NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

notes to Lake Erie after the storm

Poetry by KJ Cerankowski

you always look like the afterparty, dressed in last night’s confetti
I haven’t bled enough, recently enough to recognize at first glimpse this rainbow
of plastic shoreline as sewage overflow—tampon applicators strewn
amongst the orange brick of this city’s history you swallow & spew
 
cobble of ancient roadways, foundations of shifting architecture
if I applied myself more, might I undo the bedrock of my skin, brickwork
of cell, rafters of bone to become the right kind of boy? The man on the pier
said “excuse me, ma’am” as he brushed shoulders with my shell & I turned myself
 
into a shy & quiet girl just long enough to whisper “it’s okay, sir” because I think
for a moment he looks like my grandfather & I want to please him as much as I
love him & hate myself. I clench a syringe in my fist like a lightning rod
praying the weekly strike into my muscle will make me “sir”
 
while electricity strobed the sky & thunder rocked the boats in the harbor, a writer
who penned worlds I could live in died last night & when the news washed up
this morning, everyone on the internet fought about their pronouns & I salted
your sweet water with my eyes, begging you to send us all back in pieces into a world
 
in pieces, I put on a skirt & stood before the mirror just to make sure I still
hate myself that way. Sometimes I think boy is a thing to be but mostly it seems
like an idea of something, a man once told me I love women only because I cannot
love myself as the woman I am meant to be. He is wrong, but I think
 
I love a woman most when her face becomes a rip tide
& I am perpendicular & everything else is a wash—it is true
sometimes I confuse this great lake for ocean only because I am
salt-hungry & out of my depth

KJ Cerankowski

KJ Cerankowski is a queer writer based in Cleveland, OH. His poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Entropy, Paper Darts, The Account, and Limp Wrist, among others. He is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming, a critical lyric memoir published by punctum books. He teaches at Oberlin College.