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      June 4, 2018Scott BealAmbiguous Antecedents

      When the kid tells you their new pronoun of choice 
      is it
      you count to ten. You try to see
      the kid as the kid sees itself.
      A pile of wet stones. A pall of whetstones.
      Morphology with segmented abdomen. 
       
      When strangers hear me speak of my partner
      they assume he’s male. When my partner
      speaks of her partner,
      strangers assume she’s female.
      Partner seems like such an unloaded word,
      a word that should make 
      a harmless click when triggered.
       
      A female client (A) tells her female therapist (B)
      about the myriad joys and frustrations 
      of her relationship with Nick (C),
      and with no interrogation they both agree:
      he, he, he, he.  When A tells B
      the Nick is a transgender man,
      the therapist immediately switches Nick’s pronouns
      to she, she. It is a curious reflex,
      a perturbation of the X-Y plane.
      Nick becomes quadratic, a variable in a problem 
      with multiple solutions, neither of which
      can displace its opposite.
       
      Redact the last stanza. I loathe referring
      to people I love as coordinates.
      Someone’s feeding coordinates into targeting systems.
      My friend snaps her fingers in her therapist’s face.
      This is the love of my life you’re trying to erase.
      The therapist snaps back.
       
      No matter how I hated my name
      I never dreamed of changing it. It sounded
      like a hammer glance off rock.
      It sounded like a syllable
      repeated by a clock. I almost wrote
      glock. It was the suit of plate
      I was born inside. Its hinges were fixed.
      I would grow into it. Its perimeters
      defined my growing shape.
       
      Now it places the lotion in the basket.
       
      Every term I tell my students their writing fails
      due to unclear antecedents.
       
      Christian groups oppose the LGBTQ agenda.
      They’re trying to impose a radical view of sex.
       
      Kid wants to use the same bathroom as my son.
      Kid was born female. This is unacceptable.
       
      When the teen musters the guts to tell you
      they want you to refer to them
      no longer as Z but as A,
      it is not monstrous to wonder, though it is
      monstrous to say it, what was wrong
      with the name I gave you?
       
      Okay. You weigh it. You’re it.
      You’re who everyone on the playground
      will be hyperaware of. The one
      they’ll do their best to not let touch.
       
      When a person is introduced as he or she,
      you code the designation in your brain.
      Does the designation change when you receive information
      the person is trans? Due to what disbelief?
      RuPaul says we’re all born naked,
      and the rest is drag.
       
      When you’ve known a person their entire life
      so well finally they trust you with the gift
      of their one true name, you have to train
      your mouth that love’s sound can take new shapes.
      Each time you speak of your child
      there’s a hitch as you make sure
      you remember who they are.
       
      When Prince died I told my kids how he made himself
      unpronounceable. They hummed at how the symbol
      he invented for his name
      blent the arrow and the plus.
      Vector/excess. Female/male.
      They never considered the nail, the cross.
       
      This morning the artist formerly known as Zoe
      would like to be known as they.
      If you’re vexed at the fact
      that they’s a plural pronoun,
      you understand better than you think.
       
      When the kid tells you their pronoun is it
      you flinch. You love them so much
      for trusting you with this. You want to give them
      every inch. But it’s so easy 
      to string up a thing by a pulley.
      It’s so easy to burn an effigy.
      You worry what way it’s trying to pave.

      from #59 - Spring 2018

      Scott Beal

      “When I was nineteen I wrote a poem called ‘Assessment of My Masculinity,’ and assessments of the idea of masculinity have driven much of my writing since. It’s exciting to be living in a time when all the received notions about gender are being challenged, opened, surpassed. I learn new things every day about how it’s possible to be a person, from my kids, students, friends. ‘Ambiguous Antecedents’ is one of many recent poems that grapples with both the liberation and the danger of stepping beyond the binaries we’re coached into.”