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About the Poem
I have a title poem for my book! Well, one of my books. If you’v been following my blog for a little while, you know that I have been building two book manuscripts — The Escape Act and Car Guy Girl.
I started writing poems for The Escape Act when I was in grad school (2013-2016) and completed enough of a book manuscript to defend my master’s thesis, but the book still felt unfinished. After I came out as a trans woman, I looked back at manuscript and realized that I had been trying to write about my gender journey and that my personal escape act was my journey to get out from under people expecting me to be a man, to act like a man, to think like a man.
I broke loose from those societal expectations, found my womanhood, and returned to the manuscript to finish it. I’ve been editing old poems and writing new ones. Keep following along as I put this manuscript together. I look forward to completing it and sharing it with all of y’all as a complete book.
Poetry books don’t necessarily need a title poem, but I felt like this one did. This is a love poem to my wife. She has always supported my journey to finding myself, from the early years of our marriage and me “crossdressing” privately to my experimentation with my public presentation with carrying a “murse” and starting to put on eyeliner occasionally to me seeing if nonbinary expressions of myself were a fit to me searching my soul enough to find that Miranda was always waiting there.
The poem text is below, followed by a video of me reading it at my love Queer Open Stage last week.
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“The Escape Act”
-for Carolyn
You saw me bound, hogtied around my feet,
my wrists, my heart — Boy Scout wound tight knots.
You knelt with me in prayer, watched me don my
sackcloth and smear ashes. You imagined me
emerging from the pine box the Church built.
You could see the forged chains, iron shackles,
padlocks holding me back from me, from you,
from us. You watched through your rose gold lenses
while I struggled and squirmed, knowing when I
didn’t that I could still perform this great
escape. You, my true audience of one.
You slipped me my pick set with a kiss —
your lips, my lips, (tulips). You taught me how
to pick the locks, untie the ropes, break free.
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