PRIDE POST FOR THE BUTCH!!!
i wish for a name to thank
june keeps trying to make a party out of what had to be smuggled.
let everybody come through the bright door. the boys in mesh. the girls with bad eyeliner because no one taught them how to follow the shape of their eyes. the femmes with mouths sharp enough to slice fruit. the trans kids trying on their names in public, brave and annoying in the sacred way of young people who are still close to the day they chose themselves.
pride is for all of them.
i am only caught, tonight, on the butch in the old photograph.
no date on the back. no town. no womanâs hand reaching in from the edge, though i keep looking for one. she stands beside a car with her hair combed hard away from her face, jacket hanging wrong in the shoulders, one thumb tucked into her belt because the body needs somewhere to put what it canât say.
she is trying to look like trouble.
she looks seventeen kinds of tired.
i want to tell her what happens.
badly. all at once. with no dignity and a stutter.
i want to take her by the sleeve and say, listen, the future is gaudy as hell and still not enough, but you are in it.
they will make june vulgar in ways youâd hate and secretly like. they will put rainbows on dog toys. they will sell pride-themed cupcakes that taste like sugared chalk. banks will learn to say community with their whole dead mouth. some girl with micro bangs and no historical fear will call you iconic, and you will want to lie down in traffic from the embarrassment of being perceived by a child.
there will be butches who get to be bored.
butches buying batteries. butches returning library books late. butches standing in airport security with their arms out, irritated and sock-footed, no one around them understanding that a woman like you would have crossed a burning field for the privilege of being inconvenienced so stupidly.
there will be a butch in a grocery store comparing plums with the grave attention of a person choosing a minor future.
there will be a butch at a kitchen table, older than she ever thought sheâd get, cleaning her glasses on the hem of her shirt while the woman she loves talks from the next room.
imagine the size of that.
nothing happens to her for a while.
the house keeps making its little sounds. the dog knocks its tail against the cabinet. the woman in the next room says baby, did you move my keys, and the butch says no, lying, already standing up to find them.
the one in the photograph.
i want to give her the dull mercy of being needed both before and after breakfast.
i want to give her a drawer with her things in it. a cup with old coffee at the bottom. a woman who knows the sound of her truck before it turns onto the street. a bath towel thrown over a chair because nobody in the house is scared of her staying.
she had so little staying.
it rips me raw, how little.
how many rooms she entered like an intruder in her own life. how many times she made her face into a locked door because a locked door was safer than a window. how many women touched her once in the dark and spent the next day acting as if the body could forget what the hand had already learned.
she must have had names she swallowed and kept in the stomach for years like chewing gum.
songs she could no longer hear without leaving the room.
a shirt she wore until it shone at the elbows because it was the first thing that ever told the truth about her and did not apologize.
i hate thinking of her tenderness that had to leave the house with its chin strong.
because she had it. i know she had it. underneath the cigarette, the jaw, the laugh thrown out mean before anybody could throw anything meaner. she had some soft creature in her that still wanted to be called home. some foolish part that would have folded completely if a woman had taken her face in both hands and said there you are, iâve been waiting.
how do you live with that much want and nowhere safe to put it.
how do you button your shirt over it.
how do you comb your hair.
how do you stand beside the car and make yourself look like a warning when you were born, also, to be held.
i want the photograph to break open.
i want her to step out of it furious and young, smelling of smoke and hair tonic, asking what the hell weâve done with the place.
iâd have to tell her the truth.
we made parades and bad politics and little flags for sale beside the aspirin. we made language that still fails half the people it tries to save. we made room, then filled the room with noise, then forgot who had stood outside in the alley making sure the door could open.
she would hate the sentiment.
i would give it to her anyway.
i would tell her there is a butch somewhere tonight cutting her own hair over the sink, doing a terrible job, crying from the relief of becoming ugly in the correct direction.
i would tell her there is a butch kissing her wife in a parking lot under a pharmacy sign, and neither of them dies from it.
i would tell her there is a butch whose child calls her mama in front of strangers.
i would tell her there is a butch who lived long enough to get soft around the middle and complain about her knees and flirt with her wife at the farmers market like the world never once tried to peel her out of herself.
then i would tell her that she was never just back then.
some part of her slipped through. thanks to gravity, or courage, or refusal, or the dumb luck of being stuck in a photograph long enough for me to find the damn thing.
it got into the girl staring too long at menâs shirts in the store. it got into the dyke with her keys on a carabiner, hooked to the left side of her double-knees. it got into me when i saw her face and felt my own life answer from somewhere low in the gut.
i want it with an ache that feels childish and useless.
but maybe the name is gone, and maybe what remains is the shape she made by refusing to leave herself, and maybe that has to be enough, though i hate enough. enough is a mean little word people hand you when the real thing is missing.
so here, old butch in the photograph. jacket wrong, hair right, mouth almost cruel from holding back the tremble:
we saved you a plate anyway.
there are plums cut up in the kitchen, and a woman laughing in the next room, and your shirt is over the chair because you have been here all morning, because nobody made you vanish, because someone knew you would come back.
no one here will make you prove what kind of woman you are before they love you.
