T4T by Sebastian Merrill
Associate poetry editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: T4T is a celebration of love in flux with the brutal yet banal nature of our changing trans bodies. It is not the surgeon's hands that make the man here, but the mouth of a lover. With a direct address sharp enough to shape diamonds, Merrill testifies to the power of trans love and the beauty of imperfect change.
T4T
after Oliver Baez Bendorf
I open my mouth
to you: you crane,
come again.
Husband.
I’m slow to miss you, slow
to branch and bend.
You, stranger then lover then friend then lover again.
You, there at my second beginning, before
I took this imperfect form
and shaped myself anew. Brutal,
the arc of change, the needle,
the knife.
Instead of the surgeon’s,
I wish your hands were the last
to touch my breasts.
My nipples?
You bite them now and I feel
only an echo of pleasure
or pain. But I love my flat chest,
and yours. Mouth full of you,
I take all of you in: exposed
white of your throat, the nipple
you almost lost, but didn’t, scars
less faded than my own.
I hold on my tongue the memory
of that first kiss,
our hard want,
the men we were and then became.
Sebastian Merrill's poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from wildness, The Columbia Review, LEON Literary Review, Broadsided Press, and NonBinary Review. He served as a reader for The Paris Review from 2019-2021 and was a staff-scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2022. He has received support from Friends of Writers, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Academy of American Poets. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Read more at www.sebastianmerrill.com.
