Find This Body and This Form a Body
Persona taken from The New Transsexuals author George Petros’ printed emails to a publisher named Jim, found in a draft-print copy of the book, begging for help to publish
Jim, it’s me again—
Jim, it’s George
reaching out again because
someone found your draft
print copy of the book
and she said she loved it.
She said she hasn’t read it
but that to see the cover,
the name, the body
I put together, was like
being held. She said she
missed the sensation—
didn’t know what it felt like
until it crumpled her.
She said it felt like holding
close the last bit of someone
you will ever get to have.
~
Jim I’m going to be honest with you right now
because I don’t know if there’s any other way
for me to be honest with myself, but I don’t know if I
regret this book. Do you know how it feels
to have people waiting on you, looking up to you,
expecting, trusting, you? How it feels to have
their time, their voices, their bodies, like paper
maché wet in your hands. How it feels to form
a body of bodies? How it feels to form a body?
~
Jim I don’t know if you could tell
but I call my book a body because
I’m obsessed with the body:
How it always feels wrong, how it
just looks like a vast wound with
no back and front cover to close over it
and hide away the most sensitive parts,
how it’s always sensitive, always raw,
always on show, how it’s always subject to readers, how I’m supposed to love it most,
how it’s mine to write but
there will always be the faint warmth of what came before, how cold that palimpsest becomes, how hard it is to find new words to fit
over the old ones.
~
Jim,
be honest:
Was this a useless body?
I thought the book would mean more,
would do more,
than it did.
Maybe
I thought more
people needed me.
But no one ever
followed up, so
I kind of changed
the book:
a few edits,
a new body
of text and first appeals to line the back
and sell.
I changed myself too,
wrote a new resignation
into my heart each night:
I had a book
and it would only be
available online,
away from any hands.
Something to make me
believe that
one of those downloads
is someone
trying to find their self again,
their body in that book.
Sorry It’s Been Thirteen Years Since I Last Wrote You
based on a note left by Josh Claine to
friend Nate in A Face to Meet the
Faces, and Nate’s found receipt for a
cat toy
Nate,
Do you still have that cat? That ball of fur,
I think a tabby or tux or ragdoll,
some name like Whiskers or Fluffy,
who you’d been looking to get some toys for? I
know most cats only kick around for fifteen years
and she must’ve been at least four years old and
it’s already been thirteen years since
I gave you another face-book. I also know
I never left Chicago but I meant to,
been meaning to visit you in Oklahoma
for I don’t know how long now
if only to return the favor
of you visiting me over here,
but I couldn’t find another face-book to bring
and to make you remember me with,
I honestly don’t remember what
made the joke so funny,
don’t really know if I really
needed some key back in.
I hope Fluffy isn’t a memory to you yet,
but I know time passes on no matter how
much we try to forget it, so just know
you’re the strongest memory in me.
Happy belated-birthday, by the way.
I know I missed a few, a childhood’s length,
but my memory’s been pretty weird lately.
Speaking of memory, how’s yours?
Do you think of Heat Wave
or Chicago and think of me?
I never stopped going to festivals: I’d buy my
tix on your birthday so I never forgot it, and I’d
never stopped looking through the crowds for
you. Whenever Heat Wave returns
I get my tix and go and get lost in the crowds
and afterparties and art installations,
because I remember you
had a soft spot for the arts,
and I search for you in those faces crashing
and passing against me. But I think I might
have forgotten what you look like.
I don’t want to call my memory bad— I just
forget some things and exactly remember others:
I forgot if Nate was short for anything— Nathan
or Nathaniel maybe?
if you were an abbreviation on someone’s tongue.
Did that sound like any of the poems
in the last face-book I gave you?
Like something you could’ve
gotten lost in? I can’t tell
if I’ve got this poetry stuff down
but you liked it the most I think.
I still want to visit you in Oklahoma—
still remember how you remembered Ada.
It was always sweet like a strawberry,
sweet like the blooming fruit trees
around Bonnaroo— did you ever go? I went a
few times but none of the acts were the same
as Heat Waves so I never knew where to look.
Nothing has really changed in my life,
nothing worth remembering has happened,
since we last talked.
Best, Josh
P.S. I really do miss you.
At least I’ve forgotten any reasons
I shouldn’t.
