Let Me Hold That for You: A Review of Topaz Winters’ PORTRAIT OF MY BODY AS A CRIME SCENE I’M STILL COMMITTING
The end begins with target practice: me & how
I always forget to keep track of your hands.
I found Topaz Winters' Portrait of My Body as a Crime Scene I'm Still Committing through a pull quote on Tumblr, the way I do so much of the gutting poetry I subject myself to. It wasn't this quote, but it could have been, just as it could have been almost any other line from this relentless assemblage of truths I for some reason felt the need to make myself sit in.
I'm hiding in that, it’s hardly mysterious. This is a book about queer love and anxiety and mental illness and disembodiment, and I'm a queer disembodied anxious (among other things) person who is currently going through a bit of a rough time. I read the quote and jumped at the chance to feel heard. I was right to.
Topaz and I are obviously not the same person, there are dissonances in our experience, but the through line of forgiveness for the self in here has kept this book bedside since I first brought it home. These poems are honest and brave and willing to show you the day to day ugly of living at war with your own brain (I wanted to not hurt/ anymore, my kneecaps/ halfway shattered, the/ dark consuming itself/ over and over again. Just/ once, I wanted reciprocity - When My First Boyfriend...). There's none of the ruthless 'it gets better!' glitter on your drowning that so often makes me feel worse. Instead we find a fierce defense of the struggling self, a collection that holds firm to some truths—that queer love is beautiful and just might save us, that today is today and tomorrow a mystery, that sometimes you don't have to accept it so much as just move on—while recognizing that the road will be slow going and hard, and maybe just finding the right company along the way is the key to getting through.
We are the broken leading the broken so often in this world, congregating in tight circles of understanding because so much of society seems to operate in a sphere of optimism and privileged self-confidence we can't imagine being able to feel. We say, let me hold that for you until you're able, let me leave these fears of mine here in exchange. We say nothing and suffer for it, afraid that our friend's closets are already full to bursting with their own poorly taped boxes of need. We put on our faces and go back out into the world.
I sent a copy of My Body... to the friend who holds me when I can’t be trusted to do it myself with a small adaptation to the last stanza in Lone/Pack
This is what the wolves taught me:
the most beautiful word is girl. me, is you.
The most beautiful part of her body our bodies
is what she we did to survive.
I know he'll hold that for me until I find my way back to believing it, just as all of us who read Topaz's book are holding their belief for them. We are, as Richard Siken reminds us in Snow and Dirty Rain, “all just trying to be holy.” I'm going to close my computer now, make a coffee that's a little too sweet, reread July, and be grateful for the days when I can find that kind of grace for myself.