Assistant Editor Lily Meyer: In Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’s “Dyke Litany,” queer adolescent isolation transforms into a collective experience. Rogers deftly roves between perspectives, shifting from you to them to, in the essay’s triumphant final moment, “Her and her and them and me.” She invites her readers to inhabit new points of view with her, and, in so doing, brings us into solidarity with the essay’s teenage subjects even as they begin to feel solidarity with each other.
Dyke Litany
You know them, the kids wearing jerseys sizes too big, shaggy hair in their eyes. Buying cigarettes and candy at the Kash and Karry, the corner store in the middle of nowhere. Tucked in the back desks in Spanish class, tuned out but rarely making trouble. Eyebrow piercings and black sneakers. Chains clipped to their jeans. Their names feminine, like Angela and LaTisha and Kaitlin, soon to be Ange and Tish and Kait. Clips of the silver shears. Scissor sister. The girls laughing as they buzz each other’s heads in some ugly bathroom. Hair piling on tile, a darker snow. Rug-muncher. When one of them rakes her scalp with her palms, the cool touches back like a thousand rice grains in a barrel. She still might show up to church the next day, scalp showing and sore, afraid. No corner to hide in.
The tall one in the ROTC uniform holding the flag. The fat one in the art room: black lipstick, sly noir silkscreens. The good one with the long ponytail, her As stacked in the gradebook. She’s pouring sweet tea at Fran’s, a secret spliff tucked under her bra strap. The one who is keeping kids alive in the artificial wave pool, that engineered tide tugging at her. Her feet turn green in chlorine. The one bagging groceries at Winn-Dixie, her name pinned to her chest. Those capital letters look strange when you stare for so long.
The couple ducking behind the leggy scoreboard, up to no good. The ones who never get suspended: too good, too good at breaking rules on the sly. The debonair coach eyeing the one she thinks is hungriest, thin shirt and freckled shoulders. The one for whom she will write a dozen late notes. The one she tries to convince to cut history, buys biscuits for on her way back to town. It’ll be an unexcused absence. Delay the presentation on Watergate.
And the girl in your older sister’s class: Heather, who hanged herself on a Wednesday. Why? Quiz bowl, Latin club, used to sleep during sad movies. Butch. You search for Heather’s house years later, its rocking chairs and sagging carport. You don’t know what you’re looking for. What would it tell you now?
The one who still says but I couldn’t be because. Bean-licker. The one looking up lesbian in the tome-sized reference dictionary, finding both homosexual and inhabitant of Lesbos. Who found Sappho’s poems but found mostly blanks: that ruined temple, columns open to sky. This was not what she was hoping for, her fear doubling and doubling. So that’s why my aunt ran off to San Francisco, she thinks. Muff-diver. Taco-licker.
She with her silver ring, snake eating its own tail. Corona around the moon: she wants to press her whole body to this night. Who says nerves when what she really means is: inside, this moth keeps nudging me with its ugly powder. Who says but I couldn’t be but only because there isn’t language yet for the joy, which is a shape not drawn yet, which is something almost infinite.
We lean into the sinuous rural road, headed fast towards the city’s hem. An unnatural speed. A humming where we all touch down. Bumper to bumper. Her and her and them and me.
Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of two poetry collections: The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books, 2020) and Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press, 2013). Recent poems and essays appear in Poetry, Waxwing, Bennington Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Rogers is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.
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