For most poets, the first person is the easiest starting place for any work. But what if the “I” is itself fraught, an elegy? For transracial adoptees, this is and always will be true—to speak from the first person for me is to speak of loss, racial melancholia, and hopeless wayfinding. On a recent trip to Spain, I found myself overwhelmed with this potent loneliness and in need of community.

I now turn to adopted writers like Jeanette Winterson, Tiana Nobile, and Sarah Audsley to trace my genealogy of unbelonging. Winterson’s invitation to “self-invent” gives me license to theorize our shared affective grief, while Nobile and Audsley’s discussions of racial illegibility demand that I imagine adoptee futures outside of oppressive nation-building tools. With these queer kin in hand and inspired by Goya’s Black Paintings, I offer other adoptees “the flap,” a methodology of thinking through their experience and possibly a way forward.

The Flap

Everything sounds like an epiphany
when you say it in a different country.
I was itchy in Europe. I wanted that sentence
to be special as my grief.
 
Really, most things—foreign or otherwise—
are ordinary unless they are questions.
 
An hour into the train ride to Barcelona
and bitter with ingratitude,
I came to the conclusion that the whole world was brown.
 
Was I the only one who felt that way?
Cold windows. Brown hills as long as months,
 
tough as thumbs.
An unremarkable December.
I missed my cat. I read Jeanette Winterson and wept
into a dry baguette.
 

*

 
I was the only one who felt that way.
This wasn’t extraordinary but it didn’t feel ordinary either.
My mother enjoyed being a tourist in Spain
and my sister sneered at us both—
 
our bulky Spanish, hopelessness with coin,
the smell of our shit
after days of staying in the same room and eating fried cheese
and how, despite that,
 
I was still hungry all the time.
I stayed lonely
amongst, amongst—
 
I had felt that way in my youth
but I was too young then to learn
how to bend my tongue around.
How to make sense of it.
 
“Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be,” ^[1]
writes Winterson in her memoir.
When I read that, my heart went loose.
 
Winterson and I hover together.
She left her mother after writing Oranges,
having become something between writer and celebrity
 
but never completely exorcized from wanting more.
Winterson’s mother set her Bible studies
and Jeanette wanted
Genesis, Genesis—
 
from whose bitter dust was she lifted, howling?
Whose garden obscene and untrellised?
Whose shuddering rib?
 
She knew there was something out there.
When I left my mother’s house as a teenager, I felt
like home was out there
 
but I didn’t know how to recognize it
if I found it at all.
 
Love was a horror to me,
by which I mean, I swung the door open recklessly,
hoping.
 
Winterson has a repeated line in her memoir,
dialogue from a social worker who helped her
 
find her birthmother:
you were wanted, do you know that, Jeanette?^[2]
 
The repetition of this question continues to pain me.
How do you resist the urge to veil its earnesty in metaphor?
How can a question be so wicked
and bald?
 
Winterson pursued her birthmother
and it put her together, made her a ghastly whole.
“I have read a lot of overwhelmingly emotional accounts
of reunion.
 
None of that is my experience. All I can say is
that I am pleased – that is the right word –
that my mother is safe.”^[3]
 
She was able to stop wondering. I think the finality
was almost as hurtful to her as the not-knowing.
 
There is nothing “pleasing”
about any of this.
 
I skinned my knees, twisted my pelvis,
fell out of love the first year of college
 
away from home.
Freedom to wonder
was pain.
 

*

 
I felt difficult in Madrid.
In pasta alla Luciana with bulbous heads, full squeaky legs.
A puff of foam.
 
I swallowed, then swallowed again.
Tucked the octopus underneath coiled noodles
so I couldn’t see them bursting as I worked the knife.
 
Vulgar to waste good food,
but more embarrassing to show my family
that I couldn’t face the violence of what I craved.
My sister tried not to gag.
 
Mother paid the bill.
This was one day
in a wash of thousands.
 

*

 
It felt like I was the only one who felt it.
You were wanted, Jeanette.
 
And where Winterson clasped her origin in her arms,
hugged her—that was never going to be for me.
 
There was an entire ocean and language
between my birthmother and I,
made all the richer by my childhood growing up safely,
 
whitely. This fact was the most American thing about me.
I read of others like me, haunted.
So close
 
I could almost touch their navel
where they were cut from their mothers
in more ways than one.
 
Sarah Audsley wrote of her Korean American adoption
in her debut poetry collection
Landlock X. She described the way that “landlock”
 
intimates a severing from water
in the same way
that transracial adoptees are severed from themselves, their history.^[4]
 
“X,” beautifully,
simply, Audsley chose to suggest the unknown.
 
Audsley grew up in rural New England and identifies
as a country poet, but wrote her collection
as an investigation of placelessness:
 
“she [Audsley’s birthmother] is an X
marks the spot where she made me.”^[5]
 
To live in the diaspora of your own history,
what is that?
To grope at questions. At marks on legal paper.
The shape of your nose in the mirror.
 
Tiana Nobile, another Korean American poet,
wrote of her adoption in her debut collection Cleave.
The title resisting clear meaning—
 
“cleave” meaning to cut as well as to cling—
intimated to me the hopelessness
of adoptees identifying with
 
one name, one place, one feeling.
 
Nobile asked Sarah Audsley in an interview
if she resonated with
 
“whipgraft delusion,” in which
a person catches sight of themselves in a reflection
and feels as if they are looking into the eyes of a stranger.^[6]
 
This instinct towards pathologizing, they agreed,
is a strange one—drawing common lines
between lonely adoptees feeling the same loss,
 
but simultaneously sweeping us under the umbrella
of medical abnormality.
 
Jeanette Winterson also admitted to hearing voices.
I felt that my ancestors were loud.
 
They clamored into my ideas of love, home, happiness.
When I kissed my girlfriend,
they made shapes under my skin.
 
When I traveled abroad,
the strangers of a different nation chattered too violently,
felt too much like the strangers who made me.
That’s why I hated traveling.
 

*

 
In Spain, my sister went to bed at noon but kept her eyes open.
Already, she was back in America.
Neither of us could blame her—
 
she had a lover in another time zone.
My mother hated when we dated
but neither of us would stop
for her.
 
This says something about love and home and family
but I am afraid to say it.
 
At home, my girlfriend & I were poor as nails,
worked multiple jobs.
 
We lived as we wanted, but only after 5 pm—
everything before that was dark wallpaper.
 
I knew the Black Paintings’ heart
before I heard that they existed,
before I walked into Museo del Prado,
though I was young and measurably well and
 
Goya was old and immeasurably sick.
He slid the gruesome dark
across my eyes and I recognized it as my own.
 
Was I the only one who felt
that way?
You were wanted, do you know that?
 
The Black Paintings were wrought upon the walls of Goya’s house
in slick oils. They came after Napoleon,
after the brutal dictatorship. The bloodshed and greed horrified Goya.
 
When he died, they found the ugly mouth of Saturn,
crones conspiring on the wall, Satan preaching.
What if we lived better—
 
this is a question many artists ask.
But the Black Paintings are not invested in otherwise,
they are invested in the way things are irreversibly ugly
now. Now,
 
I worry that if I thought about it too much,
I might be dangerous, might betray, might estrange,
might rename myself in the third person
or Cantonese.
 
This, dear fellow adoptee.
I call this the flap: the temptation of description.
The danger of dissatisfaction. Our condition.
 
On the other side of the flap, I could be anyone I wanted—on this side,
I am a terrible story, preset.
You, the same way.
 
My sister loved Goya’s kittens on the third floor but I could not be moved,
could not look away from Witches’ Sabbath.
It hit me between the eyes, sank into my forehead.
 
When art historians eventually lifted the Black Paintings from the wall,
they were ruptured forever.
 
“At best a crude facsimile of what Goya painted,” an art critic said
of the canvases moved to the Prado.^[7]
 
Some things, when lifted from their original context,
lose all meaning entirely.
I the same way,
facsimile of a facsimile.
 
I was young and well and had a cruel flap
stubbing the toes of my every step.
 
I could kick at it
but I could not prise it up
 
and while he painted the flap
black, black—
 
I could do nothing but chew
on its shallow face
which cast no visible shadow.
 

*

 
My sister thought nothing of her adoption.
I couldn’t not look back.
 
She resented that I was rancorous, a pillar of salt
when she needed me to be her brother.
I couldn’t be anything else. Couldn’t know time
without flirting with the flap.
 
I was Thomas the Doubter bloodying my hand in the Lord’s wound
and needing to know what could be on the other side.
I was sitting on the lawn in Madrid outside the royal palace
witness to my life but not ready for it.
 
“Tell me how I can help,” my girlfriend said
over the phone,
again, again—
 
my open eyes streaming.
I’m on the made hotel bed. Neck tucked close like an oath.
 
My elbow deep in the flap.
This misery unfortunately essential.
 

*

 
Loving the Black Paintings is embarrassing.
The flap too is humiliating, but so is this entire splice-like existence.
Audsley admitted to Nobile that she cringed
 
at her own confessional:
“& if you cannot reach the surface,
then you, dear adoptee, are not alone.
I am lonely, too.”^[8]
 
Nobile encouraged her,
finding solidarity in the pithy honesty
that I categorized as pathetic.
 
Eileen Myles defined pathetic as
“a kind of hollow” or even better,
 
a “scraping sound…
a way we deal with that one unknowable space.”^[9]
 
They mean death, which for most people
means the end of their life but for me,
Winterson,
Audsley, and Nobile,
most certainly means the beginning.
 
Perhaps this is the answer, dear adoptees:
the pathetic, the cruel flap
private and abyssal.
 
Which is to say
I resist the urge to make my everyday mourning
pathological.
 
And although this suffering
is passed down from the institution
of orphanage, social work, government
bureaucracy, nation versus nation
 
it needn’t be institutionalized.
There is no medical phenomena to describe the adoptee’s
self-alienation.
 
No straightforward explanation,
no categories.
Nobile understands me there,
 
writing, “how do I translate
the sound of my mother’s
moaning?”^[10]
 
The wail cannot be read.
My lament is not a song nor a collage nor a citizenship.
 
Nobile wrote and rewrote her birth,
resisting one translation or one truth:
“First the head,
then the shriveled body, bright as a small sun…
 
No. I emerged
from seafoam….
No. I was stardust…
None of that is true. I was born in the airport…”^[11]
 
All of these tales must be true
even if none of them have been captured by the state.
Nobile understood that this act of rewriting was to cut
 
from the documentary
and simultaneously cleave to what felt real.
 
To tease the danger of imagining
otherwise, otherwise—
 
is to stay with abominable sorrow
and bask in its wound
rather than trying to cure it as a phenomenon.
 
Meet me there, fellow adoptees.
Our cut heads
peering at each other on the other side of the flap.
 

*

 
“Bereaved of all, I went abroad…
The Grave preceded me,” Emily Dickinson warned.^[12]
 
Alone on the sand at Barceloneta,
alone eating paella for two
 
before boarding the plane back to Boston.
My empty apartment silent, sullen as a whisker.
 
All of the things I know about myself
were told to me.
 

^[1] Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 5.

^[2] Ibid., 185.

^[3] Ibid., 229.

^[4] “Interview with Sarah Audsley,” Four Way Review, May 14, 2023, https://fourwayreview.com/interview-with-sarah-audsley/  

^[5] Sarah Audsley, “When My Mother Returns as X,” Poetry Daily, March 23, 2023, https://poems.com/poem/when-my-mother-returns-as-x/

^[6] Tiana Nobile, “Writing Into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley.” The Common: A Modern Sense of Place, April 8, 2024, https://www.thecommononline.org/writing-into-negative-space-absence-tiana-noble-interviews-sarah-audsley/

^[7] Arthur Lubow, “The Secret of the Black Paintings,” The New York Times Magazine, July 27, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/magazine/the-secret-of-the-black-paintings.html

^[8] Sarah Audsley, “Letter to My Adoptee Diaspora,” Landlock X (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2023).

^[9] Eileen Myles, introduction to Pathetic Literature (New York: Grove Press, 2021), xix.

^[10] Tiana Nobile, “‘Lost’ First Languages Leave Permanent Mark on the Brain, New Study Reveals,” Cleave, (Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2021), 44.

^[11] Tiana Nobile, “Revisionist History,” Cleave, (Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2021), 52.

^[12] Emily Dickinson, “Bereaved of all, I went abroad–.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1976).