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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