Carson Elliot
Yes, Bitch, It’s All About You
After Greer Lankton
Clearly, you can hold a life within a room–
how many altars can you make for yourself?
How much gaudy flesh can you show
to make sure everyone can see you?
Here, look– I am watching you
pirouette in your mother’s dress,
making each stitch count
until the old rag is yours.
I know you know that tonight
you are immaculate: you can make
even the aftermath of Cobain
look stunning in this shade.
busy busy busy day!
You’re wise enough to know nothing good can last:
the orange bottles overflow the bed; the best medicine,
and I feel like this is the closest to you I will ever be.
Hey girlfriend your jewels be featuring
the walls, the floors, everything
an imprint of you, enough shock
to scare away the fake bitches,
only the real ones stay;
the ones who don’t wince
at the sight of blood
or funeral flowers–
They’ll all live longer than you,
longer than this holy flesh,
and I can hear you whisper:
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
but not mine.
An Ode to breath and flame
It is always in the breath:
slow and controlled,
the promise of not losing it all.
Letting the red hot embers in my mind cool
if only for a moment. This is a meditation on love:
a way to leave the world less broken than I found it.
Even when the ringing ears and buzzing body cannot settle.
I am teaching myself how to dance with anger,
how to stoke the fires without burning or being burned
how to honor its heat when the ground hurts too much to walk
how to temper the line between boundary and burden.
It is always in the breath;
I have seen the wildfire spread
I have felt the blister of it left unwatched
I have held my hand too close and let my eyes water.
This is a lesson I am still trying to learn:
when the old wound reopens
when the universe upturns itself
when the rules are broken and cannot be repaired.
I remember my father and a gallon of gasoline
no patience in the slow stoking of flame
only needing a match and a moment;
the garden hose to wet the ground
as if that is enough to stop him.
The trees are still scarred
and the neighbors never called
there was just the laughter in the ash,
the gasping in threes.
how can I contain a world
when I cannot contain even myself?
I breathe, and a therapist tells me
to point to where it hurts
and the breath seeps into the cracks
of myself and the memory
of when even an inhale was too loud
and the fire was hot and that laughter—
a jagged breath away from misery.
But breath leads to the extinguished end,
not all fires can burn forever.
It is always in the breath,
that gentle blessing of air.
little apocalypses :: little revelations
With Gratitude to Robbie Dunning
when you ask me to tell you what a snowstorm is :: i remember the california wildfires :: how you were two and left in a carful of what we might call home :: it is all a race towards the end :: a violent untethering :: j says to let the bones speak :: and i remember my grandmother’s face as she recalled the mind of a president erupting in dallas :: her iron burnt holes through to the future :: remember the scans that lit up across my mother’s chest :: the same woman who said there is no one martyred more than christians :: who marched with me and a whole city to prove we were something worthy of living :: how i told my father i killed his daughter in order to survive :: burnt her name and scattered the ashes to make my own :: the long-distance boyfriend who marveled at our pledge of allegiance :: witnessed this dystopian recitation :: hand over heart :: the aftermath of a 9/11 tent revival for the american empire :: i sang the star spangled banner :: loved to make old men cry :: the same men who wake up screaming after years of pointless war :: a Cree chief came to the death memorial and taught us the legacy of water :: a mother came to tell us that her boy is now gone because he was brown in america :: they laid on the ground and we witnessed their dying but still the white kids laughed :: i am scrolling through my history and remember my mother’s whispered disbelief that we were not 1/16th Cherokee :: how many lies must we weave into our histories :: to try and make our presence feel less like a threat :: i am digging for the truth and it is telling me that the world will not end in fire :: but in a deafening silence.
Carson Elliot (they/them) is a poet and educator living in Middle Tennessee after growing up in Northeast Ohio. They are the author of the chapbook Celestial Bodies: A Year of Transgender Love Letters (2023). Their writing focuses on the intersections of transness, spirituality, and questions of belonging. Their work can be found in publications such as Ouch! Collective, Third Iris, Fifth Wheel Press, Stirring, and South Broadway Press among others.