Callisto Swims Like a Fish Through the Gender Binary
Sometimesmy chest is quiet:
no geologic activity to disrupt
craters, cavities, or other evidence
of impact. On those nights I
shimmer, ice-capped, breathless
against a sky (always someone
else’s sky) whose hot breath
has long since vanished. This, too,
is a vanishing – longline all baited
and sharp, dangling far below sea level.
When I held fishhooks as a child, I imagined
my body a horizon: no longer tidally locked
to the promise and omen of girlhood, slippery vertebrate
asking for my patience, filling my mouth with salt.
no geologic activity to disrupt
craters, cavities, or other evidence
of impact. On those nights I
shimmer, ice-capped, breathless
against a sky (always someone
else’s sky) whose hot breath
has long since vanished. This, too,
is a vanishing – longline all baited
and sharp, dangling far below sea level.
When I held fishhooks as a child, I imagined
my body a horizon: no longer tidally locked
to the promise and omen of girlhood, slippery vertebrate
asking for my patience, filling my mouth with salt.
My mother the orchard
does not call for months.
I dream fruit flowering over
her hands and body.
For months I can’t call:
my mouth too full of seeds,
my hands and body too full
of honeycomb and stillness.
Seeds drop from the mouth
of my neighbor’s cat. She waits,
all honeycomb and stillness,
for the dark-eyed junco to bite.
My mother’s neighbor left cats
behind when she vanished. Tiny kittens
no bigger than dark-eyed juncos
languished in the August heat.
I vanished Ohio and the kittens behind
me. Midwest became a spruce opening its arms
against August’s heat lightning.
My mother knows ash could fall again,
land in my hair, on the spruce’s arms. Midwest
guilt expanding like a season or a seed.
My mother knows ash could fall again.
August blossoms over us both.
I dream fruit flowering over
her hands and body.
For months I can’t call:
my mouth too full of seeds,
my hands and body too full
of honeycomb and stillness.
Seeds drop from the mouth
of my neighbor’s cat. She waits,
all honeycomb and stillness,
for the dark-eyed junco to bite.
My mother’s neighbor left cats
behind when she vanished. Tiny kittens
no bigger than dark-eyed juncos
languished in the August heat.
I vanished Ohio and the kittens behind
me. Midwest became a spruce opening its arms
against August’s heat lightning.
My mother knows ash could fall again,
land in my hair, on the spruce’s arms. Midwest
guilt expanding like a season or a seed.
My mother knows ash could fall again.
August blossoms over us both.
Rebecca Martin (they/she) is the author of High-Tech Invasions of the Flesh (Bottle Cap Press, 2022). They are a queer poet, educator, and roller skater with work appearing in Nimrod International Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Muzzle Magazine, and others. They received an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and are a graduate of Oregon State University's MFA program. She currently lives and works in Pittsburgh.
“Callisto Swims Like a Fish Through the Gender Binary” is a part of a larger series of sonnets I began working on this past year that use scientific language about each of Jupiter’s moons to grapple with what it means to exist in a space and a body at once outside the gender binary and confined by it. “My mother the orchard” is a pantoum that meditates on the nature of complicated ideas of mothering, the Midwest, and climate change.
“Callisto Swims Like a Fish Through the Gender Binary” is a part of a larger series of sonnets I began working on this past year that use scientific language about each of Jupiter’s moons to grapple with what it means to exist in a space and a body at once outside the gender binary and confined by it. “My mother the orchard” is a pantoum that meditates on the nature of complicated ideas of mothering, the Midwest, and climate change.