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2 POEMS A Prevett
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PERSONALITY QUIZ: WHAT KIND OF TRANS BIRD ARE YOU?
POEM IN WHICH IT IS CLEAR I AM NO LONGER THE CRUDE GOURD Nor anything lacking a red-raven mouth Nor the intimate drawer home to fat wasps Nor the piano rolled into a tight ball then kicked down the stairs Nor that simple creature old thread with grapespeckled eggs along its length Nor root vegetable peeking cautiously into the harsh blue world Nor creature too fearful to splinter the thing gnawing frantically off its least favorite arm Nor the least favorite arm Nor the broad antlers peeled to their brute centers Nor your private lesson Nor the shadow gust of light anything Skin shadow of anything Nor rhododendron Nor rhododendron
__ On "Personality Quiz: What Kind of Trans Bird Are You?": This poem came out of two things: while texting my partner about something (I can't even remember), I typed the word "transness," and autocorrect changed that to "grandness," which was so funny and self-evident it almost felt like cheating. Around the same time, on a surprisingly warm and sunny morning (surprising because Atlanta has been under near-constant rain since the year began), a flock of robins was roosting in the trees outside my apartment window, which gave me an opportunity to just stare at them a while, admiring their stillness. Everything else sort of grew as connective tissue to bring those two moments together. On "Poem in Which it is Clear I Am No Longer the Crude Gourd": This really was a poem that started with its title and grew out; the title itself originally came from a phone note that probably said "I am no longer the crude gourd," or something like that. Though I'm not sure it comes across in the poem, I saw the "crude gourd" as a masculine-identified body, and the line (and larger poem) was an attempt at owning that I no longer saw myself as in possession of such a thing. From there, it became a litany of sorts by way of conglomerating similarly-themed notes I'd taken over a period of maybe one or two months. "Red-raven mouth"; "broad antlers peeled to their brute centers"--all of these were just random things I'd written down in my notes app, hoping they'd find a place later. While I don't remember the contexts for writing many of these, I know "fleshy mantles" came from an episode of Blue Planet I'd been watching, which featured some sort of anemone that David Attenborough described as having a "fleshy mantle." So thanks, David, and to the writers of that episode, for using such peculiar language.
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