IRIS MCCLOUGHAN

The Ha-Ha

Us and the law are fundamentally different.
We beast together. The law is a man thing.
He double knots his drawstring pants
while we knock about the meadow, getting sweaty.

The law frets at the fence but can't let himself join us,
can't let himself run fast, and past his shame at that
there's a red-footed sadness.

In the shaving mirror the law always saves
his mustache for last, thinking each time that he's finally arrived
at the day he'll throw off this yokel style

and make his face light enough to float away,
a blue balloon in the sky over the ocean,
any difference between it and its surroundings finally
one not of kind but of degree.

Then the law won't be able to see us, and that's the day
we'll gather at the meadow's gate, happy
tears decorating the gentle slope
where our own faces used to be.

We know the face is an illusion, floral-
print silk laid over the truth of the body,

and we know the law
isn't yet ready to feel
our hands leading him beyond the fence
congratulating him with slaps
on the back and friendly groping.

We know he'll be there in the morning,
same as always, one arm at his side
and the other on a fencepost,
his lean giving away the direction of his longing.

So we continue at an easy gallop, parading
past, speed hiding the fact
that we too long for him
to join us careening through the wildflowers
towards the cliff.

Promissory

I come upon him
studying with a twilit
diligence. I see
he has mostly accepted
the long evening
of work ahead. The blue-

prints are spread before
him and he's begun to label.
Orchard, field, and smaller things
too: single wave, smear
of ash on palm.
The candle is smoking,

slowly filling up the reading
room with a barely-noted buzzing
darkness, like the sound
of cicadas still underground
one town over, getting
dressed in their armor,

preparing to do battle
with their brief wonder-soaked
lives. There's an expectation—
he knows it, and so do I.
An expectation, though
we can't tell where

it's coming from, can only tell
something is coming, and soon,
so I am learning how folded
I've been, tracing the path
of each familiar crease.
I am practicing how to get smooth.

He is preparing for the long exam,
studying a recondite origami.
There was a time when the symmetry seemed too
by the book, too rote. But
to all those that question the tropism
guiding the growth of love's spines

through our lives, note his hands,
how they slow and float, cloudlike
over the temple I've always been told my body is.
The calm battering he gives teaches me
that instead of mud my body is silk
scarves, a small tornado

of them, all patterned with the real
and imagined flowers of the field.
And when my veil has been adequately weakened
by all his precise and unreadable folds,
after it has been rent
with little to no ceremony,

the gentle and translucent dervish
that is me inside my body
will wind both of the pieces up
and flash them alternately:
now joy, now grief, now
both overlaid for all to see.

Attendance

1.

everything I've wanted
has been dispersed

and planted, set to ripen
under watch of correct climate

in this phase I am a journeyman
my leather satchel cradles my few possessions

my life is a loose chain
of pilgrimage, my work

is to accumulate
and weather

2.

I check in on everything
I've wanted

approach the humble church
in each dusty town, hoping to find inside

a man in black who will give me
cool water, invite me upstairs

and fuck me in full view of the afternoon,
whispering in my ear

that I can't have it,
not yet

3.

in all the cities of night
starkly pulsing, we all repeat

how we hate the world
but we imitate it constantly

eventually, growing thin,
the heart rebels and lays itself down

at the feet of any conqueror
or his statue, standing cold

near the docks, near
the dark water

Other Man at the End

wire shelf holds me
as I ripen into rot, yes
call me fruit and other words

call me faggot and see me revel
in the funny overwroughtness
of it, the simpering glitz

watch me root and dig
watch me love all the mud
I can get into my mouth

the trick is to want
to be negated and
what a trick it is

I feel soft and light
I know how to get fucked
by the wind, gentle and all

the time goes by so slowly
because where have I got to be
I am nothing and I'm everywhere

my hair is long and it mats
so intelligent it's self-
organizing, computers can't

touch me and I don't care
to learn how to touch them
correctly, I bang the screen

I'm wild and I know
that I'm playing right
into the trap they've set

I know they don't know
I grow strong
in their grip

I'll be a beautiful youth
even after youth's blush
has rusted, new goal:

feel always so pulled
by the sex of others,
be the dancer in that storm

of wanting, delicately step
with light rhythm
through the raindrops

of the body.
I'll guide my long silks
with parabolic grace

keep them dry until
the appropriate moment
for their wetting

make it dramatic
like I know how
prove it with eyeliner

I know how to open
how to be overwhelmed
by someone else

I know that this is power
that I can hold
my breath for ever

and ever young, even when
my skin shrivels like a peach
after the prime window

has closed, I know
my dark sweetness and
the pit of my complexity

I Decline

In a real library
the man I belong to
is searching the philosophy

section. I am wandering through poetry,
hoping someone will speak
to me. At random I grab

a small purple book, paperback, wounded
with marginalia, the absent-
minded scraps of thought

another wanderer inscribed then walked away
from. They are mostly non-verbal, abstract,
vague geometries of pencil marks and a few

crosshatched sketches of fruit and flowers.
The technique is apt, though lacking
urgency, unacquainted

with the need that sometimes makes
a visitation and pushes our hands
to paper in a rushed scrawl,

marks twining around themselves
to result in a poem, or nothing
but repeated strokes on a receptive surface.

The man I belong to touches my back,
asks if I'm ready to go. He's got
a book of Plato's, though he hates the Greeks.

I don't know enough
about philosophy to hold it up here
in an intelligent way, and truth

be told I often feel I have little use
for it, preferring instead the slightly
unsettled afternoons, the tide of reverie

rising and falling around me like tulle
in the breeze from an open window.
I nod to him, follow his hand's direction

to the door. Outside
it's another jewel-tone day,
not even four yet. Hours of light remain.

My smile lists.
I know what's coming:
the bed, the empty page.

Iris McCloughan is a trans* poet living and working in Brooklyn. They were the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. They are the author of the chapbooks No Harbor (2014, L + S Press) and Triptych (forthcoming, Greying Ghost) and their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, jubilat, juked, Gertrude, and decomP, among others.