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2022 Beloit Poetry Journal Prize

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ode to Chella Man and Leo Sheng

by Qin Qin

 

When you said that your top surgery scars completed your body, I smiled to myself because, yes, our bodies are precious maps; sagging, traumatized things. I want to congratulate you on playing an Asian trans man with a real love interest, even though he deserved more than being just a lovesick background character with America’s go-to Chinese actress as his apologetically, transphobic Asian mom. Do you also fear your beautiful name is leading you further away from your birth mom? Or that she won’t ever be able to find you because you believed you deserve a body full of joy? I’ve been meaning to introduce myself to you for a few months now, but I don’t know how to order my labels because I don’t know which ones are most important or endangered. I found another person who’s like us, but I think I scared them off with my questions, so I apologize. You see, you’re the closest thing I have to genuine representation. Not the kind that’s obsessed with hyper-sexualizing Asian masculinity, but the kind that understands our bodies are conditional, our being here in the US is conditional. The second or third time I told my mom I'm neither a man nor a woman, she stared at my chest; eyes raping nipples, like she was entitled to my milk and uterus. How long did it take for your moms to realize that you're more than a plaything undeserving of its own anger and confusion of allegiances? The first or second time I told my mom I wanted to become Xavier Qin, she demanded I stay as [deadname]. To survive an obligatory body. Last spring, my fingers almost refracted yellow puss, in- congruency. I didn't know the precipice could be so delicious; I’ll call it worthiness. Lately, I’ve been thinking about dis- emboweling a poem I dedicated to people like us and recited in high school where the right to exist was transactional. Queers owed them loudness, trans folx owed them androgyny. and ________ owed them silence.How did you convince the greedy that your body wasn’t one that they could pathologize, whiten for themselves? Born with a black birth- mark beneath my right eye, my otherness was measured by my ugliness. If not makeup from beauty or assault, I was a creature unforgiven for being here in the US. Chella, I let them steal my darkness. I let them take away the only thing I thought I had left of my birth mom: her gift. I’m not proud to be an American, for my citizenship was born from her grief. What I mean is: is love enough to justify my colonization? Ten days before I started hormones, I had a dream that my birth aunt had come to visit me in Minnesota. We stood in my parents’ bedroom; I was near the porch door and she was in mom’s spot. Her hair was up in a claw clip and she was beautiful, in her forties. We visited my lower school where she or my mom introduced her as my birth mother’s sister. I was found with scars on my right cheek as if my birth family’s attempts to remove my birthmark. Sometimes, I wish I was born as a bare- faced, beautiful, boy. But isn’t beauty just another body currency? Recently, I promised myself that if my blackness ever grows back, I’m keeping it. I’m asymmetrical because I always forget what I look like. Or is it the other way around? This is how I became aversive to naming things. People like us have always found home in scars, dis-embodiment. Did you discover consent when you became Leo Sheng? So far, three people have asked what my deadname is; I refused to betroth them with the power to destroy because I already fear those who keep it alive in their memories as a slur. The greatest gifts I’ve ever given my mom are these last few months in which I’ve let her claim me as her dead daughter. The last time Qin was third in line to the throne, a literal erasure. Did your moms love you cautiously, knowing you’d always return to your ancestors? Are you staying humble in your sunlit skin? Is your body a farewell, or an overture of grief? My deadname is a white heirloom, so yes, I’m branded.

 

 

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