Milk Glass

by Acie Clark

I used to have this little milk glass I found on a cold beach and this is where I put the water L suggested I start keeping on my nightstand. The cup was from 1946, it said so, and so that was the cup’s name. L named themself after a stone. They once said, “this is an act of devotion to the self.” They were referring to the water filling the glass before bed makes a promise of nourishment, and if there’s water left  in the morning you should simply begin your day by drinking it—but I mean the act of naming, as well.

Another friend mentions an app that trades a photo of a plant for its name. My friends each have names, though I go back and forth as to whether I should share them, or say S and J and P and B, or if I should just say my friend. When I met my friend, the word they used for their name meant “divine feminine wisdom.” Now, their name is a saint’s name. Their name is a city’s name but they do not live there. I was born in Florida, and lately people seem surprised by this, as if all of the anti-trans legislation has succeeded in making it impossible to be both trans and from Florida. Not yet.

The moment I was born, several things were given to me: a name, designation as both female and white, two parents, and legal status as a citizen of the United States. There have been a series of shifts between a couple of these facts and my life now, but my legal status as a white citizen has never been rendered precarious. Despite this, I admit I’m afraid of most legal processes. I am constantly aware of the ways I am not legally myself and I am wary of the process of becoming legally myself. I’m still not sure what it means to me. To become legally myself I would have to also legally prove I am who I am not. To change one’s name in the state I’m currently a legal resident of, I would need to submit a petition to the Superior Court in my county and then publish a notice in the local newspaper every week for four weeks. If the four weeks pass without objection, a hearing would then be scheduled where a judge’s decision determines whether or not I am who I am. What I am is also depressed and an educator and not actually currently living there, and so this process has felt like an insurmountable series of steps since it first occurred to me to look up how one legally changes their name.

I am grateful for the room within the words I call myself: trans or queer or Southern. Trans: not cis. Queer: not straight. Southern keeps me from having to explain the long story of the several states I grew up in, these places that have held and raised me, the weight of the word from.

In her essay and performance piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker takes a moment to ask which is the more liveable of the two: “the mark of gender” or “the unlivability of its absence?” I am not without gender, even as I try to imagine adding an a- to my identity. Perhaps gender is too much with me to forgo it. I’ve asked similar questions of God, of my relationship to religion: I am not sure what to name the God I speak to, or what to call what I believe. If I only ever call my God you, have I left  them to the same namelessness I’m so desperately trying to get out of?

L texts, do you ever wish you were a girl? No. Occasionally. Sometimes I was, and still am. At the CD Wright Women Writers Conference, I feel like I belong and then I wonder if that’s fair: to me, to the space. At a table full of women eating fried cauliflower and Aramark empanadas, H places her hand on my arm and says she’s glad I came.

The longer I live in this body, the less I feel held by the words I use to describe it. I’m always looking for new ones. I try to start from the basics. I was once who I once was and I am not anymore—that much I know—but why? How? One day, I woke up and my first name felt like someone else’s house: a place I was welcome, a place I had grown up, but no longer the place I would or could go home to. I’ve considered how long is long enough to have lived somewhere, or to have had a name, or to have wanted to live, and what to call that.

I once met someone I loved immediately, though we only shared a town for a matt er of weeks. It didn’t matter. We talked about everything, about love and poetry, and about how and where to find each other’s early work on the internet. We joked about our past names, old photos, bios we haven’t bothered editors about changing. Years later, a partner’s mother googled me until she found my dead name, and then sent a screenshot to my partner to prove what, I’m not sure. I was hurt by this, the hurt felt obvious in me, but I couldn’t quite find the language I needed to explain the hurt to myself or to my partner. Artifacts, this friend had called them, these traces of a different version of our lives once lived. I was not ashamed of these artifacts existing. I was ashamed because someone had used them to shame me.

No one could say I couldn’t, not really, when as a child I climbed up the same tree that the other boys did. Then one day one of the boys decided to teach me a lesson. He slipped his penis over the waistband of his red basketball shorts, held it over my head. I didn’t realize what was happening at first. I looked up at him. None of the boys hit him for pissing on a girl, and that felt like a nod somehow. An insult. A pass. Fifteen years later, a friend brings me to my first drag show and we watch as a queen pisses on the crowd as she lip syncs to Radiohead’s “Creep.” My eyes fill with tears and though I can’t tell if I’m laughing or crying, I know to call the feeling I felt relief.

In the drive-thru line at Taco Bell, N draws this distinction between sadness and anger: we get angry when something bad happens that we don’t expect, but sadness comes from having our expectation met of whatever goes wrong going wrong. When I say I was sad about that text from my partner’s mother, what I mean is, I’d been expecting it to happen.

Frank O’Hara says, “You do not always know what I am feeling.” My students always want to talk about this as a love poem, or as an unrequited love poem, or as a love-gone-wrong poem. I love this poem because it seems to say, I don’t owe anyone my interiority, but you, Grace, can come in if you want, because he also said, “you can’t plan on the heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open.” There is a frailty to all language. Saying sad or saying angry or even know or feel. It’s all context, even the words we love to call ourselves. Every word is just a gesture until you add more. Even you. I turn my head now, and I’m just talking to myself, looking at the mirror J gave me that another J had given them.

J and I talk often about the people we’ve known and loved and been. They quote poets I wish I already knew but now get to. We lived together for years, and eventually with P, too,  finding cicada shells on screen doors and shirts, sitting down for dinner, sitting down on each other’s beds. How strange: once it was February and 78 degrees, and J was reading on the porch while I gathered wood for a fire we would start that weekend, when it was supposed to get cold again. Today it’s September and years later and we’re speaking on the phone, six hundred miles between their bed and mine.

When I moved into this apartment, my landlord asked me to remind my girlfriend to send a copy of her social security card, thinking I was the boyfriend of the person whose name was on the lease, the one with my legal name. Th is wasn’t necessarily out of the question. I have been in two different serious relationships with people with my legal name. I haven’t decided if this is evidence of the name’s subliminality in my subconscious or if it was just a super common name for white girls in the 1990’s.

Many years ago, a person who is now a good friend of mine was a person I was falling in love with. T had never thrown a baseball before, and I was teaching them how in the yard behind the building I was about to move out of. They were the first person I had loved since a person who had caused me to question if love and dishonesty can coexist, and if so, then in what proportion. T believed love came from intention, honesty, and clear communication. In our conversations I felt the shadow of my previous partner, and I often found myself imagining my new partner haunting past conversations, wondering what they would think. As we passed the ball, we returned to the conversation we often did, though the path was always changing. How do two people negotiate the precarity of difference, in our case cultural and racial and economic and gendered, in an intimate partnership? Especially when those differences inform our capacity for sharing an experience, or understanding our separate responses to the experiences we do share? How can we be sure we see each other, and how can we understand the lenses we see each other through, especially if those lenses might be smudged? These questions never resulted in answers to the questions themselves, but they shaped how we met each other, how we still do to this day. We were so young then, but I think it’s beautiful that we believed we could get it right if we talked enough about it. That day I found out our mothers have the same name, but spell it differently.

The two animals I live with had names before they moved in, and their vet keeps them in the system with a simple code: Russell [Was Evan] and Sybil [Was Tinkerbell]. The vet calls these their “shelter names” and I am glad for the new language. Naming R took several days. I brought him home a week or so after moving to a new city, nine months after a breakup where the person I needed to leave kept the dog we had adopted together. I had recently started going by a different name, and I had a nervous feeling that I was somehow no longer trustworthy. Those first few days, I called this nervous stranger doggy, sailor, friend. Then there was Arthur Russell, singing Oh Fernanda Why. I was sitting by a window. R was sitting not next to me, but nearby, as I would eventually learn was his way, the way he is.

Belonging is not a noun we can count on: I never know precisely where or how to find it, it’s not always where I thought I left  it, but I like the words we use to tell each other when we do catch a glimpse: let’s go to the farmstand and this video of a baby eating a rotisserie chicken made me think of you and the filthy Frog & Toad memes my friends deliver to my phone.

I love that Frog and Toad are named Frog and Toad because of course. Years ago, I told myself a new word and said “that’s me,” and two years later I did it again. I’m not certain that I’ve gotten it just so yet, but maybe there is too much choice for a totality of feeling. Perhaps it would be easier if I was like R, constantly being renamed. R becomes Rudy, Rutabaga, Baga, Russ, Ru, Sprout. Renaming yourself is one thing, coming up with your own nickname is another.

I have never attempted to call R the name Evan. It feels off-limits somehow, like I’m deadnaming him. I wonder if he would even look up. Some of my friends feel fi ne about their former name, like it’s a childhood friend’s phone number: remembered, but no longer of use. When people say my legal name to me, it usually takes several seconds for a part of me that went by that name to register that I am being spoken to, or about. I guess because I spent so long trying to put each past self past me, there are layers of time to move through. I wanted to believe that my other named self was an egg who hatched into a bird, becoming possible, or true, or myself through some trans-alchemy of realization, but now I’m not so sure.

Early alchemists believed life could come from anywhere (scallops from sand, eels from earthworms), and called the phenomenon, “spontaneous generation.” Alchemy could explain part of it, but only if a person is willing to be mostly incorrect and, furthermore, into water sports. I am grateful for every time a partner and I have peed on each other’s feet in the shower. I am grateful for feeling seen enough to be seen naked by the people I have felt safe enough to, to know my body is and isn’t, to know my body can be but doesn’t have to. I won’t say I’ve given up on trying to fi nd some simpler way to say all of this, but I’m learning that whatever truth we try to unearth from ourselves or the world through language maybe only becomes what it is, becomes possible to articulate at all, in the process of trying to talk about it.

I have been trying to talk about more things and in order to do so I have been trying to re-teach myself English: what we call various verb tenses and what part of speech, actually, certain words such as “like” or “as” or “such” are, what a quotative is or what it means to be predicative, what exactly an imperative is, what it means for something to be so. This process has demystified and made mystical speaking, writing, and thinking. The feeling reminds me of listening to my mother’s audiotapes of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret in the car, the paranoia I developed that I was inadvertently telling the universe I did not want the things I really did want. It begs the question: what does language do whether or not we’re aware we’re making the words do it?

In the poem, “Old Glory,” Ocean Vuong asks language to lay itself bare. “Knock ‘em dead, big guy. Go in there / guns blazing, buddy. You crushed / at the show. No, it was a blowout. No, / a massacre. Total overkill.” As men have come to see me as a man, I find this language more and more often being used to describe the small daily actions I’m witnessed doing, and I wonder if this renders those daily actions innately violent.

When PETA released a pamphlet with alternative, cruelty-free idioms—don’t feed a fed horse, feed two birds with one scone—of course I laughed. And then I thought about it. The significance remains the same, but the story does change. No animals were harmed in the making of this point. K wonders how words will keep changing and this is so her, cautious, caring, deliberate, to already regret having ever said what she didn’t mean to say.

Once at the farmers market where I used to work a woman who sells jams and pickles asked if I could make her change for a twenty, an interaction we had regularly shared for the two years or so that I had known her. On this day, she asked if I was “a he or a she,” she said, “because I don’t want to offend you.” It was a fair question. I had not gone out of my way to come out to the various people who I worked with every Saturday, a compromise I calculated in most rooms I walked into: whether it was less uncomfortable to out myself or to be consistently misgendered. Having started HRT the previous summer, many of the people who had known me in this context had just begun to realize something had changed. When I told her that I was trans, that I used they/them pronouns, she said “okay,” and she gave me a hug. She went on to say, “but you know I will never be a person who gives birth. I am a mama.”

This interaction both moved and disturbed me, as interactions of this ilk often do. Cis people often feel comfortable talking to me about their own gender confusion, their shame or guilt about how they have handled situations with other transgender people in the past, their struggle with gender neutral and neo pronouns. In truth, her assumption that because I was transgender I wouldn’t value her identity as a woman and as a mother off ended me. I couldn’t help but trace this 7 am farmers market comment to where it came from, the conservative media pushing theories that transgender people seek to turn everyone else transgender, that our asking for gender neutral and inclusive language has the ultimate goal of eradicating anyone’s own personal gender identity as if that made any fucking sense. It’s a boring logic because it lacks imagination: that transgender people feel the same way about cis people that they do about us. That if we were to come into power, as if that was the ultimate goal, we would seek retribution, that we would create laws that rendered cis identities not just invalid, but prohibited, that we would attempt to humiliate cis people through the weaponization and regulation of public space, that we would refuse cis people housing, jobs, medical care, that this is the only logical outcome of letting people use the appropriate bathroom, of respecting someone’s pronouns.

In a class with G, we talk about apophatic theology, which works off  of the theory that God is so totally beyond our understanding that Christian mystics tried to create new methods of speaking to even come close to coming close to coming close. I am especially drawn to the not-not method. Adding a string of “not” to a statement is like a magician pulling dry scarves from their throat. I am not not a man. It’s not not true. I try to see how far I can get before I lose track of what I mean.

I tell J I’m not so sure what I am anymore. Th e apophatic not has gotten too complicated. I’m not not not not not. J is listening. J says, I’ve never really thought of you as anything but you. I am grateful for the ways friends can off er a room in which your body can be whatever you want, need, feel. I am grateful for the places where our lives touch, the shared walls. S paints me two portraits: one of J and one of me, and I place them side by side in the room I spend the most time in. Sometimes, walking past, I wave to J and I wonder if the wave reaches them somehow.

I ask my poetry students if any of them identify as poets. They all say no. I ask, “what about as a writer?” and most of them raise their hands. I wonder if we are naturally more comfortable with approximations. Someone gave me permission to be a poet. T said, you’re a poet to a seventeen year old lesbian in the Florida Public School System and it changed my life forever. I’m not trying to impose an identity upon anyone, but I do say good morning poets when we start class, just in case someone needs to hear it. What makes a writer a poet? Is it as simple as writing poems? Is what we are a matt er of what we do, or how we do it? Or how we relate to how we do what we do and the reasons for that relating? Or is it simply the decision to be, to do?

“No one is trying to take that from you,” I think is what I said to the woman at the farmers market. I wish I had said what I’ve been saying to you. I wish I had asked her why she said what she said to me. Instead, I went back to work, selling vegetables and the little pint baskets of strawberries I had picked the day before with F and A, the fi eld a place where talking runs out eventually, is often replaced by the sound of a phone speaker. Too far away to make out the words, each of us hum along across the rows.

Strawberries is a countable noun. You can have a hundred of them. An uncountable noun is what we call words that can’t be quantified as they are: butt er, news, water. You have to put the word in the cup of another word: a pat of butter, a piece of news, a glass of water. There we go. This same trick works with words like longing, or shame. Once my mother said there will never be enough love in the world for you. We were in her living room. It was morning, and I was about to leave, so I put her words in a cup to count later.

Years later, I understand those words differently now. My mother has given me one of my most beloved gifts in this life, the knowledge that some people really do change, that apologies cannot undo damage but can transform it. I now understand where those words came from and the ways they were directed, no, not at me, not really, but at a person both of my parents briefly shared the illusion of, an illusion my mother eventually abandoned, an illusion my father hasn’t yet, the idea that within the person I was telling them I was as I began to transition there was still the daughter they would have rather had, and so onto this unwelcome stranger, they pinned every animosity, none of which were actually new: my politics, my queerness, my boundaries, my pushback to the privileges they had worked hard to have, to give me. My transition brought out a profound protective impulse in my mother, not only for the daughter she felt she was losing, but for her child-self that she sought to heal through having a daughter. She felt betrayed by me, because she saw my life not as my life but as the life she imagined she’d offered me in contrast to the life her mother had given her, that my transition was innately a renunciation of what she had seen as a gift  she gave up so much to give me. 

Among the most precious memories of my life there is my mother peeling a grapefruit, handing me a slice. My mother telling me the story of her first marriage in the long car ride between Virginia and her house in North Carolina. Th e first time I saw my name in my mother’s handwriting, the curve of the A in her cursive. I imagine her pausing to look at the letters one last time. I imagine her placing the envelope in the collection box, walking back up the road to live the rest of the day, this life of my mother’s I only ever see in glimpses, through bits of our conversations over the phone, short visits where we can’t stop offering each other a glass of water.

Family is a tough word to categorize because you can have some of one or one without having one or you can have as much as you choose to make. Family is a gesture. It’s something you can be designated as, legally, or something you do, figuratively. I’m suspicious of the idea that family is something we are, that there is anything innately true about being family with someone.

There are things my grandfather did to me when I was a child that preclude love. I refuse to believe he loved me and am disappointed by the efforts of people in my life who have tried to convince me that he did. I understand their attempts to reconcile their version of him with the version I’ve asked them to acknowledge, to believe me about. The impulse makes sense to me, but I am unwilling to validate the love of a man who sexually assaulted me as a child. My other grandfather and I have only met a handful of times. I’m not sure what it means to be or to have a grandfather; no one has shown me how.

The man who is my father is under the impression he still has a daughter. When he speaks it—when he refers to me as his daughter, or in one historically awkward Mother’s Day lunch, when he listed me in the prayer he spoke over the food, as if having R made me a parent, and that as a parent to a dog I would be a mother—the saying does not create being. I still hope one day my father will let me be his son, but that day has not come. I don’t know where this leaves things. Someone less than a son. Someone less than a father, this man I call on his birthday who has my eyes, this man who I can’t fully accept or refuse the love of, whose love can only reach me when routed through a deliberate misunderstanding.

When I named myself Acie, it was a deliberate act of understanding. It meant I wanted Acie to live. It meant choosing each other. It meant being Acie, and figuring out what that meant to me. It meant being my own friend. I am still figuring out how.

C is my brother because we grew up swimming in all the same bodies of water. Because we were raised and wronged and believed in by the same rooms full of people. Because we still call each other even though no one says we have to. Because when he committed himself to a person I now call my sister, he asked me to stand next to him. Because he is, among the rest of the things he is, also my friend.

Being family is maybe as simple as being a poet. It might be as simple as deciding to be. R and I spend two days talking and when we part, she calls me her family. I believe her. S is not my brother but we do call each other family even though we’ve been in love before and our ancestors would not have in life understood, though we both believe now, in a world over, after this one, that they conspired for us to meet. J reminds me every summer I am invited to their family reunion. K makes me a jacket with my name sewn on in red. B calls from Miami just because. I love phrases like just because just because. I have pensive tender thoughts about the people I’ve met doing anything: making sandwiches and making up words and making a life. My friends and family and students and exes and mentors and strangers are always drinking at least a little water every single day; I wish I could spill into each action: those mouths and those hands and all that sipping; the water from the wells and cities and their names and the sound of it all.

One cold morning this past winter I dropped the milk glass and it shattered on the kitchen tile and I don’t think it happened for any great reason, it fell just because it fell. It feels apophatic to me, too. I lost something in losing this part of the ritual, but I did not lose the ritual itself. I still pour the water, but into a different glass or a soup container or an old sauce jar. Now I have a new ritual before I go to bed where I try to think of everyone I’ve ever known, and what should I call this besides prayer?

Acie Clark is a trans writer from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. They’re currently living in Arkansas, where they teach poetry and playwriting at the University of Central Arkansas. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Nat. Brut, American Short Fiction, Foglifter, and the Opal Age Tribune.