Recently, as I drooled over Gregory Gourdet’s performance on Top Chef All-Stars
— his careful placing of chili slivers, his spoon weaving smoothly through meaty
stews like fingers navigating muscle — I had to remind myself that I was equally
interested in the lean calves revealed to the audience in montages of his daily
jogs. Had to remind myself that trauma is not just the loud, the disruptive, but the
instincts I put on Mute.
So I turned up the volume. In a quick Google search, I found Gourdet’s new
cookbook. On the front cover, he’s wearing a thin gray t-shirt and sweatpants: an
outfit of morning routines, of fitful sleep with the smell of garlic under nails.
\
While watching Moonlight with my partner, I cried over a moment in which a
group of boys chases the movie’s protagonist, shouting “faggot” to his back. After
the movie, I was silent for ten minutes, thinking of how to describe the sound of a
queer boy’s head being slammed into a locker again and again. How to measure
how long I watched, waiting for somebody to tell the straight boy to stop. How to
explain that every morning after I first dreamed of kissing a boy when I was 11, I
rinsed and spit out those desires and questions with my bubblegum mouthwash:
made my words careful and clean.
After my first semester in college, I brought home wet wipes, a hygienic habit I’d
picked up from Queer men in my hall. My dad spotted them on top of the toilet
and asked with trepidation You know who uses those, right? I truly believe this
was a loving question. A soft warning.
\
The first time I masturbated to the thought of a man, I couldn’t stop sensing the
gaps in my blinds: the movement of leaves like green eyes blinking. Each gust of
wind a disappointed sigh.
Was my intrinsic genetic makeup somehow primed for PTSD or, by the time I
was 17, had my brain already learned too much about what men’s hands can do?
\
One summer, a boy I loved pulled me off a pool deck into the water by my ankles.
I told him I could’ve hit my head. You could’ve hurt me.
He dove deeper.
Zach Semel (he/him) is a poet and essayist pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University. Some of his previous work has appeared in DIAGRAM, CutBank: All Accounts & Mixture, Drunk Monkeys, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, The Nervous Breakdown, Wordgathering, FreezeRay Poetry, and other places. His hybrid chapbook "Let the tides take my body" was awarded the 2021 May Day Mountain Prize by Hunger Mountain.