SPENCER WILLIAMS
A Retelling of the Shortest History
Listen.
I left my body out to die and it keeps coming back to me.
First, with the meat-thick hands of a cruelly handsome
doctor. In the way he stood me straight against the door and
pulled my dickskin back for spots of disease. My
scrotum cupped like orbiting Chinese exercise balls.
Call it clinical routine. On the checklist I filled out
in the waiting room, I marked boy virgin non-smoking.
Second, a resignation. When the doctor toyed
professional around the rim of my dick, I screamed, recoiled.
Sucked in my chest.
Third, a feral beast thrashing against the prod.
I suppose we call this history now.
My lack for the intimate. Checkbox virgin. Checkbox
no STD testing. Checkbox attraction to the opposite sex.
Am I a liar? Do they have ways to tell if I am girl enough
these days?
On the table, the doctor swabbed my throat.
Forced a choke from me. Told me, lie down.
I have not since moved from this position. No one told me I
could get up.
•
Ok, I am nine and a friend is with me. we are eyes trenched
inside the screen of the downstairs PC monitor. My friend
googles “vagina” as if to break a vow, finds us a game to
play, entering his mother’s birthdate on the homepage.
A bug-eyed cartoon woman begins to stare through us,
tugging at her shorts atop a salmon-shaped pillow. I do not
have time to register this suggestion before my friend drags
the arrow over her shorts and forces a shudder from her. I fix
my gaze into the exaggerated pink underneath, her proxy squirm
carving sickness on the backs of my eyelids. She has
no name. We do not give her one, even after we stripped her
cold and win nothing.
After my friend goes home I hold my breath until my insides
bruise. I do not know my crime, only that I have committed it.
•
Ok, thirteen, in a room full of boys hiding behind the temporary
comfort of a costume change. Cats the musical hands a
group of us our skin-tight leotards. In the dressing room, the
apparition of a girl appears beneath the stern gaze of an older
boy, as he straddles the makeup chair. Shirtless and
dancer-toned he turns to me, asks What are you looking
at?
Nothing.
In the wings, I see gonads kicked across the stage: blood and
babies everywhere. Before my entrance, I feel them slapping
against the inner part of my thigh. Reminding. I do all I can
to erase
or—
•
Ok, sixteen and I tell a girl friend Sometimes I want to be you.
When neither of us can glean meaning from this, the words
just hang there, widening.
When I get home, I stream pornography in the room that used to be
my brother’s. The porn is curious. I do mean my regard
for it. A cis woman’s face is aggressively creamed. The
camera shakes like the Blair Witch is chasing its operator through
some unholy wood. I wipe my face instinctively and banish
beads of sweat towards my brother’s linens. There is a name
for this, I think. Something close to guilt. I look at my
hand. In the center, two drops of blood.
•
Ok, twenty-one, and I read Vivian Sobchack’s What My Fingers
Knew for a class twenty years too late. Sobchack’s thesis: the
movie screen becomes the body in the theatre chair becomes an
invisible physical pleasure for the viewer.
An example: the opening shot of Jane Champon’s 1990 film,
The Piano isimpenetrable to sight. We cannot decipher the
material imitation with vision, even as the image feels penetrable
to touch. This is to say our fingers spasm as if holding the
alien noun. But the eye cannot decipher. Still, like a teardrop
eroding the fleshy trench of a cheek, we know the noun is
there, brushing gently down our skin.
Conclusion: the subject does not need to be known by the eyes to
be known by the body.
•
Another example:
A trans woman in a porn video fracks in and out of a blindfolded
man. As she pegs through him, I am unable to call it anything
other than an understanding.
You don’t get to see that part.
The trans woman smiling alone on the cutting room floor.
•
Ok, still twenty-one and I begin to whisper woman to myself.
It feels the same as repeating my name.
The apparition lingers in the periphery while my boyhood
floats like a black fly on the surface of my milk.
Hindsight, I think, was born with a drop-dangle earring between
the legs. I suffocate beneath my memory, having been the
unboy window gazing department store mannequins,
strip-teasing in the bathroom with mother’s lipstick
smatterings smeared sneakily across my face.
Reader, is there another word for imposter, for a body
unaware of the lies it tells?
I cannot change the stubborn order, of how to make you see me as
I do. I cannot see where I begin clearly enough.
Around me, people are smiling. Each tooth a weapon
cradled in their mouths.
Over the phone, my mother calls me Spencer
and it feels like picking at a scab.
PSA to Whichever Man May Hold This Body First
You are given too much leeway to decide where this body
could remain. Perhaps behind the stomach of a
sandstone wall, with no dent to pry an entrance.
For where does my mythology end if not in the arms of
God? If not him, perhaps my mother. Perhaps
facedown in a forested ravine. Perhaps a limb or two
lapping the sides of the bathtub in a pool of two-inch water.
This is to say I do not believe in the casual touch, only the
touch which turns me casualty. If I am held by anyone, it is
in the confines of periphery, or else by ancient strands of
social narrative breathing ash into my mouth.
Am I to be desired as anything less than mythical?
My body, an apple hanging like a ripened threat.
If salvation has a mouth, she has clogged it with tumors,
can no longer speak me towards her.
As such, I recede back into the crease of my blood,
morphing a means of inimical exposure. For what does it
mean to be a body present under the guise of permission?
The outing of trans blood is always a non-consensual
authorship.
In one version of the story, I am lost inside my body,
carving holes into my caverned side for a spot of peaking light.
In another, my body lays starving for rejection,
sucking on the knife that gut me sideways in the alley.
There is too, that human flesh drip-dripping from a closet
hanger’s makeshift meat hook, and me, staring back
with sinister twinkle from the vanity mirror.
And lest we forget, that mother figure entombed
inside her rocking chair, her bleached wig curtaining my
eyes above the staircase, cleaver firm like a prophecy inside
my sweating hand.
Because the night is a clot in the sky. Beneath a piss-streak
of moonlight, my blood removes her red and shifts,
becomes unintelligible oil tonguing into the ground.
I have to ask why my narrative so intrinsically tied to blood,
to the image of blood, to the acknowledgment that wherever I go,
blood is found trailing after me like a stray.
Why my trans body synonymous with the concrete warmth
of a sidewalk.
Why my body embarrassed by the exiting of blood.
Sometimes I twist my neck around and shoot my heart
towards the fence. It hooks on a loop and bursts like a
surprise party.
Dick Poem
I said to the poem,
give me a new thing.
give me the dick poem I'm afraid of,
how it hangs like a dead branch between my thighs.
I said,
parse each fiber like butterfly wings inside a glass box
at the MoMA.
Force me to watch until I’m over.
Then give me splayed dick made delicate mapwork
of red and blue canals.
Please.
Paint my dick in blood and shoo away the color.
I said,
tie my hands together.
Break me so I cannot masturbate for years.
Dissect the boy with tweezers until he is see-through
bits of loose skin and marrow.
Hand me back half the body I came here with.
Poem,
I said you are a liar.
In 2008, you told me I was a gay man.
Nine years later and I can’t read or forgive you.
Nine years later and I am still unceremoniously
attracted to men who call me dude.
In 2015, I told you I am woman with a history
of women clawing through the skin of my back.
In 2017, I told you I am trans and you did not spit
back, was no longer shocked to hear me say this.
Poem,
you’ve made a cruel distance of my body.
You are the only poem I’ve ever written.
Yes, the one about the body,
about the clustered limbs, the swallowing, the tongues,
the spit, that awful, grimacing bone.
Yes, the poem where my body called me first and not the other
way around.
Yes, the poem in which you cannot see my dick because I don’t want
you to.
And I said yes to that poem.
Yes,
I said yes.
.
Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of Alien Pink (The Atlas Review Chapbook Series, 2017) and has work featured in or forthcoming from [PANK], Cosmonauts Avenue, ANMLY, Hobart, Alien Mouth, and Potluck. She is currently a poetry MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Newark, and can be found tweeting sleep-deprived nonsense at @burritotheif.