This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
How You Can Eat Today
Dig out that thing in your freezer you forgot six months ago, cringe at the hiss ice crystals make when you bite them, tell yourself to get used to it;
Dump the credit card offers in your mailbox in a bowl and eat them like potato chips, because they’re both wrapped in shiny bags and terrible for you;
Crunch on car parts that line every road in this zip code. Roast ¼ of a tire with some fender strips and serve on a bed of crumpled temp tags from two years ago that you call “local field greens”;
Snatch the broken glass while you’re at it—crumbs of other people’s calamities with Bud E&J Country Club—and mash some into your molars when your back isn’t hurting enough;
Eat your books, page by useless page, because the words aren’t worth the $25 each they cost you, but the fiber might be;
Google food pantries and pick memories out of your teeth from the last time you were at one, you and your ex-wife queer and conspicuous in a church in 2017, and you finally looking up from the floor to confront a vending machine and think that these people really put this here, to tempt you out of a few dollars they know you don’t have for a stick of sugar that won’t sustain you for ten minutes;
Swallow the puck of pride in your throat enough to go begging on some forum, only to find three other posts from sadder scavengers than you;
Conclude it’s not even worth it, all of us pitiful piglets crowded against the same sow that must be dying for how little milk it manages, but you can’t make your own,
so you squeal at your empty fridge again, and make coffee in place of breakfast again,
and wonder what’s taking the butcher so damn long.
Flagpole, or: The Greatest Showman Has a Woman in Him
based on a photograph of the poet in drag by Elle Fitzgibbons
Fingertips have memories/Mine can’t forget the curves of your body/And when I feel a bit naughty/I run it up the flagpole and see/Who salutes, but no one ever does- “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger
When I look at my old pictures, I’m offended
that people don’t. Salute,
I mean. Where many trans men might avert their eyes
I affix, full Narcissus, say she could sissy that walk.
Even when I knew it was drag. Especially once I knew.
Call this fit Exhibit A: black maxi, lace shoulders,
silky gray cinch at the waist,
zebra floral hat that never graced a church
but could make you say bless anyway.
One guy said I looked like Queen Elizabeth in it,
so I wore it everywhere, led entrances
with hip swishes and a smirk,
blasted “Flagpole Sitta” in my headphones
because it was my baddie girl-esque era.
But this? This is better. I give you
KING LIZZY,
lounging like royalty on the grass,
propped on his newly swollen forearms,
not worried about the visible
binder straps or the hook of hair
reaching for his ear. (S)he will not suffer fools,
does not hear his mother’s muttering
from girlhood that you don’t wear dresses right.
(S)he wore them like an indisputable dude,
legs wider than the chair or spread onstage in a stance
like (s)he would finish his set and proceed
to wrestle bears. And that was the right way.
I look at this and say, I still got it. I can serve cunt
as well as any woman. Hell, I have more
cunt to serve. Hungry Man portions of cunt.
Why hide it? All the best showmen
have a little sparkle, a little sass,
and I didn’t need an acting class to find mine.
I was born with it. So I run her up that flagpole
every chance I get. I let her shake it in the wind
next to the Jolly Roger for the gender
that I stole. And if no one else will,
I’ll turn my eyes to the sky, shelf my hand
against my forehead and call her beautiful.
Because she was, and I love her.
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Jesse Eikmann is a trans man performance poet native to St. Louis, Missouri and currently living in Ashland, Wisconsin with his wife. He has spent the last year building an indie writing community as queer and weird as the one he had in his hometown. He facilitates a weekly writing workshop called The Hijinks, hosts open mics at a local café, and is currently writing a non-fiction essay and a poetry book. His first book First, a Crisis, was released by Bad Jacket Press in March 2024. These poems will appear in his second poetry book, tentatively titled North.
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A native of Wisconsin, Jeri Griffith is both writer and artist who grew up in the Midwest. She regularly publishes essays and short stories in literary quarterlies. Many of these can be accessed through her website and read online. Her artwork—paintings, drawings, and films—can also be viewed on
her website: www.jerigriffith.com. Jeri lives and works in Brattleboro, Vermont with her longtime collaborator and husband Jonathan, her best friend Nancy, and their two beagles, Molly and Ruby.
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