3/7/2024
Write Club ATL, transness, and blood
Well, it’s been two months since I updated this blog so let’s get into it.
The new year has been good to me. I’ve been writing, performing, and reading, all of which has been going about as well as I could hope. My friends are also writing, which fills me with an unrepentant joy. There’s an ethereal magic to knowing that people I love and care about are building worlds in their head and doing the work.
I carried that enthusiasm with me when I was invited to perform in one of Atlanta’s longest-running reading series: Write Club. The format is essentially a writer’s duel with each performer writing to oppositional themes like Us vs Them, Sweet vs Sour, and Simmer vs Boil. I was assigned Boil. Once the themes are assigned, we prepare seven-minute pieces about our topic and the audience votes on which ones they like best. I was lucky enough this time to win my bout despite Simmer performer Zack Linly absolutely destroying the audience with their piece before me.
It was an honor to perform with the eclectic group of writers and performers at the event and, if you’re in the Atlanta area, look up Write Club, it’s a hoot. You can read my piece below.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
Phlegethon
Lately I’ve been going back and reading the things I loved as a kid. Old
comics, old books, reintroducing myself and seeing if I find anything new.
For example, when I read Dante’s Inferno to establish myself as the edgiest
fifth grader at Christ the King Middle School, I never gave much thought to
the moment where literature’s favorite gay sightseeing couple stumble upon
a river in the seventh circle.
The less famous little brother of the River Styx, Phlegethon. It’s this boiling
river of blood in which those sinners who were violent against their
neighbor are, well, boiled in blood. They reveled in blood, and are punished
with an embarrassment of the stuff. It's classic Dante and now I think about
it like once a week.
You see, there was a teensy little moment when I was spending my
birthday driving needles through my girlfriend's butt, where I'd stopped to
wonder if I'd become a more violent person since I transitioned.
The whole time I was a guy, I had trouble being rough in bed. Literally
couldn't even give a classic, happy, hetero slap on the ass. It caused fights!
I would hang my head, cry my eyes out and tell my partner..."I just can't be
that kinda guy."
In all fairness, I was half-right.
Ever since I cast off my name, ever since I wrapped my manicured hands
around the throat of the boy I was and squeezed 'til my voice changed, I'd
become one of those snuff-dreaming, too many impact toy owning, "is it ok
if I choke you a little bit?" kind of Sapphics they warn you about.
All I can say is that it kinda just sneaks up on you. Like a frog in a pot of
erotic violence. One day you read a couple of spicy poems and tumblr
posts, you look at a different kind of porn than you’re used to. Next thing
you know you're sitting with your girlfriend at a seminar about spanking
technique and using words like "flensing" when you sext. Everything's
gradual.
The blood slowly builds in temperature and before you know it, foams over
the shore in thick, viscous, cauterizing waves. And you just get carried
away.
I take drugs every day to change my blood into the death of my boy-body.
They say the true death is when everyone forgets your name and I am
killing myself to be new. To be trans is to be violent at least one time to at
least one person. To be trans is to know violence.
Over a thousand anti-trans bills have been proposed across the country
since I came out. The rhetoric has escalated to the point where people on
national TV are fine saying we need to be eradicated. When I went down to
the capitol last year to beg for healthcare, I saw it. I saw apathy and
mistrust. I saw hatred and condescending smiles. I felt my blood boil.
The spittle that flies from pundit's mouths is the froth of pitched cauldrons.
The river is hot. The blood is churning. It is flowing through congress "Here
they wail aloud their merciless wrongs."
And what are my wrongs?
I am more violent, I guess.
I am also gentler and more inflamed with passion than I have been in my
entire life.
I bite lovers until they bleed and hold them until the bleeding stops.
I have looked the violence of my birth, the mutability of my flesh, the
fundamental lie of the body in the eye and spat in it. I have seen the river of
blood and chosen to be its naiad.
When a kettle is boiling it screams. Since I realized I could be anything, I
could be anything but silent. My blood is the loudest sound I can make. I
make it every day. Like tea. I sit with the scream until I can put my lips
around it. Until I can take it like medicine.
My morning estradiol boils my blood until my skin bubbles up into hips and
tits and a body I can't look at in the mirror without weeping for joy. When
things boil for long enough they become soft. It is a cleansing heat I hope
everyone gets to feel.
Once every six months I get my blood tested to see how my transition is
going. I watch the blood pour into the tube and am amazed that it is not
boiling. So much of me feels molten, feels like a volcanic vent has replaced
my heart. I feel like a burning ocean, like a river hot and thick enough to
flood and spill enough to scald the world pink and new.
When we are born, we are all covered in blood, like we'd been swimming in
it. We had gills in the blood. We could breathe in the heat.
I and my sisters, my brothers, my non-binary anointed family of chemicals and clothing and binding and packing and change, had the courage to dive back into the river. If that is a sin then I would grin at any Dante on the shore and beckon them in.
I would ask all of you to think of the river that splashes your bones, that
ferries your air to the tips of your fingers and back. Think of the Phlegethon
in the hell of your hearts. Think of your blood.
It is a miracle, a teeming river of cells, where each one of them is a gasping
lover in heat. I would ask you to turn, just once, toward the flame, to let
yourself catch and boil.
What steam would rise from your skin as you swim?
