LIMP LIKE—

---

—my dick. 

—my wrist. 

Flaccid: curve me  

to a will not mine. Fact is,  

I limp: bent, pliable, liable to  

be cum pliant, no complaints 

for its lability. Limp  

like Richard III’s back- 

benching 

disability? 

Cast me as Shylock too. I’ll lend  

you obtuse angles and a hundred 

pounds of fresh  

thinking. Venice, 

I’m sinking. We will 

never be on even 

ground. My spine is fluent,  

onomatopoetically, says 

I should do my limp in many voices,  

in gauche feet. Okay, read aloud then: 

You want a gait  

that’s great, not gay. 

Too bad! Look here:  

I walk like so. 

But, you see, prosody will not be  

here for me when I need surgery. 

When I say I will need to cut up  

my bum hip, it don’t mean overcome. 

Say the thing  

you mean, then. 

What iamb saying is that  

I’m anapestering you to

redactyl the dispondee gaze  

you glaze on me when you 

see that I limp with  

a trochee lowkey.

My tongue slicks syncopated  

circles around your lungs but  

most prefer to keep the  

offbeat for their earbuds.  

Dance, gimpy trans boy, dance! 

I do but I don’t want to show you again. 

Cut back on 

primal scenes. 

Leonard Cohen nutcracked  

my hip to let the light in. 

Rita MacNeil hammered 

my mind with a mining pick. 

It’s a cheap trick of the eye,  

ear, nose, and deep throat  

specialist, the musical myth that 

the body’s rhythms aren’t blue jazz, 

are inviolate. Pace is a lie. All things 

can occur out of time. (Say, swift jizz.) 

We all might blush,  

fuchsia-rush of the cheek, 

if one hip swings less sweetly, 

(more stagger than swagger)  

than what I wager most  

seek when stealing a 

peek in the glass as  

they walk past me 

with my breakfast and  

Derek at the diner,  

just one  

long block 

from home.

LEONARD COHEN IN THE ARTIST RESIDENCY MEAL HALL 

Dramatis Personae 

• Me, fat trans Jewish poet 

• M., chubby trans Jewish playwright 

• S., genderqueer Jewish dancer 

• Leonard, lean cisgender Jewish poet (often fasting) 

*** 

Let’s not pretend he sits with us. 

On Wednesdays we wear black 

(so does he) but ours is XXL and 

made of panda food or coarse cotton  

serger-stitched by a stranger who could  

have used the mental health resources  

bludgeoned unto one of us at the  

table before his recent operation.

In Los Angeles, surgeons  

think they’re saving you. 

I get you. My last pap was a 

very special day… for the nurse! 

[Heretical but the new  

messiahs are medical.] 

Leonard sits in the corner counting syllables  

and calories of the melodies and mango  

semifreddos he’s let drop from his tongue  

of late. Took years to trim excess verse,  

he claims. One senses he believed 

the self could waist away.  

In California,  

M’s tallow churns with  

other medical waste in a 

neon lagoon that will soon 

overflow if cis-neuroses about 

adiposity continue to be indulged 

in Hollywood, 

nobody eats.

Keats: My name is Ozempic, Pill of Pills; 

Look on my Abs, ye Weighty, and despair! 

Canada has a BMI limit 

for top surgery, I share with M. Hip surgery too; oh 

how my joint blazes. 

I invite him to stare, even, at 

the odd double trouble chest  

and gut I take, every-other 

daily, nude, to the pool.

Dude! I never would  

have noticed. I love it! 

Yeah, my new thing is to 

say I have gynecomastia. 

ha ha 

ha ha (not untrue,  

per se) 

In addition to not sitting with us, 

Leonard does not swim either.  

I don’t look good 

in a bathing suit, he says.  

My mismatching lumps, M’s scars, 

could have been Leonard’s kibbutz. 

(It takes a village to  

raise a cis man up 

but we would do  

it gladly, yes.) 

S. Yes, what about S.? They dance all day  

with a troupe, then dance all night.  

The dancers are known to sneak  

many desserts to their rooms after  

eating many desserts  

at their table. Thing is There is no end  

of love or hunger. 

S. does neo-drag in rural BC, queer  

klezmer dance meets skittish poetry. 

I am here to write to Leonard 

of shared distastes of the self. 

M. is co-writing a play about 

a transgender Hasidic rabbi.

We remain, yours, Verklempt, not wanting 

alpha and aryan manhood. Just food! 

We have seen the Nazi propaganda of 

fat, fey, clumsy, hirsute, artsy, sickly 

Jewish men and said 

hmmmmmmmm YES. Choices are few, 

and when we die 

or diet to kill cliché, 

we affirm  

its terror. 

I too enjoy sitting alone  

most meals, but Leonard, I met two 

girlfriends here at this very 

artist residency, decades past— 

[if both are now trans do not lay your grudge  

at my exhausted flip-flops. I am not well 

heeled, but I know to watch my step now, 

heed my feet like any too-sweet boy must

who treats himself to calm in a world  

of pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-disease] 

—and I am  

glad I did. 

But song and sex cannot sustain.  

So, unlike Leonard Cohen, I eat. 

Leonard liked islands  

and mountains, fasting 

and climbing.  

Here he is yet 

again, extremities cold,  

constipated in a cabin.  

None of us is  

his stand-in.  

We are three cool loser artists  

on residency all sad to admit 

Leonard Cohen wouldn’t  

even look at me at lunch 

even though our shmata 

are cut much the same. 

A HEM IS A SHAME. 

Torso-tight, too long 

in the leg and the tooth 

to try to spanx shut  

the open secret of the  

Sphinx Greek: to tighten, to squeeze We have guts. 

No hiding it. 

LEONARD! 

Let it all hang out. 

It is never too late  

to lay down a cross. 

LONGINUS (whose name  

makes him trans sorry that’s the rule) 

stabs all soft boys  

in the side eventually.  

What will  

pour out of me? Coke Zero 

Out of S? Manischewitz or artisanal BC substitute 

Out of M? Bubly  

Out of  

Leonard? O fluidity, fluidity. All I see 

is that ZAFTIG gets the last  

word in my Yiddish dictionary. 

Dinner this evening is char sui pork belly. unctuous  

Add my nightly bowl of sliced apple. roughage 

Leonard looks lightheaded. 

However blessedly bad he  

croons behind that thin guitar, 

a fast won’t take anyone far. 

So here—here— here—here— 

LEONARD! Please! Take this Kälteen Bar—

SATURDAY SWIM 

Boring but I  

am pro-laps. 

Wet-suited girl-tot quizzes  

hot-mom in hot tub: 

• What does the sign say? 

• Why can’t old people swim? 

• Are you pregnant, mommy? 

• Is there a baby in there?  

▪ [There 

was not.]  

• Mommy, is it a choice to be pregnant?  

o Mostly, sweetie. 

• Mommy, why can’t pregnant moms go in the hot tub?  

o Well, sweetie, 

when a mom has a baby in her,  

the baby is nice and warm in there,  

so if she goes in the hot tub, 

The baby gets cooked. And babies are  

NO GOOD cooked! 

Tone suggestive of 

carpaccio nostalgia. 

• What about Harry’s mommy? 

• How did he get to Hogwarts? 

• If I run really fast, can I  

Go through this wall? You’re not a  

wizard, Willow. 

I want to tell her she is, I am,  

that some walls need rerouting  

or carving rather than collision. KA-POW! 

Walls can be slinked or scaled too.  

Since nobody looks good in a cape,  

everybody does (buckshot are the few).

Stretched and steamed, I leave. 

Willow has proceeded to the pool. 

She floats on her  

back. Fixed, flaccid. 

A cat placed on a slow shallow 

treadmill will reject the premise too. 

I totter out. Watch  

her limp resistance. 

I only inflame at  

connection points  

but there are so many. The past,  

for instance, bending over 

the present. I tell myself she  

will be fine.

SUNDAY SWIM 

Back and up, up and back, my mad back and I are too hip  

to care how our erratic paddle appears these fifteen years. 

The fast ones come  

as theorems to prove. 

Their ritualistic pomp-strut, circumcision  

(I speculate but speedos know, near tell).  

Splish-splash rashly, full of haste.  

Wheel, wheeze. Velocious, victorious for their TWO LAPS TOTAL. 

Contemporaneously (at ease, ad 

verb police), I move to and fro. 

My boat is  

no show. 

Afore the fast flop in, 

after they bound out, 

I swim slow. Mine are not real 

strokes but the job? They do it.  

My job is poetry and ache  

(stretch my sin and sinew).  

Screw it. There is no sport now 

in eulogizing the vapid rapidities. 

(The quick bull rushes in, all plum-thumbs, while 

the slow silver fox humps under a zealous god.) 

How many laps have the fast folded themselves over?  

How many bowls of milk? How many toilets? 

My recent fellow feeling slopes me  

sad-ward to their hearts anyhow. 

Unbeknownst, they marathon. 

Must I be the one to tell them?

TARGETED ADVERTISTMENTS FOR YOU WHO USED TO VISIT ME 

I. 

PLANTAR FASCIITIS MIRACLE CURE; what shoes to choose if your inner ankles have blacks  and blues (I rolled a jar of ice under your foot to de-swell it which is all well and good but a  Rexall cane does not relieve pain if one refrains from its use because one is ashamed to accept  aid. I get it. NOISE SHOWS at which the ability to read music is cursed, which, I mean, that’s  cool, I can’t claim to keep my clamour to myself much, I’m a fool for imperfect pitch and I too  press maliced calluses to things that hang by a string. I can’t sing for shit. You told me that  following the beat of my own humdrum tune was the only key, that no song must have a bridge.  I asked, then how do we get from the start to the end? Ghosting has no melody. It’s all for the  best. Now I get why Western musical notation calls utter silence a rest. CLOTHES IN EARTH  TONES. Swamp, turf, twig. Lichen, pumpkin, twilight. taupe-hope, squash-moss, beige-rage. I  live for olive, fat khaki cock, and camo tank tops on my floor for days. BLACK TURTLENECKS  in 3X for my fat-Foucault years. SUBURBAN FRANCOPHILIA. I go there so often now, to buy  miniature couches for cats and to visit shrines to Mary at churches named after bishops who  built schools to transform the tone of spirits and to yoke accents as unknown to me as the  velocity of my grandfather’s spit. ITALIAN SUBMARINES. Split like crummy communion, spread  with ajvar. JOB BANKS. Make something work for you. AMATEUR EROTICA. Scandalize  tempered tongues. VEGAN SWEETS. Sit me down. Explain the flax of life. The impossibility of  substitution. Its necessity. 

II. 

Months since, our ads still blend slicker 

than we did in this king-sized shyness. 

Me: HO’ZEMPIC. PART-TIME MFA. EXTRA-WIDE PINK PATENT BOOTS.  BLACK TELEPHONES still circumcising me up at my suspect roots.  

The emotion of the Atlantic Ocean huffs asthmatic, chest-breath’d,  

the ricing-cauli rhythm of the highest semaglutides in the world. Bore  me!  

O blistered cream! broth of sloth! oil of broken cheddar! I incant this  

to listening laptops to get discounts on courses about how to process 

matter  

better.  

No longer do I too plumb patterns  

of seeking to better appeal to you. 

And so, in sum, this essay argues 

that even if no other automata do,  

my algorithm, at  

least, misses you.

LUNCH NEXT TO ATTENDEES OF THE NEONATAL MEDICINE CONFERENCE 

Eavesdropping is sour pickings today. 

(Meal hall math = 1 table = 1 gasbag) 

No weird baby facts? Hour in, I ask them  

to name their field’s big debate these days. 

They think I can’t grok. Maybe not. I tend to debate 

live/die, steam/fry, friend/foe, eat/fast, fast/slow, stay 

go, or, how to make a throat know all will be well  

(if “all” is defined as another vile certainty spell). 

Nothing doing! Ice cream queueing, I meet a mom  

who is here to dispense experiential knowledge. 

Forever belated do I hear the flirt in the words, 

err on oblivion’s better side. (Early 20s, 

on post-seminar bar trips, I’d chat up the nervous. 

Hear later I’d hit on someone. Maritime kindness,  

file under habits to shroud. I wouldn’t, but I’m wary 

of ones daydreaming grounds for delighted disgust.) 

No neonatal parties to crash, only team dinners. READY? OK. Mad vaginal interveners feed each other in pyramid formation,  

poppyseed dressing spilt on lab coats from broken beakers  

as tiny tiramisus overpopulate each bamboo bassinet— 

The field’s big debate, by the way, is viability. 

Fresh flesh pressed to serve, how minute is futile? 

When do we call it all off? O Mrs. Incipience. 

When do we nix. When do we fix.  

On such matters, they  

presume me novitiate?

---

About the Author

Lucas Crawford is a multiply-disabled genderqueer poet with one monograph and four poetry books under his extra-long belt, including the award-winning collections Sideshow Concessions (Invisible Publishing, 2015) and Belated Bris of the Brainsick (Nightwood Editions, 2019). Lucas is the Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the University of Alberta (Augustana). Lucas also runs “Rewriting Ourselves,” a large collaborative pilot project that has designed (and will soon offer) poetry workshops in psychiatric wards.