10/15/2023

Air and Performance

The Winter my girlfriend couldn't sleep, when the miles between us calcified into jagged teeth, I read to zier before bed. 

It started with children's books, Avi's Dimwood Forest series and Brian Jacques' Redwall books, but soon gave way to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Billy Martin’s Exquisite Corpse. As I read and ze snored, I found myself rediscovering the way reading aloud brought language to life. 

Books I had loved for years, since childhood, found new life in my mouth and against my ears. My audible account, thick and choked with cobwebs of neglect, breathed a sigh of relief. I started reading with my ears again letting professionals and performers turn old favorites into new loves.

The next Spring, after I lost my job and wandered the wastelands of the internet for any distraction, I wound up in a discord server and, on a whim, checked out one of the VCs. Amid the dozen or so effortful attempts at socializing, I heard a voice like a deep copper singing bowl. A woman’s voice reciting something. The words were familiar, but again, galvanized by contact with the empty air, rudely birthed from symbols to noise:

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting..."

I had read Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" dozens of times scattered across Tumblr and Facebook posts and quoted across Etsy cross-stitches, but here it was again. I heard the poem again, in every sense of the word.

The voice in the VC, I’d learn, belonged to a woman named Raina. After a few fumbling DMs, I realized I had found someone who would become my close friend with supernatural speed. 

Profound experiences have never been in predictable places for me. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa, or gazing up through the oculus of the Pantheon, I felt nothing but the weight of expectation. 

Here, though, in an esoteric little corner of the internet, under the giggling tutelage of a self-proclaimed internet troll, I learned to breathe again.

I began to swallow poems by the fistful, reading them aloud in the dark of my bedroom like summoning spells and then devouring whatever apparition was given life by my air. Raina's antics drew me in, turning me from appreciator to accomplice. As the VC streamed videos and chatted, we giggled and chanted through Sara Teasdale and Emily Dickinson, roared through Charles Bukowski and Ted Hughes. Eventually, like all pranksters and vandals, we started making our own art, writing our own poems. My poems were given life again, alongside hers. I remembered the way performing felt. I started looking for open mics. If I had fun playing my little pranks with Raina, I reasoned, perhaps I'd enjoy getting back out there. 

Poems are living things, and they need air to breathe. Raina taught me that in the fading hours of morning with an impish lilt in her voice. Reading aloud taught me the beauty of sound, each fricative and loping vowel was a brush stroke. 

However, if Raina’s voice taught me to love poetry again, poetry taught me to love my own.

Training the trans woman’s voice, I’d learned, was an inelegant process. Exercises offered up the same rude parade of honks and squeaks and kludgy bundle of phrases. Paragraphs about rainbows, maxims about heat and fire, and endless recitation of vowel sounds baked into every lesson were threatening to drive me insane. Raina, in her own wry way, gave me permission to seek another way: an old language made new again. Ted Hughes, Maggie Nelson, Julie Carr, and others offered a roiling new curriculum to pour my molten throat into. 

Poetry, again, after all these years, taught me so much about myself.

Watching recent videos of myself, I could see my progress, see the metal of my French horn bending and hammering into a piccolo. 

I owe this to Raina. To poetry. If you find yourself reading this, my faraway friend, I hope you know, to me, those two things are one.

Recently I was given the enormous honor of performing in a Trans reading series alongside the poet and writer Emerson Whitney. My friends all told me how good my voice sounded. I smiled and thought back to the VC and the server and the mischief that built my new noise.

As if learning how to talk again were not enough, I recently started learning Italian with Duolingo. Another new language. Another new genre of music. Another furnace. Unfortunately, I have to settle for a cartoon owl instead of my dear, devilish friend, but there's nevertheless that familiar rush of a new vocabulary. 

I would read the words for coffee and milk and church. I would speak them aloud for the exercises.

Like my voice, like my poems, like my friendship, like the shuffling world around me, I watched them come alive.

I watched them breathe.

Yours with an open mouth

-B.