Tuesday's Trans Writer: Paul Tran

Much of Paul Tran’s (they / them) more recent work, as I know it, exhibits a nimble dexterity with the line. Short lines strung with breathless utterance, or enjambment handing the reader down a ladder of emotions. Trans’ poems are always exquisitely choreographed.

But I keep finding myself going back to an earlir poem Tran published in the online magazine The Boiler, titled “Elegy With My Mother’s Lipstick.” (Now that is a great title.) There’s a density to these earlier poems that attracts me. Of the lipstick names, the speaker claims:

I speak their bewitching names aloud: Twisted Rose,
Fuchsia in Paris, Irreverence. I choose the lipstick
she least approves. My mouth a pomegranate split
open, a grenade with its loose pin.

And later in in the poem, the speaker observes:

No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.

And so we learn that no child can stay a child, and that despite that fate (growing up) that one hopes not to avoid, to do so (to become oneself) is to become unloved by the mother.

The poem closes:

When I knew the body assigned to me wasn’t my body,
when I heard the murmuring in my heart, I followed it
across oceans wider than the distance now between us.
I found myself on a shoreline, a shell glinting in the tide.
I pressed it to my ear. It was you, still laughing, chewing
a fist of betel root. Your teeth black as the unlit dawn.

Simply put (and this poem is not simple), the speaker “follow[s]” their heart on learning “the body assigned to [them] wasn’t [their body” and not only leaves the mother, but travels far— even then, on new shorelines, they find a shell through which their mother’s voice enters their ear, “laughing,” and, frankly, terrifying: her “teeth black as the unlit dawn.”

All dawns should be lit, wouldn’t you agree?

This dawn is not. So, this is a poem about loss, which is why it is titled an “elegy.”

An elegy is a poem about death, a ode to the death of something or someone important, and so we can infer that this poem contends with the figurative death of the relationship between the child/adult and their mother.

It’s scary, it’s sad, and it’s beautiful.

All the feels.

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