A meandering on queerness

I told a friend I collected rocks, shells, and sand as a child.
He, a gay man, replied with a laugh. No wonder you’re gay.
I wanted to tell him I actually consider myself queer, not gay,
but maybe that difference doesn’t mean anything to him.
I’ve only known this about myself in my late twenties,
but for me, queer is the only word that fits. Still, I didn’t say
anything to him in reply. Recently, I’ve been preoccupied
with how I used to hide by changing pronouns in my poems,
especially when sharing them with my grandmother. She
would’ve been 97 today. She loved me but she never knew.
Yesterday, I taught my college students that Emily Dickinson
often changed the pronouns in her poems. They read her letters
to Susan Gilbert and said, It’s obvious she’s queer, and,
Of course, she’s a lesbian. I envy their blatant acceptance.
I didn’t say they were wrong, and in many ways, they weren’t.
What’s clear to others and what’s true aren’t always the same.
According to Ojibwe grammar, nouns are animate or inanimate,
not feminine or masculine as with many European languages
like my native Italian. For the Anishinaabe, rocks are alive.
I gifted my grandmother plenty throughout my childhood, also
bird feathers, dandelions, and once, a white cabbage butterfly.
She never knew about me, not fully, but when I presented
the tiny creature, its wings pinched between my powdered
fingertips and its unmoving body cupped in my other palm,
she told me let it go—once you pin its wings it can no longer fly.

.

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She won Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize and earned a 2022-2023 Poetry Fellowship from The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Solstice Lit, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature.