"Tear of Joy" by Josephine Florens
Oliver Brooks | Tiresias on a Smoke Break
Thank Hera for this fleeting peace—a pack
of Marlboro Reds and a womanly toga are all
I need to stay sane. I hear the racing taxis
go charioting by. Two will collide when the sun
flirts with treetops this evening. Don’t ask me
how I know this. It’s like how in dreams
I am other people—a teenage girl on an island
in the Pacific about to be blown away by
the world’s worst monsoon. A gray-bearded
man begging for pizza scraps along the city strip.
John Giorno throwing hotdogs at an audience
and calling it poetry. They all blow away like
tomorrow’s smoke, and I confound myself amid
the distant dusks of solitude. I remember I have
only one life and it’s this one, in which something
was stolen from me but I cannot recall what. And
to whom do I belong if not first myself? I am
endowed with skin and limb and sex, but most times
I feel like little more than a set of weakened eyes.
Why give me senses for pleasure just to prevent me
from using them, Zeus? When people see me playing
at being a man, they assume I’m either teenage
or ancient. Truth is, my whole life I’ve been older
than nostalgia. My gender fiasco will sort itself out
in the end, I know. Until then, I learn the old legends
as an antidote to my pain: Odysseus picking pennies
off the street to get home, Nolan filming his version
of The Odyssey. Tomorrow has no ghost, and still
it haunts me; I feel it in my navel as surely as night.
Pavement melts blackly into shadow. Taxis
will rush through me soon if I don’t move, so I stub
out my flame and clock back into my oracle gig,
playing prophet for future genders even I can’t
foresee. My life is the longest of funerals, but no one
can say the gods ever caught me by surprise.
of Marlboro Reds and a womanly toga are all
I need to stay sane. I hear the racing taxis
go charioting by. Two will collide when the sun
flirts with treetops this evening. Don’t ask me
how I know this. It’s like how in dreams
I am other people—a teenage girl on an island
in the Pacific about to be blown away by
the world’s worst monsoon. A gray-bearded
man begging for pizza scraps along the city strip.
John Giorno throwing hotdogs at an audience
and calling it poetry. They all blow away like
tomorrow’s smoke, and I confound myself amid
the distant dusks of solitude. I remember I have
only one life and it’s this one, in which something
was stolen from me but I cannot recall what. And
to whom do I belong if not first myself? I am
endowed with skin and limb and sex, but most times
I feel like little more than a set of weakened eyes.
Why give me senses for pleasure just to prevent me
from using them, Zeus? When people see me playing
at being a man, they assume I’m either teenage
or ancient. Truth is, my whole life I’ve been older
than nostalgia. My gender fiasco will sort itself out
in the end, I know. Until then, I learn the old legends
as an antidote to my pain: Odysseus picking pennies
off the street to get home, Nolan filming his version
of The Odyssey. Tomorrow has no ghost, and still
it haunts me; I feel it in my navel as surely as night.
Pavement melts blackly into shadow. Taxis
will rush through me soon if I don’t move, so I stub
out my flame and clock back into my oracle gig,
playing prophet for future genders even I can’t
foresee. My life is the longest of funerals, but no one
can say the gods ever caught me by surprise.
Oliver Brooks (he/they) is a trans poet and MFA student at Florida State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, New Delta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Variant Literature, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. He serves as the poetry editor of Southeast Review.
Josephine Florens is a Ukrainian artist based in Germany. Her paintings explore identity, memory, and resilience through expressive color and symbolic form. Exhibited internationally, her works have appeared in journals and collections across Europe and North America.
