Theory

Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.
—Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble”

Yes they chased me     Yes it was spring        It was spring    It was spring
          It was spring all day and night          All the trees leaning
into light       their fuzzy buds and calyxes  The grass greener
          than whatever’s greenest          The daffodils
yellow and yellow and yellow and cream

This telling will be different     I swear     from when I was 18 and described
          the perfect                                springiness of the grass
under my high tops     Fuck the lyric mountains and the air
          I had just turned ten               We were playing       capture the flag
when the boys in my class    and their older brothers         turned

In the mock Olympic games   I’d won  javelin   shot put   and wrestling
          Came second in long jump       but that didn’t matter now
They chased me          I fled   past the echoing concrete
          of the pavilion    past barrel trash cans     fizzing with flies
past the short field      over the edge of Ragged Mountain

That’s the real name of it        I say the real names of things
          when I know them    Maybe somebody said a name then
Maybe to Ethan        lithe as a deer       Ethan my friend
          who’d given me a folding knife for my birthday    smiling quietly
Or otherwise their blood   moved them like magnets    like swallows

or certain bugs that hang together like nets    fly like they’re woven
          together                Maybe someone said “dyke” or “goy”
their names for me      A boy who had just started shaving     gave a whistle
          gestured with his arm     My body pressed against the mountain’s
steepness       They are so high above me

I can see the soles of their shoes           when they lift them up to kick
          dirt and leaves in my face           Zigzag   swoosh   honeycomb
head of a fanged roaring wildcat     They stone me   stone stone stone
          stonestone       When I wrote of this before     I focused on the rocks
gave their scientific names     suggested I was becoming one

Naming things feels good      cataloging has great colonial power
          and so distracting        A way of looking away
They threw and threw                      All the roly-polys
          from under the rocks revealed and        scurrying
No one came    No one stopped them             They stopped maybe

because they got bored            At first they got farther away as they threw
          Someone         heel-dragged a line in the grass    and they stood
behind it         Humans in a field    Men in the man-made ground
          keeping at bay below the treeline’s dark          dangling edge
something else   Something not made like them

or unmade      abject and profane       I heard a sound from my body
          like a growl      heat poured off my head         I felt my personness
evaporating    as the boys laughed                upright in the mown field
          I bellied up with          millipedes                 snails
last year’s leaves rotting and skeletal

The body   lost human speech then     But somewhere           someone
          was writing    I know that now    at a desk in a cool room
shining-haired   You can’t see them now       you in the bloody torn jeans
          covered with mountain-stuff    but you will    They are
explaining it        That these boys      Ethan

Noah   Shawn                big blonde Jeff who once      picked you up and
          stuffed your whole body in a trash barrel
in a week’s worth of discarded lunches         maggots        broken glass
          and who claimed         to have seen a movie called
Carnal Knowledge       but wouldn’t describe it

They are explaining it all         in a book         They are saying
          you are a person                     who came first
not a copy     They are saying           these boys
          are fictions stoning other fictions        These are the punishments
that attend          These are ghosts throwing at nothing
More Poems by Miller Oberman