Deciduous Qween

By Matty Layne Glasgow

Through the creaking of bedazzled branches and the soft rustle of jeweled leaves, deciduous qween explores the queer world all around us—how we, like our environment, wear and shed different identities in our performance as human, as drag queen, as ancient tree. This collection reveals in the natural world those ephemeral moments which reflect our own truths and confront our fear of death, of loneliness, and of failure. With an air of Southern Gothic mysticism, the poet reflects on a childhood spent in Houston’s bayous, an adolescence rife with curiosity and shame, and a young adulthood marred by the loss of his mother. How do our bodies and minds find equilibrium as we learn to let go, yet long to remember? The title poem, “deciduous qween, I–V,” binds the collection in a five-part sequence, pondering those things that are lost in the seasons of our lives: teeth, antlers, body, shape, and leaf. And it’s those sharp edges of loss and the scars they leave behind that linger here, like bark stripped from a swaying willow, or a family bereft of its matriarch. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781597093101

Matty Layne Glasgow

Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of the poetry collection, deciduous qween, selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2019. He is runner-up for Missouri Review’s 2017 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and finalist for Nimrod’s 2018 Pablo Neruda Prize. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies and appear in the Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Collagist, BOAAT, Muzzle, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston, Texas where he teaches with Writers in the Schools and adjuncts his life away.

Book preview

I

deciduous qween, I

of teeth, being shed at the end of a period of growth

I forget how sharpness first emerged

from my jaw

the way milk teeth pushed

  through tender flesh

       how they scratched     then chewed

the insides of my cheeks

   just to tear another part of me       raw.

    I forget the taste of blood

  a toddler’s iron

on a toddler’s tongue

the guttural scream of a small creature

 whose only language      was pain.

   You remember.       Tell me

no toddler ever teethed with such indignation

tell me   your mama and I just wanted you

to be happy to be quiet.     But your baby

just grew louder and louder       into a gaudy

       and ungodly thing

   losing incisors and molars

 like enamel sequins        shedding canines

keen and shiny as plastic diamonds.

They’d all fall

  out of my mouth           like sighs

so high-pitched  they shimmered

   in glitter-dusted confetti.

This is how I learned to sell my body

one tooth at a time

for a quarterthen a dollar

and you’d hold all the smallest parts of me

    in your hand   glistening white

 opal stones unearthedfrom my gums

like words that only shine

    when they are freefrom the dark caverns

  of my unmuzzled maw.

This is how I learned to let go

  for a price

  those blood-stained roots

the only soft, dangling remnants

of loss.

Texas was a time that never moved

I came from a pearl of sweat that fell

from Mama’s brow on a Texas day in

August. Texas was a time that never moved

forward. August was scorched earth & steam—

a thick haze that swayed over the pavement.

When that pearl fell through flame & burst,

I danced pretty for Mama & Daddy

& whoever else would watch, just to keep

my feet from roasting on the coals. Texas is still

an unsetting sun; it hangs in time, forgets

the bodies it’s hanged & burned & buried.

August is a boy ablaze—cheeks flushed full

of fire, his feet aflicker. But I learned to burn

the past on my arms & carry it with me.

Silly Goose

I recently drew a map of my childhood: a cul-de-sac on the edge of a great lake, a bench beneath an old oak, a feather-dusted shoreline where I craved more than breadcrumbs or confit de canard. One summer night, I held stale bread between my fingers, like crusted sandpaper so dry mallards & geese quacked bitch, please! Squawked hell, naw! Until Mama’s scream pierced the flutter of feathers, & I saw a pair of white wings spread wide & shimmer in the streetlamp. The goose lowered his head, & his bristled beak tore right through her pantyhose. I remember how everything fell in the shadows—handfuls of bread on the grass, Mama’s blood dripping from her calf to the shore’s plumage. It’s strange how things that belong somewhere else always seem so violent out of place, like soft, wingless feathers or a hunger for the wrong kind of