Some Things are Inextricable
The rush of June returns and
once more it’s time
things of beauty spill out of my
mouth like pebbles like teeth
tiny and perfect and I’m only
three years removed from
psychiatric
hospitalization
but I want a prettier word, a neater phrase, something like
revivification
or
the continental divide
Two years ago the first anniversary coincided with my first
dyke march and I peeled away from the crowd to buy
myself pizza and think how it felt to be a dyke and be alive.
In the hospital I read brideshead revisited and it brought
me to life when little else would. I had recently shorn my
head of hair and kissed a girl for the first time and I was
still a woman but I was not very good at being one. Oh well
June will soon cease to signify
madness for me, I’m sure,
give it a year, two, three—
I once thought I’d never look at
my niece without remembering
how I lay on a hospital cot
for her first days, but
now she’s a person all her own.
From the Amtrak between Ashland and Richmond
Virginia is for lovers, a truth that stretches
from the appalachian corner to the peninsula
where I went mad and saved myself from madness.
You can tell me other states have trees, but
I don’t think they have trees like this—on the amtrak
to richmond I remembered what capacious love is,
and to spit truth in my hands and rub it together
I would have to say that this is home in a way
that boston can’t be.
On the james river I leapt from rock to rock
with my best friend who has asked me to
perform her wedding. Capacity, as a quality
of being capacious. The mountains here are
just better, sorry, than any others, because
they remind me of truth as love, as vast
as any ocean—and we have that too,
on the other side, chesapeake bay and atlantic
saltwater, and I grew up knowing that
this is where my bones will be buried.
The Last Summer I Believe We Will Ever Have
Kiera tells me the humidity in Boston is like
being inside a mouth and that
their IMPORTANT PAPERS are DISSOLVING!
And, I read about becoming a citizen archivist
because soon the boot will come for the face
of anyone whose art expands possibility.
And, Vickie says we should go to the beach soon.
And, I have central air in my new apartment
which I feel a tiny amount of shame about.
And, my mother talks about the supreme court
while my senator calls for court packing
while others claim victory and threaten revolution.
And, revolution doesn’t sound so bad at this point,
but not the one they’re talking about.
And, I miss Virginia like a lover.
And, Meadow and I went swimming
in the james river, just two
trans kids enjoying the rapids.
And, I want to move
to Richmond every time I visit.
And, summer makes me remember strawberries—
in childhood dusted with sugar, in adulthood soaked in vodka.
And, forty-thousand people have been murdered in Palestine because
the thing I won’t call my country will not stop sending bombs.
And, I don’t know how to keep writing.
Author’s note: I wrote these poems in the summer of 2024, which to me feels like the very last summer before something. I don’t know what. I spent the first week of July traveling between Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia, seeing family and beauty at every stop, and as I travelled I wrote about the place of art in the face of rising fascism and genocide. The Supreme Court made some bad decisions. My three-year-old niece became my best friend for two days. I saw every one of my four siblings, and I saw my high school best friend for the first time since 2019. The news talked about the rise of the right in Europe. I visited my 95-year-old grandmother and brought her farm-grown plums. My mom watched a lot of MSNBC. And always, since October, Palestinian people are being murdered by Israeli forces and American weapons. How to write in the face of all this? How to reconcile the love in my life with the hatred in the world? Poetry is the place I have turned to to work through these questions, and these poems are the result.
C.M. Green is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their work has appeared in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere. They stand for a free Palestine, and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.
Moist Poetry Journal 