Pax Butchart
About Pax
Pax Butchart is a poet and novelist currently living in York and studying for an MA in Environment and Social Justice.
Their writing deals with themes of embodiment, relationality, ecology, community, resistance, queerness and hope. You can learn more about xyr writing @wishiwasatwaterbeck on instagram.
Sodomite Girls
Content note: slur used
Girls
Are not as simple as they used to be
I heard him complain
Half to his mug of beer
Half to his companion
You can’t tell who they are half the time
And the men are no better
Too busy groping at each other
To have time
For the girls
Who are too busy groping at each other
To have time
For the boys
The girls
The boys
The twisting water-shapes of neither
One nor t’other
Are dancing the skeleton waltz
To the edge of tomorrow
All wracked and spiced bodies
Magicked into impossible forms
The sapphic boys with their
Soft soft lips
And the girls
The sodomite girls run riot
Fires in their eyes
Weaving the wild under their hands
Coming together in a shock of
Violent surprise and unrecognition
To breed or fight or sing
Sky-shattering druidcraft of sodomite girls
Fleeing the blood
Of mechanistic things
Clanking like bells or gongs or the cries
Of cranes over the marsh
And I at the other end of the bar
Dim-lit and smoky looked up
At him and saw his mutton-chop soul
And his lonely little eyes waiting
For mummy to come home
And the way he swilled his beer around his tongue
Wishing for half a wit of the courage
Of those shining sodomite girls
And I said
Friend
You wish it could be different
When he stuck out his tongue at me
It was plated with gold
And he and I and all of us
Were for that moment transformed
Into sapphic boys
And sodomite girls
About the poem
"I wrote this poem last January, at a time when I was exploring my gender and sexuality and what both meant for my personal identity as I tried to make a decision around whether or not to have gender-affirming surgery.
I was thinking a lot about expression, about masculinity and femininity, and about how queer affinity and solidarity can transcend specific labels and experiences to encompass whole communities.
The poem is part of a larger selection of works I penned in this period considering what manhood, womanhood and transness really meant, both generally and for myself.
In it I seek to blur the boundaries between arbitrary categories and to examine the psychology that keeps people so wedded to them, ultimately offering a moment of cathartic and joyously queer connection between reader, narrator, author and characters."