Just tell me I'm right tritinaBy Tam Blaxter
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Let’s count out the currency
of this request. What would it be to feel what you’re feeling—plunge throat-first in the gulp of your journey downwards? Gulp up your stream of deixis—the currency of your frantic rebuilding. I’ve not felt that grinned power in pitch– it feels like years– I mean, don’t you see it can gulp you down, make you to matches? Currency for fights. Currency to feel gulped to air. mortar / ode to trans womenon reading Travis Alabanza’s Before I step outside [you love me]
By Tam Blaxter
that you’re a lamp opening the page/ of the room so
it’s readable \you read my whole history of stumbling so i’m holding up tears ~dizzy stone bust/ emp pty portrait & never lit thing, hear you sing & i bend— you say never more than a guest in cis women’s houses you say this violence is jea- elousie since they’ve been made stones empt ty portraits why does it make my body sing\e ~bend to list listen to you—you say these words were the vi iolence visited on me & i pull back my hand but i stop, won’t visit revis sit violence on me, i hope\ pe\ but what’s hope from a cracked screen or what’s hope from dull brick-in-the-grass & dizzy & emp ptying glass can’t ask to be more than a guest in this messy house of of hope, & hands, & / falter of warmth the weirBy Tam Blaxter
i crack myself open whats
in th hope bein yolk in the open, the thing th thing and no longer the shell tht walks out w/ you all only to bail on gettin ther, shrugs on the open air and int laughing at all—but th weir is like me imean weir unanswring aching head all its life you ask and it clenches back agains the dam you ask and it clenchs bak agains th dam you ask a charm to render you invisibleBy Tam Blaxter
the first half’s hard and will take you years
so don’t go anywhere—stick in there. what we need to do is cut you out of yourself/ the flat space the world you occupy/ what’s flesh but what’s visible you get me? excavate what’s seething/ the avocado-pit the smarting, teething light and/ translucent thing that’s under you. you’ll find old furniture along the way: this the dressing-up box from when you were five, this the door to the cupboard under the stairs in your grandmother’s house, this the piano you no longer play. find attic space, a landfill, you’ll need it. at some point you’ll realise it’s hopeless —you, concrete dam no light can spill— they can still see you & they’ll always see you— but your body will disappear for you so you trip at your invisible feet as you walk, that’s almost what you were looking for yeah? Tam(sin) Blaxter is a poet, historical (socio)linguist and nb trans woman based in Cambridge, UK. Among other places, their work has previously appeared in Structo Magazine, HEArT Journal and FIELD. She writes poetry about language and outer space, about feeling things and being a robot. In the non-poetry part of their life she works on language change in medieval Norway and language change on Twitter. They spend a lot of her time making maps.
Website: www.icge.co.uk Twitter: @what_really_no |
