The Only Way Out Is Through: Or a Bit of the Story Behind Time Travel in a Closet

by digitalhyperlexic

The following is a slightly edited and expanded version of the introduction written for my thesis while studying in Ashland University’s MFA program. I will be defending my thesis this July, and in our introductions we were each asked to discuss a group of around ten texts that form the “literary genealogies” that influenced the poems in our theses . This is also intended as an update since my original #MyWritingProcess post, which I wrote prior to both beginning my MFA studies and my transition.

CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of suicide, physical and sexual abuse, homophobia, anti-blackness, and ABA.

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“Everybody communicates. Words are beautiful. Our words have value.”

These words by author and autistic activist Amy Sequenzia are simple, clear, and remarkably profound. Infinitely beautiful, and bigger on the inside.

With my words, I come to you as a survivor, a man with scars both inside and out. I spent my childhood and adolescent years occupying a series of closets, all nestled within each other like Russian dolls. I knew that my family expected me to be a “good Christian girl,” not the oversized, socially awkward, frizzy-haired, hormone-driven, hopelessly unfeminine dork I saw in the mirror. In their eyes, that “me” was absolutely unacceptable, and they reminded me of this nearly every single day until I was eighteen years old. Meanwhile, I hid the physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse that I endured at their hands. They demanded that I keep all of this, too, inside a closet.

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BURN WITH ME (for Baltimore)

by Memoirs Of A Dead Woman

The Thirteenth Doctor, in Baltimore, April 2015

This city is an angry
wound flaring up
a centuries-long nightmare
into the sky —

an orange flame fist
throat crying
not “How long?”,
but “NOW!”

A sliver of me —
not Time Lady but
black woman, braid-
mantilla crowned,

piñata hearts burst
open — kneels to weep
in the middle of
some street;

but now is not
the time for water.
It is the time for
fire, erupting

from the chasm
of a severed black
man’s spine, bullets’
exit wounds, nooses,

hard leathered skins
poverty-worn and
tented on their bones
to house their souls

from flaying knife
winds still blowing
from your Middle
Passage.

Blame not the broken
kindling for burning,
but the hot winds for
igniting them.

Burn with me, you who
watch from your tellys
and tsk-tsk-tsk — burn
black like me

and you will finally
understand.

Written 4/28/15
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This was written for Baltimore. I’ve created a future regeneration of the Doctor (after Peter Capaldi’s Twelve Doctor) and made her female and dark-skinned. I did this last fall, but I thought of all of my fictional creations who needed to say something about Baltimore, it was her.