Poem of the Week | March 10, 2025

“That Summer” by Arro Mandell is our Poem of the Week.

Arro Mandell (they/he) is from New York City. Their work is published or forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, the Georgia Review, Sixth Finch, and the Southeast Review.
 

That Summer

                        For Dusty

when we piled into the car and left,
counting each tower of road salt lucky,
taking turns calming the terrified dog,
telling stories to keep each other awake,
as Dusty drove us four sleepless days
underneath the geese, past the strip malls,
Subways, KFCs, and soybean fields,
towards what we hoped might change us
though we wouldn’t say it to each other
or even to ourselves, not yet at least,
when we’d gather hungry in the camper kitchen
hurriedly turning on the space heater
and dressing ourselves in silly voices,
when we’d open the earth just enough
to plant the tulsi or chamomile then
pat it back down and move along,
when, collecting the eggs each morning,
we’d chase the chickens and never catch one,
when we would climb up the hill past
the last cow field, wade through the ditch,
and ramble at the mountains’ feet, finding
every time what we couldn’t believe: an apple tree
in a valley of pines, a bear’s tooth
in the debris of last year’s growth,
a Sprite bottle and, inside of it,
a black widow and a little bit of piss,
when we started being boys and couldn’t stop,
the joke changing our clothes, our names,
when we chanted with dinner “T! T! T!”
as we took the Walmart supplements
that yes, we knew would do nothing,
but still we’d tell each other
I think your voice might be dropping
or point to fuzz on each other’s cheeks
and ask if it was the beginning of a beard,
when boys driving down the ditch road
would shout Girls! at the sight of us
and we would, shocked, look
for what they saw and never find it,
when outfitted in stripes, bandanas
and leather vests, we rowed to the middle
of McDonald Lake calling each other
new names (every day a new name),
when, tracing the crabgrass roots,
bright white lights, through the dark
of the soil, until finally finding
the end or snapping it in half, I thought
maybe I believe in a self, a core,
yes, that summer when I learned
to say I want without blushing,
Dusty taught me to drive, to, at the end
of a turn, loosen my hands from the wheel
and let it slide back to where it started.

Author’s Note

I wrote this poem about the summer that my friend, Dusty, and I did a work trade on an herb farm in Montana. Through our play, long conversations, and time spent attending to the land, I began to feel the mutability of my own identity. I realized the expanse of what I could be and that it was my own desire to be these things that made me them. No other qualifications necessary. Although I had already understood myself as queer and trans, I had previously let these identities remain on the periphery of my life. Writing this poem, I surprised myself by claiming to believe in some sort of core at the end, and surprised myself again when the final gesture suggested that these transformations were an act of return. Why did I describe embracing my own transness as return, when it felt like a departure at the time (in a wonderful way)? I think the answer must have something to do with desire and the agency it enables. It also reminds me that a trans teacher of mine once said transness is a knowing, gifted by others, that stretches forwards and backwards in time, altering the past and future.

Important shout-out to my friends Willem and Fox, who were also on some of that trip and a part of its blessings but couldn’t be in the poem for the sake of concision!