Neither one thing nor the same
thing all the time, I am the punch
lines of jokes about copy and type, the mark of least use,
the maiden aunt of punctuation.
I feel at home in old formes, amid dust and clutter,
akin to the moths whose wings show my outline,
no good in a crunch.
Educated kids forget my name
or try to turn when, if ever, they would choose
me into a game. I am also accused
of harboring ambitions above my station.

I am still figuring some of that out myself.
I know, though, that I was made to join together
things formerly thought incompatible, to be neither-
nor and both-and; to seek a connection
that does not amount to copulation.
In Greek I simply indicate a question.
I always keep one eye open. I know what I’ve seen.

My siblings-in-arms include the tractor trailer,
platypus, lungfish, merfolk and seaplane.
When challenged about my right
to exist by some precocious reader or editor
who makes my deletion into a helpful suggestion,
I once allowed myself to be struck out;
now, however, I will more likely assert
that I have been around for centuries,
long before anyone asked me to explain.

Stephanie Burt

Sligo town

This small child at a travellers’ halting site
(in American: trailer park)
chose to arrange
two-dozen-odd slabs of cracked asphalt,
each about the size of a housecat,
so that
they made a straight path, then veered up to the property line
in the shape of a giant, crumbling question mark.
Anything, given time, can become a fine
art. Anything can turn over, or decline,
or break, or come back together, or simply change.
Put that in your model museum. Put that in your vault.

Stephanie Burt

I’m proud of my work,
if you can call it work:

I am, also, fond
of far-off lightning, and completed connections,

and and and and and and and and.
I want to be everyone’s long-distance friend,

a second-chance source for anyone’s tenuous spark.
Like sex, I may be overemphasized,

overlooked and misused, kept out of the most polite quarter.
No mark I make should ever

be final. I love the idea of public performance,
like a girl on a wheel in a spotlight on a wire.

I see myself as neither straight nor curved.
And yet I am all too familiar with

the experience of creativity as temptation,
the feeling that you are always required

to volley, that you are never allowed to serve.
Every tragedian I know is a liar:

the announced end of a story is never
the end. That postcredits scene is my salvation,

my first line of self-defense,
the board I break, the myth I use against myth.

I am insatiable, forever
and always still swimming, and on my way. I take

and wonder whether I give. I know what it’s like
to believe you have an appeal you never deserved.

Stephanie Burt

We, too, feel uneasy alone; we believe we exist
to keep you safe and self-contained, at the cost

of making you seem, or feel, like you might not matter,
or not from the outside,

or not much.
We try to protect you. We have nothing to hide.

We can adjust
ourselves to look straighter, or flatter,

or more like sharpened claws, but we largely prefer
the state in which we resemble finger-

nails, or a French manicure,
reaching out with both our hands, your cure

for shapelessness, for your persist-
ent feeling that you will forever

remain immaterial, that you are better
off that way, that there is nothing or

nobody you are ready to let yourself touch.

Stephanie Burt

We have a soft spot for drama,
    and for memorization;

we like to share whatever we have been told.
    We liken ourselves to tadpoles, to works-in-progress,

to fishhooks, to earbuds, to loquacious
    teens, and to their vintage Princess phones.

We used to believe that, being so good
    at belatedness, we might never have to get old,

which was our mission, or our curse;
    though our true age is unclear, we have had equivalents

in nearly every civilization,
    both in our efforts at sarcasm and our attempts
at protests. Leave our single sisters alone.

We come in several shapes but are never
    heartless, or pointless, and never entirely straight

If you ever see just one of us,
    wait.

Stephanie Burt

   Honestly astonishing
the first time you see them unless you grew up with them,
   they look prickly enough
        to cling to your clothing. Instead

   they are a soft
unsettlement, their promise
   of sweetness more than justified
        inside, like the way

    you told me you once
got to pet a porcupine, nibs
    relaxed and folded back for better
        nuzzling, or the first

    time (after waiting and
waiting) you let me hold
    your hand. Cliché
        means clench, clutch and

    predictable, but also
sometimes true. Sometimes I feel tenderly
    opened up, wet and revealed as if cut
        in two. I want to spend
            today with you.

Stephanie Burt

What if you really had never heard it before?
The throaty voice, the credibility
And strength of a man who could always pick you up
And bring you to that one place and keep you there
And never abandon you, who would move only slowly
And never in circles, a man who would hold your hand

Gently and yet unrelentingly, whose very
Hairline crept up to a heart-shaped peak
Whose gentle curves matched black-tea-colored eyes
And as-if-penciled brows, so that those farewell-free,
As-long-as-you-need-me tones of reassurance
In him and him alone could be believed. There is so little

On this Earth you can trust, so little that comes around
And never goes away, but we will always
Have this gem, this constant
Companion, this life preserver whose love is a promise
You should have seen coming: he is, indeed, never
Gonna give you up, never gonna let
You down, never gonna run
Around and desert you.

Stephanie Burt

When the wind picked up, the field dried.
The window. The sound
of apples blowing from a tree.

Sex was the first thing
someone else took away from me.

Taneum Bambrick

Eating beside the wives of all his friends, I quietly order three oysters. Disgusting, the person beside me laughs when the half shells come over ice on a little glass plate. That smells like a dirty woman. Leaning together, they wonder how nauseating it must be for their husbands to go down on them. I am sitting across from a man who, in bed, turns to ask, Are you ready? Sometimes I am. Other times he reminds me of all the women who came so quickly with him. There is no productivity in imagining the people of my lover’s past. Or to saying, here, that I am queer in a way that might puncture the conversation.

Taneum Bambrick

Lay my figures bare
              and give them no rest,

I can relate to his premise, that he was born on Jupiter

and must be getting back soon,

that the earth is a failed planet,

that rehearsal itself
              becomes a ceremony.

Cedar Sigo