Poetry / CJ Scruton
:: Counterpoint For Prophetic Voices ::
god and satan are not a part of your body // yet in most bible stories //
until they agree to invade // test some things out // see what will move you what will pull or break // if I say you’re not there // loudly // eventually it will come to be true // if you floated in a saltbath with headphones and a mask still there would be voices music // would you // listen // tenderness unnests in the body from places // we can point to // endocrine system // brain // cardiovascular response // we call heart ache // the feeling of clenching fistsized // reminder you haven’t taken // breath of real depth // for weeks // listen // to me I’m telling you // there is stone where once there was shade // you were not wrong not // about this // I told you // love is not a dead letter we hold // unreturned // when there’s nowhere // to arrive
From the writer
:: Account ::
A good account traces an arc, a motion, a work’s act of arriving. But after years, I still don’t know what to do with the fact that I don’t have a clear arc in my life for arriving to queerness or transness. There are fuzzy story-memories, out-of-sequence images I can recall, but the realities of my own body and identity often feel almost as if they snuck up on me, a rescuing hand held out in waters I had no idea I was sinking in. It’s a story of bodies, a clear one—to me—but a story that most stories would miss since the words for it tend to make themselves elusive.
Through the process of transition, I’ve increasingly been drawn in poetry to forms that suggest gaps, missed translations, meanings that seem obvious—and perhaps are obvious, by logics outside human language—but that don’t always get to be recorded clearly in writing. That resist this urge to tell the story perfectly, choosing exactly the right words.
It’s an exercise in trust, in vulnerability: knowing that I can’t say the full story, and knowing what violence can occur when others are allowed to write the story of marginalized people’s bodies for them. Knowing how often people want to write a narrative that’s convenient for them first and foremost. But through these poetry experiments, I have also been accepting that openness and questioning is often the only way to escape prescribed narratives for what our bodies can be and do.
It’s an intoxicating possibility to try and establish trans rights in clear, “logical” language that will make transphobes understand or change their minds. Except that pursuit doesn’t work. Even when we express ourselves as clear as day, they act as if our bodies and stories are blank pages for them to fill in. The pressure to assimilate, to express truths in a way that will be accepted, acceptable, will never actually work. The extended hand we reach for here is not a lifeline, but a snake, a tensed coil of fangs.
The problem I’m trying to parse out, then, is finding language open enough to leave room to explore my own feelings and embodiment without totally succumbing to the fear of such violences. And sometimes, this requires facing those fears head-on. What if I am the monster, or let myself be? What if I want to know the past and future of my body, but admit this knowledge is impossible? In my poems I’m exploring what happens when I lean into the lack of clear, singular narratives for queer and trans embodiment but also invite more possibilities of being known by myself and others in community.
CJ Scruton is a trans, non-binary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley currently living on the Great Lakes, where they teach and research ghost stories. Their work has previously appeared in Shenandoah, New South, Quarterly West, and other journals. Their full-length manuscript has been a semifinalist for the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize and a finalist for the Willow Springs Books Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize.