Poetry / CD Eskilson
:: Recipe for Roasted Broccoli ::
When my sibling says they don’t feel subject to our father’s mental illness
I focus on cleaving through the broccoli stalks. Separating florets from the
trunk, dousing them in salt and olive oil. I want to question the stem
severed from its leaves but this thread tangles when I start tossing with my
hands. My sibling postulates how ordinary growing up was, how little
we’d known about what’s heritable until later. Until trying to form
relationships and being too much every time. How our narratives eschew
slipping grips and siren wails, my sibling says. I watch my broccoli in the
oven as I nod, try to toss the stripped green artery into the kitchen trash.
I miss and hit the wall. I want a gesture that can prove them right. I want to
glue the front door lock our father drove back to review each morning
before work. To sand the floorboard his obsession tried to level. Last
month, I tried cleansing sorry from my language but I didn’t last the
afternoon. I tried until it rained and knew whose fault it was. I know our
father would’ve folded long before me: would’ve blamed himself for
gravity, would’ve safety-pinned the drops back on the clouds.
:: At the Midnight Show of Sleepaway Camp ::
My queers and I clear from the aisles annoyed and damning the director, entering full takedown mode. Onscreen a trans girl romps through teens’ dark cabins, the panicked cry of she’s a boy! giving this slasher its shock-twist. Today the image we’re all killers remains deadly, has only grown more mainstream. But others in our group push back, defend the film. All huddled at a Denny’s, we listen to them fawn over the catharsis in a murder-fest. Admitting over plates of fries to dreams of wasting bullies, dropping angry beehives on assholes throwing slurs. From the ruckus of debate between our booths the film’s subversion sharpens: critiques of gendered violence, forced dysphoria emerge. Can’t we hold both readings of the movie to be true? Know the risk in such vindictive gore, that it still offers us resistance. That we might carry on with movie nights and diner talks, the uneventful lot of it, an arrow pointed at the next abuser’s throat. Can’t we promise to slay whoever creeps these woods and return thereafter to our quiet trees?
From the writer
:: Account ::
hough varied in their forms and themes, these poems investigate how the stories we’re told about our identities mark our lives. My forthcoming poetry collection Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), investigates how representations of monstrosity or “insanity” pervade societal conceptions of both transness and mental illness. Through compacted prose forms, the speaker examines family lineages of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and its ongoing effects on their daily life. Collapsing the poetic line and stanza here complicates the poem’s sense of time to underscore the continued ramifications of their relatives’ struggles. Meanwhile, other poems respond to popular horror films to interrogate the complex legacy of gender panic found throughout the genre. Poems like “At the Midnight Show of Sleepaway Camp” strive to reinterpret the reactionary dehumanization propagated by trans villainy and reframe these horror narratives to allow for queer and trans survival. Here, monstrosity provides an opportunity to reimagine an existence for those living outside of cissexist and patriarchal confines.
CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator living in Arkansas. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright/Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is forthcoming from Acre Books. They were once in a punk band.