I’ve known Stephanie and admired her work as a poet and critic long before she transitioned. Here is a poem from her 2017 volume of poems Advice From the Lights (published by Graywolf Press).

I know a lot of people (many of them my students) who are intimidated by poetry. I suspect this is due to how they were taught this genre in high school. I ask students who get nervous when faced with reading poems (“will I understand it?”) to take a deep breath and simply experience the poem.

Believe me, no poet ever wrote a poem wanting their reading to feel like they’re taking the SAT. Poets are generally people who, first and foremost, value the Truth. I suggest you regard poems as atmospheres & experiences into which you, the reader, may enter into to simply feel, observe, and be.

The poem I am sharing by Stephanie (below) speaks to the binaries we are presented with in childhood. “I learned to use stamps,” her speaker states, acknowledging the price she paid when “mail[ing herself] like a letter” out into the world as an AMAB (assigned male at birth) individual.

The poem closes in a joyful present, looking toward children climbing sun-hot monkey bars, but then turns to mourn the “lost Chuck Taylors” and “the lost Mary Janes.” This, to me, figures as those who were lost to these binary categories, children who were never liberated as, we learn, the speaker has been (not without difficulty).

Let us dwell for a moment on the daunting and difficult undertaking, the awesome challenge, of declaring oneself the gender they ARE as opposed to the one they were assigned at birth.

Here’s the poem:

Inside Outside Stephanie

                                                1

I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order.

I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids

already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb

without any glue. I didn’t have any permission.

                                                2

There was a snowstorm that lasted three days

and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a pencil-and-paper game

where the object was to figure out the object of the game.

There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar,

and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different

since they all started out black and white, and all the same.

                                                3

O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look,

up there on the uneven climbing bars,

too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring,

the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors

and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes.

O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.