Rough Draft as Caeneus Abroad
BY VICTORIA C. FLANAGAN
“Grant I might not be a woman: you will have given me everything.”
—Caenis to Poseidon, Metamorphoses, Book XII
“He did not understand that there is as much liberty and latitude in the interpretation as in
the making...”
—Montaigne
I.
I have this theory: everything I’ve written
is really an acquisition
of language Or acquisition
of one language over another.
Like when I watch skiers laze down
Snoqualmie’s slope like melt,
like Kees’s bathers
stuck in the wrong season. Or the way
a former student writes me to say
she’s experienced a traumatic event
& my hands stiffen & begin to ache
on instinct. How do we make sense
of tragedy in writing she asks me
over iced coffee, expecting
I know. A steamer wand screams
into milk, a muffin cools on a blue plate—
she was the first neighbor to respond
to the father’s yell & she is shaken.
The real question:
what is the poetic voice in excess of?
I am three thousand miles from the place
that made me. Now
in a place with a windy season,
a fire season,
brim of the high desert,
I can see scorched earth & whitecaps
from the same June lookout.
That which takes us captive
shapes us, too. Out here
no Poseidon ever makes good: I'm refused
service at the brewery off 3rd
in my oversized clothes, an ex says
how could you possibly
over FaceTime & I have both
a your kind & no kin
while missionaries find my doorstep
twice a week. Who is there,
in this place, to grant me
release? The dirtfloor arena waits
below a bluff, empty
fifty weeks a year, and I watch the day sink,
thinking, Ravisher, make me anew
in the shadow of high mountains, grant me
liminal-unthinkable, take this,
all of this besides—
& that body, released
dismissed discarded might
just become mine.
This same student emailed a while back
& signed off in the real world I’d like to think
we would have been friends.
Naming’s a whole affair, you see—
it matters what you celebrate
in a thing, too. Name me a god
who hasn’t thundered. That one may speak
and be heard becomes a demand
to speak and be heard.
II.
My student tells me that a father
backed over his daughter with his pickup.
She died, chest-split staining the grass black.
My student talks about the hush
that smothers a block
even weeks later.
The mind, tethered
to the body, officiates
our myth-making. Surveillance buffs
mythos from physical container—
the body is nothing
but a marionette. In my head,
I’ve got hellhounds
on a pack lead
strutting down Pine:
all transition is violence,
erosion, & origin at once—two mirrors
facing out from opposite walls—cause
& invention.
I try to search up the name
of the child:
accident father death girl Seattle,
pickup truck neighborhood accidental death
but come up empty. Name me
a god who hasn’t plundered.
Tragedy & spectacle:
these twin puncture wounds.
III.
Cast out, I begin each day with an invocation
for what I’ve lost—passing:
Let my captors have the legend
if I may keep the sound which marks
my life like a bell.
The quarter I’d had this student
I shaved my head for the first time:
homemade undercut, radiation carryover.
Two years since the scare of a tumor
in my chest, the body bears the mark
of every way it’s been:
I look tough and tired.
This tradition
of the Narcissian pool
obligates a final reflection—
Chase down the name
so that we can have power over it,
draw the force of the thing right up to us—
& so I swallow hard when my student admits
she Googled my name, a name
which is no longer enough. I cannot tell her
that every Thursday for all those weeks,
classes let out to the sweep
of a weekend, I drove the canyon road south of campus
with my lights off, I took every rock-wall turn
lastsecond swearing, sometimes,
I never touched the wheel at all.
IV.
Rebel Poseidon, defiler
of the genderedbody, wield
your sharpest knives. Cut away
& remake in the image
of that which you fear most. Avenge
your boundary with doubt—
all those titles which never fit:
necessity of reinvention a hard year
fleeting emotional response this container with its own rules.
Name me a god who hasn’t pardoned
and cursed in the same breath.
Every idea is a question, too,
& my top surgery is denied
a third time—too risky amid the body’s constant
sway between well & ill
& I tell myself never mind. I tell myself
you are seeking comfort
in a body incapable of such things. Some days
I tell myself there is nothing
to be done. There is so much work
to becoming.
V.
When the buzz grew back
& decisions had to be made,
I tried boy. Hair pulled tight, smoothed
to one side, I thought yes, body as
boy, which became boi, then then,
then was, then just maybe, then just vessel, then
nothing more, then just this once, then
neveragain.
Thing is, we don’t have canyons where I’m from,
just the junk of melt and migration:
passivity, inevitable landscapes. Appalachia
is all slow creep. But ridges—
the exposed rock of a canyon wall
is what remains
when a river has bored its way through.
Name me a god without design:
I have learned to take, too.
My night drive carved its shape
from red desert and basalt,
riparian zone: the surrounding biome
of this foreign earth, a strip of habitat
between the river & the land beyond.
An interplay,
a margin: Space to remake,
right and revise
the narrative—cell mutation, bones hollowed,
chest cracked open like a seed
in surgical—I deadname
girl belle proper
frailmeekthing deadname
diagnosis relapse and recur. Instead take up
them, of consequence, reluctant then a made thing,
then threat, then body between.
Is the line not so very thin
between making again & making new?
Galvanized, then forged, rewarded
for a long and searching gaze. Taking
& taking up, armed—
I have acquired. Name me the god
who says Yes, and.
Worthy animal.
I have learned
all sacrament rests on the tongue.
Caeneus Struck by Side-Effects at a Late-Night 7-Eleven
BY VICTORIA C. FLANAGAN
Between retches, I study the frosted window to my right
as if for the first time: etching
sallow, nicked and private. I’ll look anywhere
but down. Here, on the tile floor of a pitstop,
I divide my loneliness into parts. Section off
the havebeen agonies, the stillare
regrets, lace-delicate: just weeks into gestation,
my radiated body rejects
what it might not bear. The neverwouldhavebeens,
the probablyshouldn’ts. The nevertobeagains.
No, my body is not a vessel
it is a canyon, particle ricochet rising to the edge,
DNA split, each invalid afternoon
a mortal souvenir. But why
attend this constant vigil
for myself? No one says buck up
to the faithless. Anointed by bleach & a testosterone patch,
I imagine a mammoth skull dug up
& drug through midtown. A crowd
stares on as the crane hoists, the tusks
make miniatures of us all. Asphalt buckles
mile after mile, baring in noon light the century’s graves.
It’s not fair to say excising
when it may have been unearthing,
uncovering, discovering—strangeness
evolves by degrees: I was dug up spitting
red clay, voice choked down
an octave from silt. But I have proven,
time & again, unfit. Inviable. Each biopsy
sews up a question—this body not quite danger, not quite
deathtrap. Is it that my body, if it could bear
would bare a thing incomplete as girl?
But uncertainty is not a menace
in itself. Over the sink I remind myself, take heart:
A window is not a mirror, and who am I, anyway,
to disrupt the wonder of this, all this becoming?
