Nancy K. Pearson’s first collection of poetry, Two Minutes of Light, is the latest winner of the Perugia Press Intro Award. She has kindly permitted me to reprint a poem from her book below. Read more of her work and buy the book here.

Thought Thinking Itself

Suddenly, all the things I do not understand
discreetly twinkle below a surface.

A gristle of duckweed gleams through a thick chop of ice.
The green wafer of a fish drifts up through a pudding of eelgrass.

For 10 years, I lived mostly on psych wards & nothing burnished 
    more
than my overestimated connection to grief.

One year, my roommate consumed small amounts of arsenic 
    for a week.
Everyday, she stirred it through her warm brown soup.

Three blood transfusions later, she lit two portable charcoal grills
in the back seat of her Subaru & died.

We reassemble our lives & discover nothing.
Just under the skin, a tiny wick of green ignites a garlic clove.

In the early 1990’s, something went terribly wrong.
All around me, young women were diagnosed & diagnosed.

After a month on a psych ward, doctors discovered I had fifteen 
    personalities.
I was twenty. I made them all up. This is a true story.

If I could live my twenties again, I would not sever to untangle—
flight is a single ligament balanced between two forces.

In the snow, the geese link chains & I follow their past.
There is nothing at the end to unravel.

Continuing this week’s Trans Pride theme, below are two poems from Stacey Waite’s chapbook love poem to androgyny, winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. Thanks to M. Scott Douglass at MSR for permission to reprint. Stacey has just won another prestigious award, the Tupelo Press Snowbound Series, for her forthcoming chapbook the lake has no saint. Put it on your Amazon wishlist today.

XY

The doctor, who speaks slowly, after spending
quite a few moments to himself in his gray office,
says there is a strong possibility I am “chromosomally
mismatched,” which cannot be determined now
unless I pay for the test, because according to
my coverage, the test is not necessary due
to the fact that I am “out of the danger zone.”

The danger zone is puberty, when, he says,
“women like me” are at risk for developing
genital abnormalities. I look back at myself at 13,
staring at my body. And I think it might have
all made sense to me somehow, if my clitoris grew
like a wild flower and hung its petals between my thighs,
which were plumping up in that adult woman way.

The doctor is careful with me, knowing how my being XY
makes me a bad example of a woman, an XY woman
is an ex-woman, whose blood has been infected by Y.
The testosterone rising like a fire in her blood.
The doctor looks mostly at his chart, he wants me to disappear,
to put back, in order, his faith in the system of things.
He wants me to react correctly, to be ashamed.

I sit nervously in the paper robe, which covers only
the front of my naked body, the cold laboratory air
drifting up through the gown, my nipples hardening
like the heads of screws. He doesn’t know he’s given
me a second chance at my body. I think about the man
I could have been. I make a list of names and settle
on “Michael” after my father, who did not love me.

I imagine the girls in my high school I would have
been able to love. Michael could have saved me
from all of this, from the sound of my voice,
from the years of wearing someone else’s skin
in the form of a church dress. Michael
is the easier version of me.

When the doctor leaves me to dress myself,
I shove his crumpled up paper gown in the crotch
of my briefs. I cover my chest with the eye chart
and try to look for Michael. But he is not able
to be seen. He is out emptying the trash at the curb.
He is in me in the way that a man is in a woman.

****

Finding My Voice

When Dr. Rosen says he can “fix my voice,” he means
he will give me shots of estrogen that will surge through
my body like electric shocks, sending the hair on my chin
and stomach running for cover. He doesn’t want me to be warm.

He doesn’t want to listen to my large truck voice
fill his office like his soy milk
bursting up from his coffee’s deep bottom.
He wants to imagine me as an affirmation.

He wants me perched upon his plastic table
with my smooth naked legs, singing hymns
in the voice of a woman who needs him
in order to recover some piece of herself

that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone,
opening and closing hard like the doors of angry lovers.
He doesn’t exactly know that he hates me,
the feeling is more like gender indigestion,

how the sound of my voice keeps rising
up in his throat and he can’t rid himself
of the image of my lover who stretches out
nude in the dark bed, presses her hand
above my chest saying,

“talk to me, please, talk.”

Carl Phillips is a professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His poetry has received numerous honors including the Kingsley Tufts Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. The poem below is reprinted by permission from his collection Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006.

The Point of the Lambs

The good lambs
in the yellow barn–the rest
housed in blue. By

“the rest,” meaning those who
–the guide explained–inevitably
arrive suffering. For

some do, he added.
Soft.
Serious. This–like

a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual

stammer of heart the naive
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What

must it be, to pass
thus–clean, stripped–
through a life? What

reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches

is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but

too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I

mean is we moved
closer,
in,

to the blue barn’s
advertisement–
flaw,

weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days

old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small

crowd of us
shifting forward, and–
in our shifting uniformly–it

being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind

single gesture–kowtow,
upheaval–there was
little difference. Some

took photographs; most
did a stranger thing: touched
briefly, without

distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less

for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe–given the lambs who,

besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating

the dwindling contract
between the two.
the flies everywhere)–

maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand’s instinct
to follow the eye, to

confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there–yes–but
I myself touched no one.