torrin a. greathouse, DEED

 

I Am Beginning to Mistake
the Locust’s Song for Silence

Night is lonely as unplucked
guitar strings. Desire: blue
hum of a phone screen making
neon from my skin’s damp spread.
Ugly music of two bodies
rapt in the performance of lust.
Dance choreographed for a third
party’s pleasure. The screen freezes
&, for a moment, pixelates cum
to flake of off-white snow.
A mattress can be a kind of desert.
Mine, a drought—
40 days without softness.
My palm makes the sound
of a thirsty mouth. I’m jealous
of crickets, for how they turn
friction to song.

From self-described Washington State-based “transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist” torrin a. greathouse comes the poetry collection DEED (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), following on the heels of her full-length debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (2020). DEED is a collection of poems on physicality; writing the body—the queer body, the transgender body, the disabled body—through a lens of resistance, limitation, comfort, discomfort, gender and sex. “The truth of most words / is the bloody they leave behind.” she writes, to open the poem “While Researching the Etymology of Punk, / I Discover a Creation Myth Stitched into the Liner Notes,” “Every name I’ve given myself— // a kind of injury.” There is an expansiveness that burns through this collection, moving through elements of burst text and erasure, expressive gestures and a precise, lyric ferocity. “There’s a certain economics // to the way I let them fuck me / as if I were a man. My body more / valuable as anything it’s not. I cut // my hair short,” she writes, as part of the extended lyric sequence, “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire,” “then buried—for years—any hope of a future / girl. Call it backpassing. Cost / -benefit analysis. Safety feature. / I was closeted at every job. After all, / nowhere is safe for girls like me.”