Water I Won’t Touch - Softcover

Candrilli, Kayleb Rae

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596170 ISBN 13: 9781556596179

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Synopsis

Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won’t Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body’s healing from a double mastectomy―in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction―these ambitious poems put new form to what’s been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.

About this title

About the Author

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in poetry and the author of Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia, 2020), and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017). Candrilli was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry and a 2017 finalist for the American Book Fest’s Best Book Award in LGBTQ Non-Fiction. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary and are published or forthcoming in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, American Poets, TriQuarterly, Boston Review and many others. They live in Philadelphia with their partner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Water I Won’t Touch

It’s hard to explain my persistent
sadness when I keep so many

blueberries frozen in the freezer.
Nirvana, in the past, has been plenty

of fruit, and all the moments spent outside
of myself. But currently, I am trying to pull

the planets from retrograde, and remember
all the ways my drinking can kill me.

I still want a lake-sized sip. This is such
a citrus habit of mine, such acid rusting

away my tooth enamel. I never learned
to drive because I knew one day

I would learn to drink. I have always
been almost selfless like this. Sure,

there are some things I regret:
I once left my mother’s Minolta

on the hood of a car, and I regret
all the memories lost in turn.

Because I am an alcoholic,
my memories are seven amens

and a few holy spirits from
hogtied. I name all my favorite

bars after churches. Pigeons are
swans if you squint. You know,

the cherry blossoms bloomed again
this year, despite all the damage

to my liver. And autumn is coming,
even though I’ve said things

I do not mean.


Sand & Silt

In the beginning, there was a boy
who touched me as he shouldn’t have.

His hands around my ankles―claustrophobic―
a plot of cattails on the water’s black silt.

We all have a story like this,
innocent in its setting, nefarious

how it stays spurred into our bones
as we grow.

I think I knew I was a boy
when the boy touched me.

I know this boy is now
a violent man

with a large collection of semi-
automatic rifles. Some things

are so absolute. The point
at which rain becomes snow. The way

fruit eventually spoils
even under unblemished skin.

If I make a metaphor of my body,
it’s a desert. One part longing,

one part need, the rest withstanding. Of course
I would prefer to be thirsty

for nothing. I’d rather do so much
than be touched in this angry dark.
Violent men want me to be a violent man.
Or they want me dead.

What a privilege to have an option.


My Partner Wants Me to Write Them a Poem about Sheryl Crow

but all I want to do is marry them on a beach
that refuses to take itself too seriously.
So much of our lives have been serious.
Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing
when it persists after learning where we come from.
When I bring my partner to my childhood home
it is all bullets and needles and trash bags held
at arm’s length. It is my estranged father’s damp
bed of cardboard and cigar boxes filled
with gauze and tarnished spoons. It is hard
to clean a home, but it is harder to clean
the memory of it. When I was young, my
father would light lavender candles and shoot
up. Now, my partner and I light a fire that will
burn all traces of the family that lived here.
Black plastic smoke curdles up, and loose bullets
discharge in the flames. My partner holds
my hand as gunfire rings through
the birch trees. Though this is almost
beautiful, it is not. And while I’m being honest:
My partner and I spend most of our time
on Earth feeding one another citrus fruits
and enough strength to go on. Every morning
I pack them half a grapefruit and some sugar.
And they tell me it’s just sweet enough.


On the Benefits of Learning by Example

I’m always writing about heavy things: headstones,
fathers, a feather painted with blood. Below the equator

bats are boiling in the night sky. I know this is the product
of global heat, humans, but all I remember is my father

taking bat after bat from the night sky with a BB gun.
The first thing I ever learned is that it’s not hard

to kill. He held them together,
dead in his hands and rolling like tiny red plums.

When I fall in love with my partner it’s as fast
as a downed bird, smooth and in
a tailspin.

Our bodies are not meant to live
together, in such queer blood red

harmony. But some sins are sweeter than others.
Sodom and Grace are all wrapped up

in the backwoods and yes, I will always be loving
my partner just like this―soft

and dusted in Pennsylvania dirt. As far
as I walk from my roots, they grow to reach―

and that teaches me everything
I need to know about being good.



One Geography of Belonging:
After Ocean Vuong

What becomes of the girl
no longer a girl? Dearest Mother,

The stretch marks from my once-breasts
have migrated

to their new tectonic flats.
But you can always find hints

of what used to be. Trust me,
it is more beautiful

this way, to look closely
at my body and name it things like:

Pangea & history & so, so warm.

Look at me now
and see how blood

faithfully takes the shape
of its body, never asking.

never asking
too many questions.

Dearest Mother, how many rivers
did I run across your belly?

Do you love
that they will never dry up?

Mother, I’ll make all
this water worth it.



Echo

When they look inside
your chest, the sonogram calls

your heart an orchid, each
petal pulpy and abnormally

palpitating. You and I
both imagined it would

behave this way, flowering
too big where it shouldn’t.

We have both pressed
our ears to conch shells

and clocked your heart
as it gallops

into another season,
another faulty

bloom. Perhaps it is an early
symptom of aging, to worry

like this, with every sense,
in every room of our bodies.

Perhaps it is wrong of me
to be so critical

of your heart―to want it
to speak more like mine."

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596170
• ISBN 13: 9781556596179
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96