Jamez Terry

Jamez Terry is a queer and trans poet, novelist, zinester, parent, chaplain and rabblerouser.  His poetry has been spit from stages across North America.  His debut novel is forthcoming from Generous Press.  He lives in Alaska.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Coming of Age

Pivotal moment –
14 years old,
roller skating rink,
holding my girlfriend’s hand
while teenybopper after teenybopper asks
Are You A Boy Or A Girl?

I thought my shirt was tight around my chest
I thought my belly showed, pale and trim
I thought my jeans were clinging to my hips

Girl, I tell them
they don’t believe me
Boy, I tell them
they don’t believe me
Both, I try
they look shocked
wonder if they should believe me
decide to ask my friends instead

I learned that day how porous is the line
between curiosity and danger

I learned some questions have only wrong answers
and truth is tangential to threat

Didn’t yet know how to know myself
but I knew the rules and how to escape

I learned to glide faster,
to pivot, duck, and flee

I never returned to the rink
nor tipped my toe earthward to stop

I know the difference between a disco ball and a constellation,
which gleams in the night, will guide me around these wild curves
and see me safely home

My Body

My body, alone,
was a fragile, unseen thing
shrinking into shadows to hide its vulnerability

My body when you are near
becomes strong, unyielding,
secure in exposing
its most tender, secret parts

My body, alone,
was an object of hatred
a vessel for years of accumulated shame

My body under your coarse palms
is beloved, proud,
ready to burst from the
ancient threads that hold it captive
and proclaim its beauty
to an unseeing world

My body, alone,
was hamstrung by hesitation
uncertain of what, precisely, it is
or ought to be

My body entwined in the
tender, perfect thing that is your body
finally knows it need be
nothing more or less
to be perfect, too

My body, no longer alone,
has found its secret wings,
fragile, unseen things
strong enough to take flight

Waiting

Boy or girl, he asks.
I tell him that we don’t know,
we’re waiting. Okay,
yellow or green, he asks,
and I say, I guess we don’t know that either,
picturing baby aliens,
picturing sideshow freaks,
terrifying and enthralling
only insofar as they remind us
there are far more possibilities
than we normally dare
to imagine.
I am taken aback by his insinuation
but also somehow pleased
at the limitless potential
it implies,
at the sense of irrelevance it imparts
on the earlier inquiry,
on the obsession with
boy vs. girl.
Yellow and green
are mere flickers of light
along the color spectrum,
suggesting boy and girl
as equally arbitrary examples
of the infinite forms
this new life might take.
While he moves on in conversation,
I remain in this reverie,
imagining my technicolor
offspring-to-be.
Only later do I learn
yellow and green
are today’s hip nursery colors,
replacing blue and pink,
a failure of imagination and
a new false binary.
Still, in my not knowing,
his question was a gift,
an invitation to revelation.
Not knowing often is.
And so, unbound, we wait.