torrin a. greathouse | Self-portrait as Daedalus, Writing the First Draft of His Autobiography

torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer, schizophrenic, cripple-punk from Southern California. They are the Editor and Co-Founder of Black Napkin Press. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus, Crab Fat Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Polychrome Ink, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Calamus Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, & The Feminist Wire. torrin's work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Rust + Moth. When they are not writing or editing poetry, they are trying to survive in america long enough to earn a degree.

Black Napkin Press.

Also by torrin a. greathouse: Three Poems Panic Attack as a 4 Part Word Problem

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: On the Midnight Sky, Fireworks Calling to Us Like a Mother in the Distance

March 2017

torrin a. greathouse

Self-portrait as Daedalus, Writing the First Draft
of His Autobiography

every version of this story begins with you, which is to say, this story begins with falling, or it begins where sky ends, or with the ocean swallowing a bird or a boy, like a lump in its throat. let me begin again: once, your mother gave birth to a candle, these palms carved wax, searching for feathers inside. lesson — you cannot dig a body from the fire, only bones. no, let me begin again: maybe, once your mother gave birth to me & i spent years hating birds for the gift of wings & i was taught to labyrinth these fractured ribs to hold my bullheaded heart. no. let me begin again: once my mother gave birth to a bull, then to a pair of wings or was it a fire? or just a pile of bones? & then she labyrinthed this into a name. let me begin again: you or i were born a candle & i named us with a blade, trying to carve a perfect wing. i named us until all that was left was a sound. maybe this is the only way to say it: boy begets boy, teaches him — desire. teaches him the shackling of dark, how it labyrinths into your veins. forgot to teach him — fire or how it can kiss. fire begets fall. boy rises from the ocean, cliff — white as bones. story walks out my mouth in the middle of a sentence

This poem emerged during a time when I was facing one of the worst writer's blocks I've ever encountered. My friend HanaLena Fennel (a fantastic poet who constantly inspires me) suggested that the issue might be my perfectionism, and that maybe the way to write again was to attack this directly. She challenged me to write about my own perfectionism through the lens of Daedalus, whose perfectionism was often his downfall. In writing to this prompt I carved out a space where parent / child / object / animal become one and different, where memory restructures / devours itself. At a certain point it became a poem less about perfection and more about the safety this elusive perfection provides, yet ends on the refusal of a perfect ending. In a way this poem is a lesson to myself. A lesson in walking away, of finding perfection in the unfinished.

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