boy/girl/ghost

The poet attracted to the virgule, or the slash, is the poet who intuits that one break in the line cannot possibly convey wreckage enough. The device elaborates upon further disruptions within the process of the poem, which leads us to how such a poet might cope with, navigate, and redefine narrative, line by ravaged line. torrin a. greathouse knows about such a ravaging. The poems in boy/girl/ghost demonstrate and necessitate the power (and the sundering) of threes: first the boy (“i buried / the boy / my father beat / behind the barn”), then the girl (“to name us queen / is to both name us women and steal / this word away”), then the ghost (“a birdcage gutted of his fluttering”). Combined is the perfect amalgam of disappearance but it is also within this alchemistry that we come to greathouse’s most tremendous rendering of agency. To control the story of the trans body through the violence of confession keeps the threads together and helps the body survive the poems. When greathouse writes, “any part of me I can coerce into softness // maybe / this begins & ends in scar tissue,” we must acknowledge there is great risk on the poet’s part to speak. The incentive to live, to “body into anything,” to verb at all is endlessly wrought in the brilliant lyricism of boy/girl/ghost.