POETRY : Self Portrait Sans Trans Body / Sage
Very excited to feature this new piece of poetry by once-Bay-Area resident Sage. We’ve had the real pleasure of featuring them on a few of The Racket Reading Series and, as you’re about to find out, their poetry is great and they’re reading of it is equally so.
Give it a listen.
“Self Portrait Sans Trans Body”
by Sage
In dreams I tug gently on the hard
knotted muscle rope
hidden in the body of God.
My body, too, comes
with detachable pieces.
After years
of silence I learned
why the trees fascinate us—
we are made of paraphrasable facts
and an irreducible truth.
This brutal tenderness we center as a way into
each other's hearts.
Some time ago
another trans poet said he did not like
trans poetry with bodies in it, that it was too tired a symbol.
That's three bodies
in the poem now, four if you count
how tired this one is of being
delineated and defined.
Invisible is a feeling. I know well
the outraged cry against the world's static looming
like sorrow over barley fields golden in the summer sway
a promise broken or kept depending on where you grew up.
I was born in the middle of a doorway.
I was born in the crossroads laid
through my cradle.
Looking for a redemptive confession ever since, something like
sleep, or a white noise that is
supposed to put sleep in me.
There is a stone
from a dried
riverbed
perched on my mantle.
I lean my lips to its cool gray skin.
I whisper ache into the world's
most bodied eternal.
I wake to barbaric noise in my left ear, something
in me still
too restless to sleep
Sage received their MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California. Their poems have appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Penn Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They live in Kansas.
