Poems and Texts

THE BAROMETER IN MY NECK, by Trace Peterson

Philip Good & Trace Peterson
Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 8:00 pm
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THE BAROMETER IN MY NECK

I love this scroll bar, increasing in density
your paw on my shoulder a gentle, foggy
offering. Meanwhile, I’m hunched
against some crooked shoulder-length wall tones
trying to determine how Leigh
Bowery can see out from inside that full immersion
wig. In the Bowery, there’s this cobbled
Salvador Dalí, leathery together
but then suddenly this moat appears
around my voice. You should come over,
you should try to be my cobbled life
says the worn-away toe of the boot, as it turns
back into a lucky nightclub. “If we’d stayed there
two minutes longer, you’d have been the filling
in a sandwich.” In this poem, I’m spread all
over town. I’m reaching toward the rough-
smooth line of your chin, a polluted creek, a non-
elegiac context without piazzas dangling from
the scenery. You can take another’s voice,
and mock their lack, but Dalí will get it back.

Trace Peterson

Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Since I Moved In (new & revised) (Chax Press, 2019). She is also Founding Editor / Publisher of EOAGH which has won 2 Lambda Literary Awards, including the first Lammy in Transgender Poetry. She co-edited the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books), and also co-edited Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press). Her work has recently appeared in Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology (Dia Art Foundation/Yale University Press), From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (ON Contemporary Practice), Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press), TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and at the Academy of American Poets (poets.org). She recently taught Transgender Cultural Production at Yale University and was Guest Faculty at the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She currently teaches at Hunter College, where she has taught an innovative course in Trans and Nonbinary Poetry since 2015.

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