The mournful cooing of the Mourning Dove is one of our most familiar bird sounds. European settlement of the continent, with its opening of the forest, probably helped this species to increase. Regularly swallows grit (small gravel) to aid in digestion of hard seeds.

— Audubon

 

On a Monday, I drag something out to the curb. They watch wary, then scatter, tittering into the wind. In New England winter, the Mourning Dove is a melancholy absurdism.

 

In therapy, I confessed I was not earning enough: not writing or drawing or reading nearly enough. Who is saying this to you, my therapist wanted to know. Titter into the wind. My uncle, lodged in my psyche, unyielding as a beach stone. I've worn him down some, but the ballast he left in my brain tips me back from the brink of weightless flight: What about the money? Where is the money? uncle said, then said again, until I learned to coo it to myself.

 

On a Monday, I drag shit out to the curb. Lots of little shits in little bags. They watch wary, the doves.

 

In the foyer of cousin’s mansion, uncle stepped from the shadows, ring-eyed and crooked with age. Before dinner, ringed around the coffee table — husband beside me — uncle asked what I thought of the effort to criminalize queerness in the classroom. I don't have a problem with it, he added. He is a contrarian, cousin said. His wife called their young children down, using the intercom.

 

On a Monday, I drag myself out to the curb. Shit. Who is saying this to you? Emboldened into a sullen huddle, the doves do not scatter. They coo. They who.

 

Monday shit.

Monday shit.

Monday shit.

 

On a Monday, husband drags shit out to the curb as I sleep. In New England winter, mourning is melancholy, Doves. Winter, in New England, Doves, is in.

 

In a little room behind the sanctuary at father’s funeral, uncle said to me he’d be a father. I was fifteen. I did not know then uncles are uncles, not fathers, and I want to say, in the years to come, he watched wary, but he didn’t. I want to say, instead, he tittered into the wind but uncle is logic-cold. He has never tittered.

 

On a Monday, Doves!

On a Monday, I drag myself.

On a Monday, I drag uncle out to the curb.

 

I am an uncle, too. A tragic exuberance, dramatic, erudite, not a little bit anxious and largely unavailable. I have promised to be a father to no one.

“That’s some white people shit.”

“What?”

“Were all of the people who thought you were gay white?”

“It’s not that they thought I was gay exactly…”

“Not straight. Whatever. Were all of them white?”

“No.” I mentally scroll through faces and races. “Yes?”

“See? You don’t fit their Black-Man stereotype, other than dating white women…”

“Hey…”

“Whatever nigga: you do you. I’m just saying you don’t fit their image of what a Black man is ‘supposed’ to be. You’re not some overly masculine thug, sitting on a stoop, rocking a durag and sipping a 40. A sensitive and educated Black man, who works with kids seems femme to them. So, they assume you’re not straight.”

“No, V. That can’t be it.”

 

It was.

___

Before-school conversations were a regular event with Eden: a young, white lesbian needing to unpack her thoughts about sexuality, gender identity, proper pronouns, the school’s GSA, the “Day of Silence,” the Stonewall Uprising, whether Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham are closeted assholes, turning the self-loathing of their internalized homophobia on others, and a host of other issues my teacher education program did little to prepare me for. But I love my kids and I’m always available with what little knowledge I have. And it’s not like she’s the first to drop questions of identity like bruised apples on my desk. One morning, driving to work, our last conversation still weaving through my head, a question occurs which should have dawned sooner. When Eden enters my room, I ask if I am the only adult she’s talking to about all of this. I assure her that I’m in no way suggesting that she shouldn’t be talking to me, but ask if it would be more beneficial—make more sense—if she were talking to one of the other teachers, someone within the LGBTQIA+ community, not just an ally? She gets quiet. Seems suddenly concerned with sporadic red squares in the sea of beige titles at our feet.

 

“Well, I mean… To be honest…”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t even say it.”

“Say what?”

“I mean. Okay. I mean. Look. I…,” her blue eyes now darting between the technicolor posters adorning the walls. The pocked ceiling tiles. The slated blinds that can never quite close.

“Oh, for the love of God, out with it.”

“Okay. So, I never really thought you were fully straight. I thought you were a little…,” with a limp flick of her wrist, she makes a hand gesture that was a popular insult

“Wait. What?”

 

The conversation gets weird. I don’t even know what “fully straight” means and neither does she. Maybe bi. Maybe pan. She knows I was married to a woman, but thinks that might have been a farce, that she was my beard—10 years with a spouse pretending passion. In Eden’s defense, we did get divorced. She says she was confused because I once used the word “partner” to refer to my wife. I say there is no way in hell that happened because I hate that word in that context. She says it must have been something. I say I’m not sure what. She finally looks at me. Sees the look on my face. Worries that something has been broken, that I’m offended. I realize that I am offended. Not because she mis-saw my sexuality, but because she thought I was peering out of the crack of a mostly closed closet door this whole time. That she saw me as she does Pence or Graham: a hypocrite living a double life. Given all our conversations, given how almost every lesson in our class comes back to themes of figuring out who we are, living in the truth of our authentic selves, I’m offended that she would think I don’t practice what I preach. Then something clicks.

 

“Hold up. Is that why you came out to me? Why you’ve felt comfortable having all these conversations?”

“Yeah. That’s part of it, I guess.”

___

A few days later, I’m Zooming with two former students—both in college, both queer, one male, one female, one white, the other not — and mention my conversation with Eden as an interesting happening. But I’m also curious to hear what they will say. From their college dorm rooms I receive opposite reactions. Later that night, and over the next few days, my survey of former students and close friends begins. By some I’m met with the immediate incredulity of furrowed brow and nose. But then there are the others. The initial silence and blank stares, familiar darting eyes, and the electronic hesitations—being left on read, before typing bubbles appear and disappear in response to my message. Eventually I get an answer from these. Phrases like “big gay energy” and “theatre gay” are used more than once, but only by some. It took V, a queer Black woman, to point out the pattern. She’s right. Every person of color, and all my Jewish friends, balk at the assumption that I am anything other than a cishet “breeder.” Every white person questions, assumes a hidden sexuality. Some have even created detailed narratives on the subject, drawn elaborate connections to my anxiety, depression, and divorce.

 

Maybe it is time to reassess.

___

 

My sophomores are in the throes of dissecting Jackie Sibblies-Drury’s drama Fairview and discussing Franz Fanon’s “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”: what it means to be seen, how being seen changes how you’re seen. It’s a Heisenberg theory of racial ontology. Or something Hegelian—thesis and antithesis. Is the boxed cat Black because it is, or Black because

of all the ways they’ve said it’s “not white”? Whether it’s dead or alive is secondary and almost never in its hands.

 

I begin to picture this other they see, begin to weigh this alternate I never knew I carried. The mannerism they take to be feminine. The softness of how I carry myself, my body. The talking with hands and comfort crossing legs. My raging ADHD seen as flamboyant or fierce. The slipping in and out of foreign accents and dialects for comedic effect, which sounds like lisping in their ears. My being a hugger and easy giver of consolation.

 

I begin to consider my pedigree—my Jamaican parents. I’m the son of a mother with first-born sensibilities. The daughter of a blind woman with an iron fist and an ever-ready Green Mountain switch. I’m the son of a father who lost his own by age eight, was raised by a strong mother and older sisters: women who raised me alongside their own. I’m the youngest sibling of two sisters, then a brother and a sister.

 

I begin to see the history composed in young, queer white eyes: an 80’s baby, an elder-millennial, an elder-queer. A 40-something survivor of not only Boston’s police brutality and the crack epidemic, but Reagan’s silence and the AIDS crisis. I can see him, my doppelgänger. But V, and so many others who look more like me, can’t. But as that child of the 80s, I know my TV tropes and myself. I’m neither the big Black buck or the gangsta with the heart of gold. So they’ve typecast me as the weirdest magic negro ever: a mentor in queerness, both the token gay and Black best friend. Definitely some white people shit. My trans brother will get a laugh out of this, and then get really serious, pondering the implication: white supremacy raising another hydra head.

 

But I’m thinking about the kids for whom I was the first adult—if not person—they came out to. Counting the number of “hypothetical” situations and stories about “a friend” in crisis my ears heard. Their worries of putting grandmothers in early graves and parents being less progressive than they claimed. The Sunday sermons about hell-bound souls they heard. The kitchen tables stacked with books on “healing” and pamphlets for summer programs sure to “fix” them. The terror of old eyes seeing them in new ways: whispers in the hallways, friends reassessing their comfort in locker rooms and at sleepovers. I’m counting the confessions of retracted lies, the real reasons for school absences and hospitalizations. Counting how many of them told me I’m one of the reasons they’re still alive. And, honestly, I’m not sure how I feel.

We had these skateboard ramps to the left of the house, a mini ramp and a vert ramp and forty or so skaters every Sunday with their dogs and stoke and speakers blasting new school punk and old school country and sometimes It’s Brittany, Bitch, and during the peak heat in summer some of the skaters would take a break and get crafty at the picnic tables we built from weathered fence boards, and one Sunday this girl pulled out a bag of foraged crystals she bought off the internet and thin gauge wire and needle-nosed pliers and she encouraged me to recite a wish while she worked the wire around the crystal I picked out at her insistence, and it was like she bound my wish, secured what little hope I had left to something tangible, and it wasn’t a great time for me, I was newly separated but not quite divorced, and childless every second Sunday and I often got drunk those second Sundays because I missed my boys but not their dad—missed their direction and affection and distraction—and I kept the crystal next to my bedside, picked it up when I was drunk and lonely or groggy with waking and I’d turn it between my fingers and recite the wish, and at the time I lived with another family in a room I rented because single parenting was easier when there was another mum and another dad in the house to fill up the space, and they had a daughter and a son of similar age to my boys and this particular summer, the Summer of Separation, our kids all skated too, learned how to drop in on the mini ramp alongside the big kids, the click of their wheels and their hollering praise at each other, and the family’s daughter found my wire-bound crystal next to my bedside light one night when she’d finished skating, sat on my bed with her knee pads and helmet still on, took my crystal between her fingers and stared at its intricate wire work, its twists and circles and loops, asked me what it was for, what did I do with it, and what I meant to say was, everything, and, keep those pads and helmet on because you’re going to need them, but all I said was, nothing, I said, I don’t do anything with it, and I placed the crystal in the palm of her hand and wrapped her fingers around it and said, It’s yours now, good luck.

(pt. 1)

I think when I say “anything but ‘it,’” what I really mean is, “Make some choices so I can see if they work for me. Call me ‘he.’ Call me ‘they,’ in the same breath. Call me ‘e’ or ‘xe’ or ‘nir,’ so I can hear it. Call me ‘she,’ even, but make sure I know you do not think me a woman because of it. Call me any neopronoun you might know how to use. Make one up, if you like. I’m collecting data, collating results. The only thing I know right now is ‘it’ doesn’t work. Call me anything. Call me anything else under the sun. This is science; that’s why it’s called ‘experimenting.’ Give me enough data points that I can discern any kind of pattern at all, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on yet.

Give me a multitude, that I might divine.”

 

(pt. 2)

It’s enough syllables to wrap around me like a cloak. Nine letters long: three by three. A pair of trochees like a coal in my hand. “Enough of a name to keep me warm,” I say, my lips upturned at the end, like a joke. Mayhap they’ll think so. But the truth lies buried like the warm ember at the heart of my name: it is warm. Nestled comfortably inside and a clear enough sound for the highest summer sky.

My last name was cool blue, bordering on periwinkle, and would sometimes fluff into wisteria when I gave it out whole. This one, that I picked, is sparks and embers wrapped in steady dark brown branches that never crumble away in ash. I picked a name that rolls amber off my tongue and tingles at the touch.

A name that keeps me warm resting in my voicebox and my heart and my core. A name that rattles its trochees in my hands and rings itself in the air inside my skull.

Once, drunk, two brothers decided to walk west until they reached the ocean. The older one was to be married seven days later to a kind, dark-haired woman, so the younger one never left his side for more than a minute that night. There were other, incidental men in their group, but their names have all flickered out by now. They’d just come from a variety show and 8 course dinner in Chinatown, so drop soup & sour mix slicked the bowls of their bellies as they walked through the city. The cigar smoke didn’t help their nausea at all.

Truthfully, the two were not brothers, whatever the younger one wished. Just college buddies. Just friends who’d seen the worst moments of each others’ lives up to that point, & who both loved the dark-haired woman in their own way. They all stumbled west from Long Beach, shouldering street lights until they reached the dim, moondrawn edge of the ocean.

As they walked, the older & younger man stood away from the drove of swaying drunks. Someone fell backward into a rusty firepit, was forgotten. The younger one, already a divorced single parent, wanted to say something wise to mark the moment, weighting his hand solemnly on his friend’s shoulder.

He wanted to tell the future. Like this:

In seven days, you’ll catch up to her laugh.

In one year, you’ll find a stray cat behind

a dumpster & grow your family to three.

In seven years, you will have a son

& I will lose a son, whom you love, months apart.

You’ll wonder, passingly, if there was a way to trade

your son’s unformed soul for my son’s

chemo-battered, 12-year-old soul,

would you take it?

This is the most loving thing

you’ll ever say to me, & still,

in ten years, we won’t be friends anymore.

The many stories of our one fight

will be so much less important

than the state of unfriendship that came after.

I will get married, and we will both have second sons,

months apart, each on our own sides of the world.

You won’t tell me when your wife gets sick

or when she gets better

or when she gets sick again.

& still, in sixteen years,

you will call me at five in the morning

to tell me they can’t stop the bleeding.

I will drive a hundred miles to see her,

& you, & I will arrive

five minutes late—

But the younger man didn’t know this future, so he stuck his hands in his pockets and said nothing as they walked across the sand to the water.

Look, the older man said. The ocean’s glowing.

The seasonal bloom of bioluminescent algae, the kind that turns blue when agitated, came early that summer, banking the L.A. coast with neon for a week. Each wave warmed in a long, slow curl, then exploded into beryl in the break & churn. Someone realized that hard footsteps on wet sand would linger. Someone waded to his hips to slosh a blue angel out of salt & darkness.

Come on. Let’s write our names with pee, the older one said, and everyone agreed, because it was his party and he was their leader. Other, incidental men joined the almost brothers in a line facing the ocean, 8 Picassos about to draw a centaur in the air with a light pen.

Between waves, they each held their cold dick out & tried to piss a signature in front of their feet. Not one could finish the full, glowing script of their name before the damp sand faded black, before the ground was dark enough to disappear into.

The reason why I don’t like the saying my person is, well, try to use it in a song. It just doesn’t sound very nice at all to fall from lips ladled with that my person to whisper, to a someone, at a time, on a night when the mind’s madness turns into music. Alone, I switch out Smokey Robinson’s lyrics.

I imagine him sing-songily singing in a way that only he can—

Ooo, my person, my person.

And I laugh.

___

If I loved someone, I would let them be my baby.

A baby, instead of my person, so that they may get treated carefully when they wail. ‘Meet their accidental burps with a pat to the back to let them know that these things happen. A baby, instead of my person, so that they may know how to be still enough to become swaddled by my arms if nothing else can hold them together.

If I loved someone, I would let them be my baby to place them in the position of a sweet pet name, to remind them that I know where all their soft spots are and that I promise not to touch them with a punishing press to their skull.

___

I think about how when I was younger it was always, Go easy on them. They just a child. They don’t know no better.

I think about how now that I’m older it has become, Go harder on them. They a person. They should know better.

And I ask, not anyone in particular at all, why does the child-to-person change bring about such a lack of grace?

As if I will have an eternity to forget the hurts that have come my way? To stop, and see, and feel those hurts with an indifferent familiarity like a person accustomed to their clumsies? I imagine that the would-be eternity could shape the pain of the hurt to pinch like a pesky mosquito bite, and not slice like an indecisive needle, seeking so much from me. But all I have is today, and hopefully tomorrow. All I have is a short time. And in my short time, I have spent so much of it obsessing about all my little hurts, and I still I feel that I do not know any better for the new days that will possibly come. What then, if at all, kind of my person does that make out to be?

___

The songs lie to me. They know that persons aren’t very good people, sometimes. That living isn’t very good always, either.

They call us the opposite of what we really are because of the possibility of what we could become, how life could be. It’s all so very idealistic, to believe that softness is the solution-protest against the calloused person, the hurt-filled life. That to move forward is to go back to gentleness once more, and always, where grace is never gone and clumsies are catered to carefully.

Confession: Alone, I think I sort of believe.

I imagine me sing-songily-singing in a way that only I

can—                                                      Ooo, Baby, Baby. My Cheri Amour. Sweet Love.

And I cry.