Adie B. Steckel - Six Poems
an excerpt from DAVID
“Everyone is female.” —Andrea Long Chu
Dear David,
I went to work in Chinatown. I drove down 4th across Burnside and thought about My Own Private Idaho and how strange it is to occupy that mythic space now, as the person I am, dressed like a gay boy because for whatever reason that’s what works for me. At lunch, I walked to get a bagel on Everett. Past so many tents. Felt glad my Nikes have passed from white to a more acceptable cream. Sat on the curb eating my bagel. Listened to the B-52’s in order to feed the feeling of living in a great shadow.
Dear David,
I’m reading Nevada (Imogen Binnie) and it’s helping me understand imposter syndrome. And that I have it. And that I will always have it because I will always either be worried about looking like a cis woman or looking like a boy. Or looking like I can just move between them according to my own free will. How that’s really all I want to do—move, move, and keep moving, always passing through something, passing only when I want to pass and being trans exactly when I want to be trans.
Dear David,
I think your shame preceded your rage, but I still wonder sometimes if you felt like the core problem was inside or outside of you. I wonder this because you were prolific and it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone riddled with too much shame can actually get much done. I wonder if I would be better off being more angry and less self-conscious. Or would that just make me even more the problem? And I don’t even think I mean productive in terms of creating a product for someone else or a system or society. I mean productive in terms of doing what is necessary to feel okay surviving. I mean expression.
Dear David,
I’m reading Darryl (Jackie Ess) now, and I know there’s something similarly wrong with me—something avoidant about my approach to self-actualization. I feel like there is something incredibly obvious right in front of me, but I can’t see it. I can’t unspool all of these threads of this giant gender knot.
Dear David,
The problem is that I seem to have been given the choice between sanity and sexuality, depression or libido. I am walking into a cloudy, sexless domain, where my relationship to my body has vastly more to do with image than sensation, let alone pleasure. It feels personal and specific to my body, but it’s much bigger than that. Boys with veiny waists smile bleachy smiles from inside empty mansions. It’s put in front of me and I look. I am inside a great sterile machine.
Dear David,
Jaimie Branch died last night. I’m obsessing over how and why and the sameness of the two questions. It was 9:21 PM EST (9.22.22), in Red Hook, Brooklyn. How? Why? Once more I am swimming in digital condolences, tributes to someone I didn’t know, but felt I knew through art. Of you, I know a profile, a glove, a dead woodpecker. I know the good hearts of bird hunters, I know the birds that feast on the dead, I know the plovers on the lake, the smaller the scorpion, the stronger its poison.