Night Logic
Poetry
Tupelo Press, 2023
$17.95, 52 pages ISBN: 978-1-946482-94-5
“I came to the wheat field / to look for my sister / but my sister was not there. . . .” These are the haunting first lines of “The Wheat Field,” the sixth of twenty narrative lyric poems presented by a single speaker in Matthew Gellman’s prize-winning chapbook, Night Logic. In an intimate exploration of a queer individual’s struggle to live authentically, the sister that the speaker conceives becomes a luminous figure who represents the unconditional acceptance and empathy he needs to grow. Even as a child, he longs to embrace his queerness, yet he learns that love and approval are contingent on the concealment of what makes him different. Growing up in a family with two brothers, an absent father, and a mother wrestling with grief, he is burdened by the weight of shame in both public and domestic settings.
In “Homecoming,” the speaker is aware of his mother’s shame for having bought dress-up clothes for him, “each time, she turned away – ,” and he copes with his father’s rejection by making himself invisible: “I wore pink tulle. I spun / until I could no longer see / my father in the doorway, / his head in his hand.” Outside of his home, he recalls incidents of bullying, how “The same boys / who would later spit on [his] cheek and throw [him] onto the blacktop, . . .” supported his brother after a severe leg injury by signing his cast with “rainbows . . . affirmations, stick figure flowers / and the names of the kids in our class at school.”
At a restaurant with his parents, in the opening lines of “Smoke,” Gellman strikes an immediate contrast between the father’s foreboding masculinity and the speaker’s softer nature. He writes, “Shame obeys its own ritualism / in this too-bright light of Chinatown / where father sits with his chest square, / claiming the darkest meat.” Told by his mother that if he curls his knuckles inward while checking his nails (rather than extending his fingers in front of him), he “must not be a fag,” the speaker tries to stifle his feminine mannerisms, but realizes he can’t “trick” his hands into moving differently. We learn that “this test,” in which he’s the subject of his parents’ scrutiny, follows a recent assault in which a group of boys “pelted [him] with orange peels / on the playground [as he] wandered, ill- /fitting, . . . .” He feels the heat of his parents’ reprehension, smoldering: “. . . my fingers descend / while behind their flutter / / of side eye, there is smoke, a flame / being tempered, . . .”
As he continually attempts to find safe spaces, an especially moving aspect of the collection is the empathy the speaker offers others. In the opening poem, “Replica,” he presents himself as a perpetuation of his distant father: “I wear a gray sweater not unlike the one / my father used to wear, . . . ” He envisions his father as a young man with his whole life ahead of him, at the point when “. . . all we get is a moment to think / that we are permitted more than a moment” – before a sweater “the color / of sleep, . . .” , which the speaker now wears too, came to symbolize the life his father led. With tenderness he states, “I’d rather remember / this sapling: my father, nineteen, / knocking on a woman’s green door, . . . . ”
When looking at a photograph in which his younger brother is reaching for their mother at the time just before their father will depart, the speaker contemplates his brother’s vulnerability, knowing the grief he’ll soon face: “You don’t yet know that while our mother / will sleep, blanketed all season by shock, / / past the wrecked spires of topiaries / I will drive you home from school, . . .” And when his mother has realized that his father will never return, he empathizes with her too as they sing together on the patio, “the songs that made her feel like a girl / again, . . . ” He shares her pain, and as they sing in unison, “. . . the same notes began riding / the starless heat of [their] mouths, . . . . .”
In the ongoing context of the speaker’s search for refuge, the wrenching title piece “Night Logic” begins with a brutal description of Matthew Shepard’s unrecognizable body, his form “so pistol-whipped and transfigured by blood” on that tragic day in October of 1998, that the man who first saw him thought he was looking at a scarecrow tied to a fence. The speaker describes Shepard’s death as “. . . an emblem / of caution, . . .” before expressing how impossible such caution can be to heed: “To be queer is to be questioned / on the way your breathing / displaces light. The way you lilt / or stutter.” These gripping lines serve as a transition from the graphic opening to a terrifying personal experience. The speaker recollects his fear when as a student in “a clapboard college town” he realizes a man is trying to follow him home, and he seeks shelter “in the weave of roots next to / a crippled fence, . . . .” This fence is reminiscent of the fence Shepard was bound to – and the tumbleweeds in which he hides recall the chapbook’s cover image. His fear is palpable: “I keep my head low. . . . / So quiet I hear the whole planet.” Earlier in the poem, Gellman refers to gestalt theory, a naturalistic philosophy in which “the whole is greater than the sum / of its parts.” He continues, “By this night logic / a boy jumps over a fence / / or a boy gets bound to a fence / and there is only an aperture of dead grass / to determine the difference.” In a world where ignorance often turns to hatred and violence, any queer person potentially faces danger when walking alone: “A boy is a star in the stratosphere / blinking like something that could be extinguished.”
The speaker seeks a safe haven in his imaginary sister, though she is often elusive. Like him, she bears the scars of sexual abuse. In “Beforelight,” he explains how “ . . . after years of trying to see her /. . . all promise, / her dress a galloping of small yellow wings, . . .” he can’t shake the pain inflicted on her by “ . . . . that group of boys killing their engine / and doing to her under the cedars’ nimbus / things [he] will not say in this poem.” Her trauma corresponds with his own: “Not unlike the boy who held me underwater . . . / his whole body locked around me / as he pulled off my trunks, how even now / I can feel a small finger twisting my throat / when I try to tell it, . . . if I had a sister to tell.” He imagines that “When [he] finds her along that highway . . . all her hair will be cut off.” She won’t talk that summer, but by winter she’ll find the courage to visit the forest – and with him at her side, they’ll confront the site of her trauma.The closing poem of the collection, “Sister, Far Ahead,” is prayerful and beseeching with its intimate, rhythmic series of questions reflecting on experiences the speaker and his imaginary sister might have shared growing up together: “Would you teach me / how to roll my pants, / how to pain / my nails. . . . Could we wear purple lipstick.” The inclusion of periods rather than question marks after each inquiry and the use of the present conditional tense seem to will his requests into reality: Would you / give advice: should I meet the boy / under the bleachers. . . . Would you wait / by the chain link fence the whole time, / crushing dandelions.” His sister is the friend who would wait. She is the deepest part of him, the empathy he offers himself. She is the conduit through whom he could begin to heal.