from the gospel of jean grey
transition timeline
This is not a history history would mean a sequence of facts something provable
and what can you prove one moment inside the blackbird another aboard
the deck of a boat sailing for the new world in one memory you kiss your husband
on this boat in another he’s just another hungry dom at a fetish club
but the clincher is when you meet your daughter from an alternate timeline
no the clincher is when you meet the shell of DNA meant to replace you
some genetic experiment some mind wiped clean of genocide of dying and rising
so much you’d think you had something to prove and what would that be anyway
that the godhead inside her the shell’s head was yours all along a harbinger
of a continuity beyond bone and meat that somehow despite your consciousness
radiating through each length of rope each discarded face You are still a discrete you
dissociation
Amnesiac a state of being in absence of selves as good as dead until the brain
is once more peopled with Is the I who tucked into the mansion off Graymalkin
only to tuck out and with a boy the I who kept the boy’s eyes open without
collateral damage the I who took three claws to the gut but got back up
the I who got back up from grave after grave until the engraver etched
‘she will rise again’ on the old tombstone this is true: she’s like a species
bottlenecked during an extinction event one that left only the best genes moaning
to take hold once more to dig back into each other and endure like a person
robbed of memory except for the most durable I of all the one lodged
in the reptile brains of other bodies who incubate the I like a virus who’ve evolved
to live without it not knowing when it will rise again Or how hungry she will rise
Emma X Lirette (she/her) is a poet and the author of the nonfiction Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers (UPress Mississippi 2022). You can find her poetry—all under her deadname—in Drunken Boat, jubilat, PANK, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. She holds an MFA and a PhD and used to teach at Cornell and Emory, before transitioning to work in social media in the creator space. She lives with her wife and children in Atlanta. You can find her online as @imagistex on Twitter.