[I found this poem I’d written, I think, while sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon in Northern Virginia trying to make it back to Hampton Roads. It was written on a napkin in smudged ink, so I had to make a couple of interpretations. Enjoy.]
an inchworm
of cars
a rainbow
of matte amd metallic and rust
sweltering
trapped
in the web
of yellow and white lines
fading and broken
marked on pitted asphalt
Did you watch the Superbowl last night? I did. Or at least, it was on the television in the same room I was. Im not a big football fan. Not a big sports fan at all.
My husband watches it every year. Although this year, he was also on his phone. That “TV in the same room” situation.
I made potato skins and fried cheese curds and we ate chips and salsa. Dilly, our Bullmastiff, got up on the sofa to hang out.
We both watched the half time show, phones down. I loved it. My husband was amazed at the transformation of the field into a space representing Puerto Rico. I chair-danced to the music.
Usually, I would be rooting for the Patriots (Boston-born Virginia transplant here), but last night, I was rooting for the Seahawks. Mainly because I just found out their owner was in the Epstein files. When my husband asked why I was rooting for Seattle and told him, he nodded his okay.
Much of the game experience, from the colors on the field to the pregame warmup entertainment to the half-time show, even to a lot of the commercials, seemed to be a snub to the antidiversity crowd running the country right now. It only made it even better. I wish I’d been able to see more of the sign language interpretation; it looked wild from what was shown in thevregular presentation. Guess what I’ll be looking for on YouTube today?
And now, this morning, is the backlash about the Black National Anthem (what rock have these people been hiding under?) Lift Every Voice has been a part of the Superbowl since 2020. (See this article from Ebony about that here: https://www.ebony.com/lift-every-voice-and-sing-super-bowl-lx-coco-jones/.)
It’s false outrage, of course. If they really had an issue with it, they would have protested by not watching the Superbowl, by boycotting the whole NFL season in protest. For the past five years.
But the folks protesting that lovely song, and thus all its historical significance, are just grousing because they didn’t get their way about the half-time show. They ignore that half the players (or better) on the field were Black. Why wouldn’t the NFL give a nod to those players’ history? (The origins of Lift Every Voice is in that Ebony article, too.)
The diversity on display at the Superbowl last night, and it’s celebration of that diversity, is what most Americans, and especially this Massachusetts-American, would like to see every day in these United States.
So ask yourself, why can’t we have that every day?
I am not someone who keeps a steady journal or diary (we all know this blog is come and go, and sometimes I’m gone for a long time). But I have written things down, in special note books that I am careful when I write in so that they are not messy, although my handwriting is never the same from one entry to the next.
Memories, feelings, events that happened that I think I will want to remember one day when I will need that written prompt.
This morning, I was reading through some of those written-down memories, reveling in nostalgia from a decade and a half ago, and had to pause and edit what I was reading in my head.
The pronouns were wrong.
Someone I had written about back then had since come out as nonbinary, and changed their name and pronouns, and the discord in my brain was real. At first, I didn’t know who this person was that I had written about. I used to feel this discord often in conversation with folks who would ask about them using their deadname, and I would have to pause to figure out who they were asking about. But that was with someone else; someone who either didn’t know about the transition or didn’t respect it.
In my head and memories right now, they have always been nonbinary, with this name and these pronouns. My brain has fully made the transition to their nonbinary status (they are not nonbinary now and not back then – they just finally recognized it and grew into it enough to determine labels). But in this handwritten memory, it took me a minute to adjust.
These were my words. My memories. Unchanged with time and progress. And they were at odds with the memories in my head. Because a part of what I had written was not true.
And I was tempted to pull out a pen and edit, make a mess in those old pen strokes.
But when I’d moved past the discord, I realized something else, something that I had told mutual friends and family members, but maybe hadn’t actually seen and only felt: that they were indeed the same person back then as they are now. Younger, obviously, but still the same. In these old written memories, the descriptions of how they looked and dressed and acted, their nonbinary status is plain. That balance of the masculine and the feminine is there, on paper.
And though I haven’t picked up that red pen to mark up the text, because a part of me wants to, another part of me wants to leave it as is, because it shows something else about this person. How they grew and accepted themselves, and how even though they hadn’t had a label for it in their youth, they were still that person, the same as they are now.
And seeing that written down is its own sort of truth that should never be forgotten or glossed over or changed.
Tara Moeller 