This week's Poet of the People is Evelyn Berry. Over a decade ago, led by Evelyn Berry, an inspired group of Aiken High School students would pile in a car and journey to Columbia to attend Mind Gravy Poetry. I am fortunate to still know several of them through the wonder of Facebook—and Evelyn continues to lead and soar above us all. Some day, we will say we knew and were energized by Evelyn Berry on her way up and be grateful for the experience.
-Al Black
Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She's the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024). She's a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
Self-Portrait at Nineteen
All summer, I worked shifts at Old Navy
& snorted molly from an iPhone screen
in the backseat of a car parked nowhere,
a happy heathen not yet grief-plundered.
Once, I was a boy unafraid to die.
I would swallow almost anything meant
to kill me if, at first, it got me high:
pills left over from surgery pilfered
from my parents’ medicine cabinet,
coffee cups of dark liquor, gas station
feasts, bounty of grease, sugar, cigarettes.
How else to parachute from the body?
Aliveness, this useless extravagance
I have wasted once before, but no more.
prodigal daughter
what I know of sin, i learned in the sty
amid the swine, slurped mud and called it wine.
femme-fouled boy, faggot-spoiled sacrifice
offered at the altar and abandoned.
forgive my reckless want, lord, to belong
as more than soiled sacrament, fat sow
knife-split to gorge the prophets of gendered
violence. prayer, in their hands, a blade.
what do i know of penitence, patience,
except once the lord sent frenzied demons
into a drove of blameless pigs to drown?
how did we decide which beast to slaughter?
lord, i too am an impure animal.
i left home a son, return a daughter.
Eos
After Mary Evelyn Pickering De Morgan
Once, the goddess of dawn cried out, forlorn,
her son cast into dirt beyond the walls of Troy,
Achilles’ sword drawn through his chest,
his soul gone, replaced with a feathered flock.
Her tears poured graceless as swans,
like a vase overflowing with morning dew
until grief bloomed new gardens.
Describe to me the weight of this.
Mourning replenishes the earth, ushers
Soil into rebirth, new river traced
from the boy’s doomed blue veins.
What is a song worth without its wound?
Let me, for once, taste paradise without the tinge of blood.
Let me glimpse the cusp of dawn without the flood of night.
The Decoy
After John Collier
To be painted femme fatale, condemned fatal:
a woman’s beauty is a dangerous deception
in the hands of a man who demands
to own her like a plucked rose.
Let me be the decoy instead,
damsel in undress, glinting
luminescent like a knife
bound to my ankle.