Poem-a-Day - "My Hole. My Whole." by Sam Sax

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August 19, 2024 
 

My Hole. My Whole.

Sam Sax

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me. 

Copyright © 2024 by Sam Sax. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem began, as many do, struggling with the limitations of language. Being in a long-term, queer, poly, nonbinary relationship, we often find ourselves pushing against the terminology we inherited for how to name ourselves and our love(s), how to become legible to ourselves and to others. Both queerness and poetry can offer ways of breaking with the past and searching for strange syntax and improper nouns, not just to define an already lived experience but to eke out a space to imagine new possible futures. This poem struggles with this question of naming, of possibility, of fluidity. It offers up one way of honoring the flexibility and specificity of our loves.”
—Sam Sax

Sam Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. Sax is the author of Pig (Scribner, 2023) and Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), which received the 2017 James Laughlin Award. They live in Oakland, on Ohlone land. 

Pig
Pig
(Scribner, 2023)

“Broken Retablo for Being on My Back, My Feet Bare & in the Air” by Joe Jiménez
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“Tries the Grammar of the Arabic to Fit the Language the English” by Noor Jaber
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Thanks to Danez Smith, author of Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Smith’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.
“Poem-a-Day is brilliant because it makes space in the everyday racket for something as meaningful as a poem.” —Tracy K. Smith

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