The week of encountering Bug Butter, the latest chapbook by [sarah] Cavar, my life was charged with what writer and “critically Mad transgender-about-town” might call “Schrödingerian energy.” A fellow trans, recovering from disordered eating, I did what I’d claimed I would never do: start a GoFundMe toward medical transition. As multitudinous as gender itself are the means for reckoning with feeling like an embodied paradox — woman and/or man, full and/or empty, alive and/or dead. Reading & writing is one such practice of becoming, and Cavar is generous.

Bug Butter made me hunger, yearn, laugh, and feel less alone. The chapbook of fourteen thematically linked poems risks bearing the inside-outness of personhood as body & language. Early on, we’re allowed glimpses of a father, a mother, and a childhood of snacks, TV, and bodily curiosity, the setting of an imaginative space that prepared me to dive with the “freezer pixie” through the sometimes gross, sometimes fantastic bounds of physical reality. With phenomenological attention, Cavar attends to the pleasure and violence of the physical world’s exchange into meaning. The poems explore the (seemingly) known of sense and sensemaking through cheeky wordplay and atypical caesura and enjambment. In “My stomach,” for example, descriptive lines are riddled with gaps and braided into a state of disjunction and conjunction, an embodiment of both truths.

begs my pardon 

has big eyes 

a little red mouth my 

pardon spits into the tender 

eye at the navel of my stomach 

asks my pardon what is it that 

which constitutes con 

-cave?

These poems reminded me that, like language, people are boxes of meaning. Cavar hacks this principle to defy expectations, not unlike a magician drawing a rabbit from a hat, except that in the act of drawing from inward, Cavar doesn’t simply conjure but transmutes what’s brought forth, “[…] the way little things can be bracketed by caps and transformed in meaning, from a surname to the backend of a cow.” The subtext of such lines is nothing short of grace. Simply: To alter form can mean power to alter possibilities. In poems like “well if it isn’t the bicranial quadraped known as,” in which catdog is playfully-painfully split into two columns of inquiry, cat and dog, I found myself grateful for the reminder that if part of who we are is how we think, and seeking a definition transforms the seeker-sought, then as a reader-writer I might one day find-possess agency in what-who I am.

As the title hints, Bug Butter is food-fixated. Poems like “Upon my mother sanitize my fruit” and “Beneath the hot white hue of my instinct to self-preservation” examine digestion as translation, sustenance as being. Throughout, Cavar reconstitutes academic grammars into textures familiar & familial and serves the colloquial in inspired deconstructions. Always, these poems highlight the pesky differential between the physical and psychological while formally embodying their inseparability.

My mouth a well-
trod wound.
And my body, a shadow
instructing my feet: the weight
of yet, the wait of all-ready,
the squawk
of a clot of a fruitfilling
red, unafraid
of living –– 

Of course, not everything digested nourishes. As messages from family and pop culture sharpen mental pictures of “women” and “men,” tension arises. How will each of us who endeavor a speculative journey survive the reflective turn of measuring up to gendered expectations?

We watched Survivor, saw irony to pieces. The longer they survived, the whittler they got. Mens’ stomaches sank beneath their hip bones. Women hunched above their coconuts, prey to break next-fast fish-flesh. In this context, survive means the getting some guts with a spear.

If we are what we eat, we are what we don’t. Perhaps unavoidable, several poems graze the link between transness and higher rates of disordered eating. “DIRECTOR’S CUT” reminded me that “[t]he difference between fasting and starving is context,” the context here being lack of bodily autonomy, internalized transphobia, and increased exposure to discrimination and violence as a person with a marginalized body. Sometimes, I can’t untangle the knot of my gender dysphoria. Does today’s horror arise from facing the wreck of hormones on my “secondary” sex characteristics or from incessant social cues remarking that my body doesn’t visually conform? Where do others’ expectations end and mine begin? If I learned anything from Bug Butter, in trying to resolve conflicts between the internal and external, and maybe any assumed binary, the answer is likely a mixed plate and ouroboros-like, consuming and swallowed.

Schrödingerian energy convenes
me of calorie. Why when what be
longs of my father makes a nasty
brutish brief of ruined dishwash. I
am wristing blood not even mine
d. Attempt a weight in dirty river. Perhaps
she said to me I was born broke.

I’m grateful for [sarah] Cavar’s Bug Butter. Seeking transgender healthcare has often felt futile, like peddling my dysphoria and trauma in a white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal system serving appetites for healing that can never be fulfilled, tempting my will to exist to starve against social and economic barriers, if not heaps of shame. Bug Butter funnels the magic of transformation into a closing wish, a faith in well-being that I need to reclaim bodily autonomy and survive beyond:

& the wound
is fewer
perhaps less
loud

Maybe you do, too?