image of what society deems to be a‘ proper’ feminine girl. He proceeds to do so without the speaker’ s permission: the speaker is treated as‘ passive, beautiful, and decorative’. By this point in the collection we have learnt that the speaker is transgender. In this context, the man’ s actions become significantly more intrusive. Not only does he physically intrude into the space of the car, but he also intrudes metaphorically into the speaker’ s life by making assumptions about hirs gender identity that do not correlate with, or even consider, the speaker’ s own experiences of being embodied.
Unlike the man in“ Memory” who looks upon the speaker’ s biological body and concludes that the‘ truth’ of their gender must be located there, I now wish to apply a phenomenological reading to the poems in a way that respects the speaker’ s self-perceived gender. After all, it is specified in the title of the collection that the speaker identifies as a boy, not a girl, with flowers. To phenomenology, it is this self-identification and subsequent experience of the body that is important. That is not to say that phenomenology overlooks the significance of obtaining harmony between body image and the body as it is perceived by others in society. Instead, what this paper argues is that the male identity that the speaker claims becomes meaningful through phenomenology, precisely because phenomenology acknowledges the intrinsic value of a person’ s lived experience of being gendered.
“ Magnolia” continues to reflect on the speaker’ s childhood experiences by exploring hirs friendship with a girl named Marissa. The friendship is short-lived, however, as it is suggested in the poem that Marissa’ s stepfather has discovered that her friend is trans. He bans the friendship as a result. The following stanza both highlights and confronts cultural anxieties surrounding gender deviance, as the speaker recalls being told by Marissa that:
I wasn’ t allowed inside her house anymore. Outside, as if to apologize, she picked me
a magnolia blossom. 7
Initially the flower can be interpreted as a parting gift to a friend, something to be remembered by. Yet the final line break alternatively suggests that it is the speaker that Marissa has picked. In this moment, the magnolia becomes representative of the speaker’ s body. Although flowers feature throughout the collection, this is one of the few times in which Shipley specifically names the flower, which prompts the question: why a magnolia? Because magnolias are‘ bisexual’ flowers— in the sense that they have both male( stamen) and female( pistil) reproductive parts— they become analogous to the speaker’ s transgender identity. That is, the speaker was born female, biologically, but hirs gender identity is male. To continue the
7
Ely Shipley,“ Magnolia,” in Boy with Flowers( New York: Barrow Street Press, 2008), 17.
18