In the Femme Future
It’s all becoming clear now. The ferns and airplants on the windowsill
are dying and returning
to the Gulf nightsky now, like the spaceships
we wanted to believe in
are coming to spirit us away, any benevolent day now.
There’s no rush. The storms
are not quieting
everywhere, there are more —
but not here, darling. I haven’t seen you all year, now,
and yet I love everything
for you that you love, have loved lately.
If you were a cactus flower
of sorrow unblooming in the West, how fitting
the future only gives me signs of anchors floating
off with their tethers. Everything that can be reversed.
I dreamed of you again. This time
I saw you wearing a tiger lily crown
and talking on one of those plastic, seethrough cordless phones,
swooning around a teen movie bedroom, rehearsing something.
You were always the only one who could call me
back to my body, cradle my visions
and plant them in a place
back by the porch steps, by the unguarded cemetery.
My gift, if it is a gift —
is this dream world, back to you. Before
I had seen a bay of tears so full
the salt buoyed all the bodies up to the clouds. But
in the femme future, we all walk on the waters and wear
earth tones, which will be entirely new colors
by then. In the femme future
I know I can’t be trusted to tell,
there is a girl. There is a train station, a chance meeting,
a scene you will think sounds just like a summer mystery novel
about to play out. There is a scarf and a faint flower,
a flush, a pulse, a quick chest you think
has never beat so immortally as it does right now.
CJ Scruton is a trans, nonbinary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley currently living on the Great Lakes, where they teach and research ghost stories. Their work has previously appeared in Shenandoah, New South, Quarterly West, and other journals. Their full-length manuscript has been a semifinalist for the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize and a finalist for the Willow Springs Books Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize.
The Mantle 