through the use of flower imagery . Note the final lines of the stanza , which depict the speaker ’ s mastectomy scars as ‘ a naked stem , flaring with thorns ’. The body is once again imagined as a flower , but on this occasion a ‘ naked ’ one . It is my suggestion here that the speaker is flowering into the male body that hir recognises as hirs own , but hir has not yet fully bloomed .
Shipley utilises flowers as a metaphor for the speaker ’ s body and transition until the very end of the collection . In the closing lines , the speaker recalls being an eight-year-old boy picking a spring flower and putting it inside a dictionary :
my first and only dictionary , a gift from my father on the first day
of that school year . And later when it was dried , wilted , I remove it . Only a stain left , small
shadow , the handprint of a child quieting the words . 10
The symbolism of the flower being crushed within the pages of the dictionary represents how linguistic structures within society effectively ‘ crush ’ any form of gender variation that strays beyond the binary . Dictionaries are constrictive in the sense that they set the boundaries of language : they are the summation of all ‘ known ’ words . Thus , by giving the speaker a dictionary , the father simultaneously attempts to confine the speaker ’ s expression to socially produced and , by extension , socially accepted definitions ( be these expressions of identity or otherwise ).
The beginning of this paper explored an instance in which the speaker ’ s gender presentation was policed through having to ‘ wear ’ the flower . But the speaker is no longer willing to sacrifice hirs trans identity . As a result , the poem ’ s final act is to ‘ quiet the words ’ of those who would limit hirs male gender expression , or erase it completely . Speaking about Boy with Flowers , Shipley states that poetry provides ‘ a way to be visible , a way not to pass as whatever is deemed normal or socially acceptable .’ 11 It is through poetry that one is able to ‘ continually resist reduction into assumed and constructed identity categories ’. 12 This process is reflected in above stanzas , where the stain from the flower becomes reimagined as the speaker ’ s handprint . The stain operates on two levels . Firstly , it is a visible sign of the speaker ’ s body , i . e . leaving a ‘ handprint ’ as
10
Ely Shipley , “ Etymology ,” in Boy with Flowers ( New York : Barrow Street Press , 2008 ), 66 .
11
Ely Shipley , “ The Transformative and Queer Language of Poetry ,” in Troubling the Line : Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics , 198 .
12
Ibid ., 198 .
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