To R., Because Deadnames Make Old Friends Hard to Find & I Miss You.
Yeah, the elderly women from the dried flower department reigned / over us, but our red aprons hid stacks of half-off coupons behind our craft / store IDs, clipped tight. We gossiped over snuck glimpses in the parking / lot: the head manager feeling up that employee. She was sweet. He tended to grandstand. / Refused to use your real name, dead set. His face: a rock / garden, no peace. We rolled our eyes whenever he dropped / your employee ID back in your hand to deadname you. Sympathy forgetfulness, I thought, dropping / my own license on the floor over and over, scolded by the elderly florist with x-ray / vision, who returned it. I fled my own pocket, before I knew who I was. I thought if someone stole my ID, they must be at rock / bottom. I was a student scraping by on a slim budget, crafting / a self out of used books while you and I laid on a bare mattress in your grandmother’s / apartment. We drank until we stumbled downstairs on a parkour / trek up the street, our stomachs craving salty solids, amusement park / gastric turns on the walk to the Cumberland Farms, sloshed off our asses. Before dropping / off for the night, you described anal with your boy to me, as open as the Grand / Canyon. No bottom between us, or both of us actually. Your boyfriend claimed to be straight, like mine: arrangements / that make me laugh now that I’m older. Gender was our real craft / project. Costumes, our art supplies. We all wore them. That guy plunking rock- / a-billy in your living room, his amps fighting horror flicks playing on video. Punk rock / kissed Rocky Horror. We did what we wanted. Anarchy by faux album release. Parking / our asses on your broken sofa, jumping up and down with Jack and Colas. Crafty / theme parties to loosen anxiety. Nowadays, I suck on sour drops / to stop flashbacks, heart firing as fast as that boy’s drum kit and his long-gone reign / of percussion. Young, we shapeshifted. We made our bodies. Corporate grandiosity / couldn’t claim us. Our manager was one rabid man afraid of wet places, trained to gain from every grand / opening, shocked at our self-possession. He fixed on you being fixed. So we rocked / our heads side to side at hard bigotry, then first-shift, we softened, again and again, and fluffed the felt pom-poms, stacked the crayon / boxes, and tidied the glitter packets. We watched his wife drop off lunch, us lounging loose, parked / in the break room while you absorbed his shots. I had no word for fluidity yet. I was a teardrop. / My flood came later. I was a display of shorn hair, chest flattened by sports bra and unisex craft / t-shirts, no puffy paint or patches. You were so much like your grandmother, so generous. The craft / store hid me among the racks of decals. I should have picked a name there: scrapbook aisle a grand / tour of trans nomenclature, fussy stickers of birds, birthday months, flowers. If I dropped / this name then, who would I be now? A revolutionary November pelting rock / through window in protest, a Crow cawing back at the dark, and every flower in the park, / not just one bud, but blooming on and on, moving through transitional stages, like a spray / of Baby’s Breath in all grandeur, out and out? What I mean is, you moved me: you were a Rock / dropped in my lake when I was water waking up to being fluid. Now the local park / in spring gushes out flashes of our retail friendship, all the crafty hell we used to raise.
Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus, the Senior Reviews Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Multigenre + Chapbook Editor for Split/Lip Press. They write outside Providence, RI.
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