Acie Clark
To return to those early prayers
As a child I can remember asking god for a different body but I would turn to my mother for explanations. I hadn’t been halved yet by what I came to understand as not possible.
My body was limited by the language she gave me: the words she had to think with to make sensible
what must have seemed illogical as any child’s irreality in longing for transformation.
I had wanted to be a horse before a boy.
I was told what I felt was not true, not real, not bad exactly— bless her. In the backrooms of my heart, my mother is my age: dancing in Atlanta at a gay bar in the early 90’s.
It never occurred to her to hate me for being trans, but prior to being corrected my body was my whole mouth. I spoke with it without fear of mistranslation. The word boy was a portal I climbed through to be what I was. I had no use for why what I knew to be true was not possible.
Had God given what I asked for, what would we have done, my mother and I, standing at the edge of explanation of that miracle in Florida in 2002? Had God replied, could I have trusted that one day I would wake up to a world where I was what I felt I was already becoming?
Belated miracle: twenty years later my mother did not realize I was on T. I was only any mother’s child returning to her from far away and stranger, with a stranger’s aging face.
~~~
Dear Acie
When my beloveds write my name I feel in existence and dear, they say so, when they write: Dear Acie. When my mother writes my name I see her seeing two names. When I was who she named me to be, I was often sung to by my mother. I sang to her, too. I don't anymore. When I do sing, I understand how my mother can love me while mourning her daughter, that voice no longer here to hear.
My mother’s father isn’t all there anymore, either. He is a good man, he says to my mother about me,
but what I don’t get is where she went. My mother tells me this, and I wonder if she is telling me this, too. My mother sometimes says we but what she means is women. My father still groups my mother and I together when making generalizations about what’s gone wrong.
When I write I am trying to talk something through with myself that doesn’t feel available to me without the habitat of art. In past attempts at saying this, I built a box for the letters of what I understood to be my dead name, obscuring to render a kind of silence I needed to be different now.
I can’t make sense of where [ ] went, so I tell myself about it with brackets where the breath it took to say the name can live. I want to learn to shoulder the silences I’ve left, wholeheartedly. I want to address my selves dearly; I want us all to exist.
Acie Clark is a writer from Florida and Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor. He teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and as an Instructor at Interlochen Center for the Arts. He was a 2024-2025 Fine Arts Work Center fellow. His recent work is forthcoming in Salamander, Quarterly West, and The Arkansas International.
