In shape note singing, the tenor is genderless

by Shaoni C. White

Linguists, rejoice. No crystal-mouthed machine can set the boys
apart from girls by voice, though we’ve taught each other a way.

Here in the bombed-out labyrinth, carnation-choked, we shroud
our choice, like brides who demand to be given away.

Ariadne stitched the string right through her tongue.
It stilled her voice, the needle through which the camel got away.

Stained as glass, the psalmist said, Is this what You made—
a rusted maze of chairs that rejoice to be folded away?

The airport scanner fans its face, all shock at my terrain
of fat and bone. My voice, when questioned, gives me away.

Ariadne’s abandoners want to know: am I a boy who stole
the girls’ toys, or should their taxonomy cut the other way?

In the labyrinth’s gut we slip into a dozen-bodied box,
tenor ungendered in anarchic poise, the singers’ hideaway.

Thorn-eared preachers named it sacred harp: their overthrow
enthroned in holy noise, this old ungoverned way.

Like surveillance, we are iteration, not instance. Ritual—
we call it passing—employs us along the itinerant’s way.

Ariadne, string yourself a harp and pass inside
our own unvoiced tradition. Run. Sometimes we get away.

Shaoni C. White’s poetry has appeared in CV2, smoke and mold, Augur, Channel, and elsewhere. Their short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and other magazines. They are pursuing a PhD in Literature at the University of California, Davis.

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