh, to cry in a bar, objective, anyone could do. Except I’m not
interested in encouragement. I told him how I can enjoy my
body. The extent to which I cooperate, I’ll be in significantly
less understanding. I mean, I’m bellyward with desire over
here. I remind myself it will all turn out clinical in the end. The
whole spiel. My ablutions are my body and my body is me. If
my Brut deodorant OKs me
they tell the receiver
you are lovely
no, ugly
thinking of an absent
zinnia, you’ll always
I still
tranquilize my
shame, gay life
thee only
do I love
cheerful
bluebell humility
walking on air
false and gay
understanding objectives
fickleness for all
occasions give me
a gladiolus
and I’ll girlhood
substantially for you
in secret ivy, the extent
to which I live
but for
fascination
stupidity
grant me one smile
rose leaf you may hope
daisy, I’ll never tell
normal
hyacinth
Before my wanting to be me on you perks up
lust soaks the improbable space it happens across
I look to you one chair over in the gender clinic
deliquescing with me in the non-profit heat
where unbelievably I’ve never had a crush
on a single overworked nurse practitioner
even the time they sloshed my own blood all over me
but how have you been in the continual girl fight
I’d lost track and now they’re handing me
a cup into which I’ll go maneuver my evidentiary piss
Goodbye, I’ll be at the beach tomorrow
if you’d like to liquify me there as well
My kingdom for another chance to enter
the weather system of our coverup and sweat
This is why I love waiting rooms
There’s still a chance I could get better
the body turns out to be a metabolism, a place where questions are fleshy, digested
substance looks restless in your ill-fitting uncool girl machine
while we busy ourselves, trying to girl in fits and starts
there turns out to be something stuck in your procedures
shit takes place, the living weight smeared between your teeth
churning out beauty, too moist, substantial, too real, we didn’t know what real was
ugly, on the other hand, does its own thing
intimate, uncomfortable, funny, poised
in your nostril, the condition for making a painting
trying to embarrass the uncertain
extent to which material gropes for form
an open fly, you look down at your creation
and blurt my god, you’re me
In addition to language from “Physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity disorder” by S. R. Fridell, K. J. Zucker, et al., these poems refer to and incorporate language from Kay Gabriel’s “Specters of Dying Empire: The Case of Carson's Bacchae,”Anne Carson’s “Possessive Used as a Drink (Me)” and The Beauty of the Husband, Lou Sullivan’s We Both Laughed in Pleasure, Trish Salah’s Lyric Sexology, a database of the Victorian language of flowers, and Amy Sillman’s “Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness.”
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