Tommye Blount
To wring out a trill—like the robed girls
in the bottom tier under the director’s spit
shower as he screamed, Sopranos, the Lord
can’t hear you—is all I ever wanted there
in the middle-row altos. I dithered below
the boys up in the back row, digging for what
low note they tried to reach on tiptoe. Here’s what
used to happen: the Lord below was absent to girl-
shadowed castrati—no meddlesome devil below
or between their legs to strangle their spirited
peals (high enough for the Lord up there
to hear). In Mass, girls were denied the Lord’s
ear, so the boys over the Lord’s song lorded
in their place. As a boy, I placed what
whiny voice was misplaced in me. The Lord up there
swat it from his discriminate ear—O my girl-
shadowed din. Once, on my aunt’s floor—spitting
up hours before a doctor took me apart below—
I fell to my knees; writhed as if the Lord below
bucked me from its slick back. Shhh! That lord
can’t hear you down here, it spat, as the pain split
me up to the song-gut. Between my thighs, what
a fiery glossolalia. Back in front row, the girls
trilled the note; the director screamed Up there,
his ruler struck the deacon’s dais, the note is up there!
God can’t hear what you have to say if you’re below
earshot! I was under ether. As with the tangled hair of a girl’s
doll, the surgeon untangled the lurid
lines inside me, his sound God lamp shone—a watt
searching the devil’s chords. A divine torture to spite
me, the doctor called it testicular torsion. No, not split,
the ropes raveled between my one bell and the other—
wrung wrong.
Of the not-so-little-anymore boys, what
to do with their—no, mine, no—our bodies wrung in the rafters with no bellow
left to rival Farinelli’s? No organ powerful enough to unload
our dissonant music? There is only left this gall
of a rope’s burn, spiting no Adam’s Apple below
our mouths—opened as if an attempt to sing for the Lord,
but what? This note, too high to hear, from our gnarled bodies?
The sestina, I hate it. With its rotating word scheme, the form is hellbent on preventing any gesture toward linear logic. Oh, I do love when others can successfully pull them off: Diane Wakoski makes it look easy in her witty “Sestina to the Common Glass of Beer: I Do Not Drink Beer”; there is also Phillip B. Williams’s dynamically ingenious “Inheritance: The Force of Aperture.” Still, to my mind, perfect examples like these are hard to come by.
It has to do with ego. One’s ego must be reined in when attempting the sestina. It takes a bit of openness to failure; a welcoming of change—behaviors that are difficult for me to grasp in my own life. Vulnerability, that’s the concept I am struggling to get at here. Its insistence on vulnerability—that’s why I hate the sestina!
This poem was never meant to take on this conceit. For at least five years, it has existed in various iterations. The problem: I had no idea how to handle the bio-medical information. A breakthrough didn’t come until I read Leila Chatti’s debut full-length collection “Deluge.” Now there is a poet who has figured out how to open up the clinically personal to the whims of lyric and form. The result isn’t navel gazing, but an invitation. Through one body’s specificity, a reader is invited to see their own. A risky undertaking that pays off for Chatti. Could I do the same thing with this poem? Worth the try.
A poem isn’t worth its ink if there is no risk involved. This mantra is in my head each time I sit down to write. It’s how I arrived to this poem. To have broached an uncomfortable and clinical topic, a testicular torsion surgery I had as a teen, within this uncomfortable form, unnerved me. Just because it has, thankfully, been granted a home in Southern Indiana Review’s pages, doesn’t make it any less unsettling for me now.
I’ve always preached that poems can be queer spaces because they take on forms that allow them to live. So too with this poem. In order to cut through the sestina’s so-to-speak noise, the voice I’ve donned needed to sing a few octaves higher; needed a more clarified tonal register. That work was made more complex due to temporal and spatial concerns. Flirting with narrative, shifting time and space proved difficult, as the sestina insists on the diction of a single moment, its repeated words magnetized to their initial origins in the first stanza. All of this is to say, there is a struggle happening on every level in this poem—formally (obviously), sonically, and structurally. Tensions arise, something is always working against something else.
Being the queer space that it is, a place where paradox can exist unimpeded, the poem’s structure—the narrative strands of information that exist—must somehow harness the sestina’s centripetal force to gain forward momentum. It’s a rough way. There were countless drafts in which I made it to the envoi, only to realize the path I’d laid out for myself was a dead end. Up until the last seconds before publication, this poem put up quite a fight. It is my hope that my hatred for the sestina is apparent. By “hatred” I mean “love.” Is it one of those sestinas that is perfect? Nope, but that is the point. This sestina is evidence of an ongoing struggle on and beyond the page. A bruise.
Tommye Blount is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For and the full-length collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue—which was finalist for the National Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and others. He is the recipient of commendations, fellowships, and grants from the Whiting Foundation, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kresge Arts in Detroit, and the Aninstantia Foundation. Born and raised in Detroit, Blount lives in nearby Novi, Michigan.