Before I was a baby, I was a beautiful idea.
The salvation of a Jersey girl whose limbs hung
grotesquely draped in berry-blue defiance whipped
in all white till her dress frayed and fell cherry-stained
on the long walk home. A Brooklyn boy’s respectable
manifest destiny as he sprouted upwards toward the
heavens from a roach-infested tinsel tower varnished
in my grandfather’s secrets. I was part and parcel,
the means of production. I could make a dream
so American it’d twinkle like onyx
buffed and chiseled into a vanity so reflective,
they could almost see themselves in me.
& then I was ugly.
One does not become ugly overnight, there is a context
for such monsterfication; it takes a learned imperfection.
Cracked teeth in a mouth that insists upon staying open
and so much self you spill out of yourself. You become
the answer to questions no one ever planned on asking like:
How are you yo daddy’s son when you’supposed to be
a daughter? Couldn’t you color yourself lighter in every hue?
Couldn’t you walk lighter than a feather,
instead of this hulking beast, a blight, refusing
to be the beautiful through-thread of this story?
And who the fuck do you think you are
being this ugly and unabashed?
And then I was hands and snap and sparkle
puppeteering in the morning light.
And then I was boy, embodied
and benevolent. And then I was handsome, hanging
on your every word. And then I was gravel voice
and gray-evening-haloed in tobacco
& then I was beautiful again.
I couldn’t keep pretending I wasn’t. Lips berried
with vulgar smarts. A fifth of whiskey easy
on the way down. A baby-eyed big talker.
One does not become beautiful overnight.
There is a ceremony in this release.
There is grief in the cutting away of flesh.
In the leap from the jetty. It is an ugly feeling, truly,
to touch your own beauty for the first time and realize
how many years you denied yourself to yourself.
How you foraged and flailed and reached for the things
furthest from your own face,
catching fistfuls of nothing but the quiet.
How you believed in a god
not strong enough to see themselves in you.
How you let them make you into a monster,
or a fantasy, or salvation
like you weren’t an offering.
Like you weren’t conjured from the people
in every corner of the planet.
Like you might spend your whole life
apologizing for the things they could not hold,
for all of the ways in which you are wayward.
But mostly, for making them into lies–liars.
How you never saw what they saw when they saw you.
How you never defined the sun by the way it looks
dipping below the horizon, never allowed the thunderclap
to scare you from summer rains.
How you gave up being someone’s idea of ugly.
How maybe you were never good at pretending.
Kelsey L. Smoot (they/them/he/his) is a gender theorist, a committed Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their work and writings explore the process of identity formation at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. Selfhood and cultural constraints—such as masculinity and its associated expectations—coalesce in their writing. Their autoethnographic style has become a lens through which they understand their personal experience traversing the US sociopolitical landscape. Having grown up bicoastal and spending the majority of their adult life in a state of transience, Kels draws from his eclectic life experiences both deep fear and great optimism regarding what people are capable of. This tension is reflected in his published writing which can be found in Barely South Review, The Guardian, HuffPost, Voicemail Poems, The Amistad, and at their website, queerinsomniac.me When not writing, Kels can be found performing at The Space (a premiere open-mic based in Kennesaw, Georgia), perusing an antique store, or running the streets with their bois.