Route Nine

by Elizabeth Mikesch

I don’t know what a Litmus test is, so I’ll blurt it out. The things is that it does two things. It sucks, and it spits. If you try to stick even a pinky in it, which would horrify me, a part that makes me sore would stick out a bit for you. Buy me ice cream cones from within your car for my trouble because it really fucking hurts and it’s mostly your thing.

You’ll hear teeth crack the cone. It’ll spritz. You’ll never not see me bleeding in the front seat on your palm.

Could I forgive you if you could make me do one part of what it is I do, which is to disappear? I kind of have to disappear to become my vagina, and that is what will bring us together out of basements, Buicks, motels to someplace better than whatever we’ve bought not looking for what’s after or what we had a little of before easing into the parade. 

The recoil, My Land!

It’s just tinier and has cricks that inflate, and it softly ruins parties. 

I’ll have to lock myself away from even myself. It will be remarkably medical again. Each person has gone mentally ill from still feeling the clutch. Such burdens I lug. The grouping of them thank me with a thank you card. 

All of us get into wheelchairs in a terrible chain or train, whichever, and open our gowns. We eat tapioca with stevia. When you come down, you can gurgle the wet glue.

by Callum Angus

Somewhere out there is a version of myself who avoided the difficult conversations that surround coming out to friends and family as a trans man. She’ll never build up a tolerance for needles through weekly hormone injections. But she might give birth and be a mother, and out of that she’ll sculpt some new way of being a woman that I hadn’t thought of before.

Stephen Burt’s persona poems in her new chapbook All-Season Stephanie are the first I’ve read that address this double-self of the trans person with the extended attention it deserves. Burt is one of the few high-profile people living, in her own words, a “two-gendered life”: she openly refers to herself using both male and female pronouns while teaching English at Harvard, writing books of poetry, writing criticism for The New Yorker, and raising a family. (Per Burt’s request of this author, female pronouns have been used throughout. Her written work appears under Stephen Burt.)

Stephanie is imagined by Burt as the girl she never got to be, and each poem from All-Season Stephanie is a meditation or scene from childhood through adolescence. But Burt goes beyond a simple reimagining; she uses this collection to allow her alter ego her own identity crises. In the poem “School Day Stephanie” Burt writes:

I don’t want my mommy; I want to be a mommy, to pretend to be a mommy and to fail

In these lines and throughout all of these poems it’s vital to Burt that Stephanie does not manifest as a fully-formed, confident Judy Blume character. Stephanie has her own conflicts about gender and as she grows up over the course of the chapbook these grow more complex in a familiar confrontation between the desired other and the self we desire to be, like the poem “Skylight Stephanie” where she “can’t figure out if I want/ to conceal myself, or display myself, or display/ myself as somebody else, or/ both”. Every poem is another version of Stephanie as she grows into teenagerdom, and it’s refreshing to see a young alter ego given so much leeway by her creator to explore her own gender and identity.

Other poems depict memories like learning to swim, playing board games on snow days, stealing cucumber lipgloss from the CVS—they inject light-hearted fun into what is, after all, an imagined childhood. But there are flashes of sorrow, especially when Stephanie’s own adult self begins to crystallize. In “Funeral Stephanie” she confronts death for the first time and realizes with a shock that “I was used to believing in more than one of me”. We’re left with the uncanny sensation of a switcheroo—that perhaps Stephen Burt is one of these imagined Stephanies that floated off to forge a different, wildly successful, future.  

In a coda to the book, Burt describes these poems as coming from “a girl who is both me and not me: they come from the life, or lives, that I could have lived, had I been born and raised and grown up a girl.” For many reasons, most of us live realities where it is not possible to live as more than one gender at once. In lieu of that, Burt has given us All-Season Stephanie: a radical permission slip for us to feel the loss of one kind of gendered life, and a reminder of the beauty to be found in inhabiting and reclaiming that identity anyway.

by Ben Roylance 

6

And it’s all in there? The eleven-temple swelling, From square to circle again. Ghostberry, redroot, angel-axe, Alive to see the list bend back. My new tutor is hardly unreliable. And that’s the story of lucky. He struck gold then we cut him out. You aren’t feeling sorry are you?

12

Did you even smile? It’s been a military Christmas, I admit. Let’s call it a lesson in civil ufology. I grip a leathern cup behind my back. When I tilt it toward the lecturing moon, Your mood crispens to a yellow coal. A stomach is a good indication, Though I can’t control instinct. Visitors at this hour? 15 I’m to believe we were left unchanged? Now the flicked-open sun says Its first words and they are big ones. My detective was a happy young man. Beams like poles of eve corner him. Hydrodesulfurizing, twin mercuries. Mistakes studied to ready ends, We’ll reclaim tonight noon’s plot. What did you say I buried there?

16

Can we interpret the marks? A man in black is named by the hour. The next portion will be horror. Had it only been hunger. It was after all a form of kiss. No one enters the mouth alone. Steam distorted by sun, I ask for that dollar again. May I have that dollar?

21

by Margaret K. Foley

Whiskey Baths

The elephant in my ribs is named Harold and he is sweet He tells me stories, and tucks me in under blankets, he is sensible, and sensitive, and still a little rough around the lungs, But Harold, stuck between my ribs, is sweet and drunk on the breath of God And Harold is big, and friends with my father, and proper and a traitor to no one and he tells me I hurt him with my true stories, but I have to.

by Nick Maione

PASTIME 

The woman in an orange apron ferries wine bottles down the street against her chest, and lets out only a light sigh when the broken moment tries to cut her. My next breath is not my best but no one will ever love at all if it isn't okay doing one thing too many all the time pretty well. CAREFUL WHAT YOU'RE GOOD AT 

For instance this rock climber. The thing is, you could do that too but then you would have to have the kind of hands that could do that as your hands. LESSON ON POLLINATION 

One child can't help calling out his own important fact: my brover was thtung by a bee on hith butt And the children exaggerate their laughter as they lean and reach for one another  WE ANNOUNCE 

by Jane Dykema

Valley folks! Check out recent MFA grads/superstars Jon Ruseski and Christopher Lott this Thursday in Florence.

More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1580989725482679/

F I N .

thanks to everyone who followed the nervous system this year. 

i’ve got some new comics and projects in the works for the summer and beyond (!) so please come say hi : www.colleenlouisebarry.com

lots of weird love,