Stevie Subrizi
Twentieth Century Has Come to Take My Gender Because It Never Got to Have One of Its Own

Bugs Bunny says I should pull the trigger
of the gun I seem to have leveled at my head.

Will Ferrell, as both Ron Burgundy and Buddy the Elf,
says that my likeness is an insult to God and Man.

Once again, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise 
is dismayed and bemused that I have dared to show my

face to the world without remorse, a peccadillo
for which I have also received grievances from Mr. Bean,

Willard Wonka, Adolf Hitler, several employees of Dunder
Mifflin Inc, and a certain high-profile wizard eugenicist

and children’s storyteller. I am drowning in their images,
and yet mine is the face of their crisis. I would laugh

at their bluster if I hadn’t heard it first from my own mother
and father. I close the screen. I turn and check for the gun.

*

Queerness of the Living Golem

When the rabbi looked at the golem, perhaps he saw some approximation of a man, but he had not created a man or a woman; he had created a protector for his threatened people, which took on the shape of a large person, because for its shape, this protector needed two legs to stand before the threat; a body and two arms to block and strike it; and a head—why a head? To hold the eyes that would see the threat? To think? Though what entire head would think only of threats and how to abolish them? Perhaps only a head whose body is a moving fortress. But this bodied fortress was not man or woman. In all that clay, what would make it so? Even if the creature should find within that clay the mysteries of desire, self-knowledge, beauty, what would mark it he or she? Was that for the rabbi to decide? As the calamity to come would make clear, the rabbi could not decide for the golem at all.