Professor

“Write a poem about men,

The professor said,

and if you use the word ‘masculinity’

or any of its derivatives,

you will fail this class.”

Hands went up–

“What about trans masculinity?”

“What about the divine masculine as an integral part of Goddess spirituality?”

“What about my ex-partner, a gender nonconforming sign painter who went so far in his nonconformity that he had himself castrated at Burning Man?”

What about that time when I was five and my dad found me crying in the bathroom

because I knew clean teeth and strong gums were the cornerstone of a successful life

but here I’d gone and wasted a nice-sized glob of the chalky white goo by letting it slide off the brush and plop onto the pristine ceramic of the sink, a sink my mother presumably cleaned each morning while I was in kindergarten, because it always gleamed and it definitely wasn’t me cleaning that sink, with my little boy hands and my penchant for Leaving The Goddam Toilet Seat Up or my older brother, who certainly wasn’t going to stop playing his Metallica CD long enough to clean his own room, let alone a shared sink in the master bedroom, 

or my dad, with his beer breath and sarcasm,

my dad who any other night would have told me to suck it up and that crying was for little girls

but that night I guess he hadn’t started drinking yet

so his scent was different-he smelled of aftershave and not Coors light-and he helped me put more Crest on my Batman toothbrush,

then took a wet paper towel, wiped up the toothpaste I’d dropped in the sink,

and said hey, it’s okay, we have plenty of toothpaste, buddy, and that night, that one night, my dad was the one wiping away my tears instead of causing them to stream down my mother’s face

What about  that, Professor

But that wasn’t me. Oh no.

 My hand didn’t go up.

I was too busy looking through Roget’s thesaurus, stopping by the Ls on my way to the Ms because I was really into “lackadaisical” and “lugubrious” my freshman year of college and wouldn’t be satisfied until I memorized all the synonyms and could spell them backwards in my head (unenthusiastic, halfhearted, blase, despondent, Eeyorish, and melancholic are my favorites) 

and me, I wasn’t even supposed to be in college, I was supposed to work at the phone company with my father but, come to find out,  nobody at the phone company cares if the number of syllables in a word changes or stays the same, when you reverse the letters. All they care about is how much wire you can pull before the nerves in your neck and shoulder give out.

What about italics, professor? If I put masculinity in italics, will I still fail the class? And what will you do, you sardonic tweed-wearing hipster fuck, if you unlock your office door one day to find your in-progress novel covered in Crest?