Taxonomy

by E. Peregrine

In airports I try on different names. 

None of us belong there anyway, no harm 

in being new each time. I fear that I will 

forget what I said, that my tea will go cold 

after the wrong name dies in the air. 

Namelessness is truer to me than 

all of the things I have been called.

I am usually misheard: it is always 

loud, and my voice is soft,

consonants mute into steam and

coffee grinder static. Why should I

keep leaning in to a world droning

over me? If you want to hear 

my name, my real name, there must

be silence like two trees with entangled 

roots, a tripping hazard, silence that comes

after a diagnosis but before someone else

succumbs to their own discomfort.

My name is the tinnitus of fate ringing just

beyond perception. My name is spoken over

because precarity is unbearable. My name

is in each name I offer up because my name

is in my breath, each breath, something

beyond sound or letters or passport checks,

beyond private screenings with too many

hands in a too-small grey space groping

for the shape of my name on my chest, 

beyond the specter of those hands still

on me as I stagger to the other side. My name

lingers even when my loud, loud body drowns 

out that empty silence of violation. 

My name is lost in the translation of flesh.

I may as well robe myself in glamour of sound. 

One syllable can travel safely. Two and 

the aspirants unstitch themselves. Three 

decompose between mouth and ear. 

Author Bio:

E. Peregrine (they/them) is a trans/nonbinary conductor, poet, teacher, and recent transplant to New England. Their writing has appeared in Gold Man Review, Roanoke Review, Variant Literature, smoke and mold, Bluestem Magazine, and elsewhere.

Artwork by Larissa Hauck