The Closet Professor

My Hole. My Whole.
By Sam Sax

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses 

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west 

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love  

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how  

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was,  

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart.  

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife  

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you— 

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle  

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then  

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain  

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner 

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery 

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming  

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer.  

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished  

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor.  

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those  

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me. 

About This Poem

Some of you may not be too fond of this poem because it’s modern poetry, but occasionally, I think modern poetry can really make us think. Then, sometimes, it just doesn’t make sense at all, even after the poet discusses what it means. “My Hole. My Whole.” is one of those poems that is easy to understand, is quite interesting, and makes you think.

pSam Sax wrote about what inspired this poem. He said, “This poem began, as many do, struggling with the limitations of language. Being in a long-term, queer, poly, nonbinary relationship, we often find ourselves pushing against the terminology we inherited for how to name ourselves and our love(s), how to become legible to ourselves and to others. Both queerness and poetry can offer ways of breaking with the past and searching for strange syntax and improper nouns, not just to define an already lived experience but to eke out a space to imagine new possible futures. This poem struggles with this question of naming, of possibility, of fluidity. It offers up one way of honoring the flexibility and specificity of our loves.”

About the Poet

Sam Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. They are the author of Pig (Scribner, 2023); Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), which received the 2017 James Laughlin Award; and Madness (Penguin Books, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series. They are also the author of the novel, Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024). 

Of Sax’s work, James Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess writes,

Bury It, Sam Sax’s urgent, thriving excavation of desire, is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.

Sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, MacDowell, Stanford University, and Yaddo. They are also the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion. 

Sax has served as the poetry editor at BOAAT Press, and they are currently serving as a lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University.