On Being Mistaken by Laura Buccieri

PANK, May 2018

62 pages / Amazon / PANK / SPD

I still remember the moment several years ago when I discovered clothing manufacturer’s gendered zip hoodies—men’s zipping up on the right, women’s on the left. It was a bewildering moment. I stood there in my mother-in-law’s most comfy grey hoodie mumbling to myself, “Wait. What? Why?” I recall this as I read Laura Buccieri’s poetry collection On Being Mistaken, as gendering is a major theme (we hear the echo of misgendering in the title). The opening poem, “what does gender got to do with a table,” captures in poetic prose the hidden strangeness of American English, the supposedly genderless language of a culture obsessed with gendering:

I Google translate Lorca on the bus ride home from Trader Joe’s with you. There is a boy in Ballad of the Moon Moon. And in the English of Google, this boy: becomes a child. Loses all gender. Between female 1st Avenue and male Avenue B we see a female mother teaching her male child how to play this male first female person male shooter male game on their female iPhone. As the male bus jerks to a female stop and speeds off through a male green light the male boy is shooting male bullets from his female fingers. His female mother watches, proud. That female shit used to bother me. Male bullets flying everywhere on the female screen. But now, I go about my female ride. I’m completely male desensitized. I don’t hear the female blood splattering, the male gun reloading, the male boy laughing as male he learns how powerful male his female fingers can be. I press the male red female button and hear the female ding for the next male stop: male Avenue C. I get off with my male our female Trader Joe’s female bags and my newly translated male Lorca female poem.

This prose poem’s skill in mocking, identifying, and assigning gender to objects shows just how language, expression, directs our thoughts. We do not do this, yet we do this all the time. There are consequences as many of Buccieri’s poems show. Some are weary, exhausted with the casual dismissals of who a person is, as in “i am listening to bright lights i am the only thing i have felt in a while”:

when my mom gets asked about her son i am so much of being dealt with is understanding through all of this i am a girl and that is her rope she holds tight and i am scared that i don’t know how i feel because i am always it’s ok it’s ok

Others like “on being mistaken for my girlfriend’s brother at the wash and fold” are annoyed “no really/it’s not a joke” but show how one is coaxed to capitulate to narrow thinking “i turn my feelings off/make sure that/this man/this nice man/feels reassured/that it’s not him/it’s me//it’s us.” Buccieri also writes elegant and enticing poems such as “from across the street” moving over the page in such a way as to seduce while the content reveals the voyeurism if not lecherousness of readers:

i will be there on the sixth floor standing maybe pacing sipping water from a glass you are unable to smell the scent of my skin that scales my body across the street that distance blocks most senses but if you want you can see me and notice the curves around my hip bones the gentle flow of my chest you will make a judgment meaning a decision

In this poem, the speaker is never identified or identifies gender, and as such, the reader is immediately implicated. There is a beauty in this maneuver in that it revels in the sensualness of androgyny. Buccieri’s poems are never unsettling but always push readers to also become interlocutors taking part in the conversation or scene the poetry is depicting. However, these poems aren’t interested in your ‘takes’ on them as you read, rather they are there to take you to task.

Buccieri has a gift for casual language, sewing thought and speech together with a deceptive ease. Her poems often utilize the entire page and do so with innovative efficiency. Yet she balances this with more conventionally composed lyrical poems, moving readers along with firm cadences. Especially enjoyable is how several of her poems begin with the title, that is, the ‘title’ is merely the first lines of the poem itself:

environments building on themselves not themselves

anymore when the balloon is

up and up and rubber touching air squeaking the sky but never rubbing the blue off environments like me

rub up against you

The technique is simple and effective bringing immediacy to the work. The accessibility of Buccieri’s poems, her butch/femme aesthetic play is “the zipper that zips up/the man in this woman” (“to be a dreamer you have to change the way you relate to objects”) makes the poems pf On Being Mistaken delightful, moving, challenging, and simply pleasing.

Daniel Casey has a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. His poems and reviews have appeared in Jet Fuel Review, Rise Up Review, Tuck Magazine, Waxing & Waning, North of Oxford, Heavy Feather Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and JMWW Journal.