Tristan Silverman Trained as a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, and a veteran educator, Tristan's work addresses the humanness of flaw, the fluidity of identity, and the reality of coming of age disabled, queer and American. For the last seven years, Tristan has been facilitating clinics and discussions using aesthetics to improve dialogue around identity, faith, politics and gender diversity on campuses and in organizations across America. Quickly becoming one of the country's foremost emerging live poets, she recently placed 7th overall in the nation at the 2010 Women of the World Poetry Slam, has been on 2 semifinalist National Poetry Slam teams, was the 2009 and 2010 Chicago Female Grand Champion, and 2008 Chicago Poetry Champion and is the winner of the 2010 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award.

Two Poems (April 20, 2011. Issue 27.)

1989

It was the summer after Ted Bundy was executed,
but bodies kept disappearing. My dad called my grandmother,
asked her to keep us indoors. My dad called and I sat waiting

on the couch for Nana to hand me the phone. I was seven
when every room in America became trained to watch death
on their TV sets, frozen snapshots of mutilated bodies,

as if those bodies were a studio pose. It was the summer
I learned it wasn't just the ten-dollar whores trolling
behind my school who had it coming. My dad called my

grandmother and said Jacksonville, Florida was unsafe. I listened
while they argued; I sat on the couch. Later my sister and I would
drink beer until our heads spinned, but now she was out

in the back cutting the heads off her dolls and hiding
them in the dirt. The TV reported that a 10-year-old boy
raped by his dad would not make it. The summer our

local reporter looked so helpless, as if trying to
push back the weather, she asked everyone to "just calm down."
It was the summer I let the man take a whole roll of film.

Me in my polka-dotted bathing suit. I wanted to give him
something back. He fed me popsicle after popsicle, let me devour
all the red ones until my mouth turned raw and slaughtered.

He let me leave whenever I wanted, and I always ran
all the way home. Always entered through the door out of breath
or filled with terror, started to lock the door to my bedroom

to keep out my sister who started to stare empty at me while I slept.
It was the summer after my father called and said he wouldn't be home
for awhile. How much he loved us. How everything was going to be OK.

Following After, What I Did

I take my boots off three times
before keeping them on.
there is a man on the street who smells
of the large and uninformed.
I sit with him and know this is my body.
Again, I check my phone.
It is mid-afternoon, and I'm not sure
I've really moved from that bed.
My car looks like a bed.
The sun is a set of sweaty sheets.
The sidewalk is green with the sun.
I am not considering any one thing here,
just that my body was smoking under vinyl
or girl leather and how I will never wear it again.
The worms are moving, because it rained.
And this had made all of Los Angeles hide
in rooms where people were dancing,
wrapped in ropes or naked. Why they weren't
eating picnics or dancing dressed in their child
clothes is not on my mind. The world
reeks of make believe, but not the kind
involving Narnia. I'm walking past a beer sign.
I'm drinking straight from the bottle.
There are so many houses filled with hope
here, I can hardly stand it,
but I wouldn't take that from them.
The sight of their bliss is
the boiling kettle song of war.
I don't know how to talk to God
but I want to have been created.
My house is so far away
it takes the four men in me to arrive.
The blood on my back has dried.
When some folks next door wave I want them
to ask me why I'm not naked. Or where
I have been. They smell of soap made from cut grass.
This might just be their lawn.
I love it so much that I bang my head
on my door frame.
This might be my only mistake,
somehow I start crying.
I feel a strange relief as
my roommate touches my back
and murmurs that I could write the bible
on kink. Several days pass and I cannot
dry myself enough times fresh
from another shower. My own face
is the deepest apology I owe. I can't
move, but I have to. And when I do,
I do. I move around and start to clean up.