‘An Essay about Being a Non Male Non Female Person in the Literary World Written in the Form of a Dream’ by Moss Angel

Moss Angel’s Sara or the Existence of Fire is the book of poetry I lend out most often. It’s so vital and resonant, and it’s one of the most important inspirations for my own work. Angel’s prose poems are often surreal narratives that open up the known world to expose its inner magic. Angel’s piece at VIDA continues in this form. VIDA is running a series “about the unique experiences in the literary world outside of the binary.” Angel, who is agender, titled their piece ‘An Essay about Being a Non Male Non Female Person in the Literary World Written in the Form of a Dream.’

Written in the attention-holding second person singular, the essay-dream looks at communities and how they open themselves up (or close themselves off) to new members. Angel reshapes such things as respectability politics and social privilege into a narrative of many-armed people standing in line waiting for food. You have to have the right type of arm, fashioned in the right place, in order to line up at a given table.

The “you” in the poem isn’t allowed in any of the food lines. They end up cutting off their arms and dancing/bleeding to their death. The parable-quality of the dream-essay is upfront. The literary world, very much a white cishetero institution, is a difficult sea to navigate for those outside the gender binary. Privilege and tokenism run rampant; journals perform their progressiveness by running “themed issues” every so often; work by non-binary writers is rarely reviewed in the mainstream (or even off the mainstream).

I hope you sit with this dream-essay, and think about how, even in purportedly progressive spaces, marginalization continues and thrives. And I hope you pick up a copy of Sara or the Existence of Fire—if not, I’d be happy to lend it to you.

VIDA