musth

musth

I

Elephants experience grief

And hold elaborate funeral rites.

They kiss the body with their trunks

One last time on the forehead

Before their beloved joins their mothers

And the herd in an eternal Savannah

Where there are no poachers, no chains.

A herd of elephants is called a memory,

And juvenile bull elephants never forget

As much as they may want to.

In 2002, a gang of orphaned bulls

Rampaged across South Africa.

They killed and raped over sixty-three rhinos,

Endlessly repeating the scene taught to them by

The men who offered their aunts a watermelon

Filled with the flavor of bitter almonds.

She shared it with her memory,

But then they each collapsed from the cyanide.

More men appeared, now with machetes

And they sliced the tendons of their mothers to immobilize them.

They severed the trunks to bleed them quicker.

And then they took their damn ivory.

But they left the children

Chained to their mothers in the heat

And bathed in the stench of corpses

Because the young don’t have sufficient ivory

And time will fatten them up for watermelon.

The little ones do not know the funeral rites 

For the women in their memory.

The only kiss is from their chains.

Their afterlife is reiterated pain.

After they have poached the sixty-three rhinos,

These juvenile bulls are put down.

Though somewhere else, another gang arose

From the lack of memory.

In Sierra Leone, a village of three hundred,  

Was pinned by giant feet as tusks

Slid lovingly into their chests like a kiss, 

Like a funeral the body knew

Though the bulls had never seen it before.

II

The only males permitted in a memory

Are the children.

Female elephants are the herd species.

When a male comes of age, an urge to wander

Haunts him, a curse in his bones called Musth.

A rise in temporin and a steady trickle of urine

Down the his leg is an indicator

That he is in Musth.

He is overcome with the restless ache

To leave his sisters, mothers, and aunts,

To spread the rich scent of himself over the plains,

To find a mate and impregnate her

Until the Musth drives him away from her memory.

Musth makes the bull too dangerous to stay.

He becomes violent and territorial,

And to heal this, he spends weeks alone,

Lumbering towards the horizon,

Connecting the dots of his mother and mate

With a trail of piss down his legs.

None of his brothers go with them, 

Like lions, the son is a threat to the father,

And only women are fit for family.

The bull is made for self-reliance

And slow but determined marches toward the western flatlands.

Musth is considered healthy in the adult male,

Even as it makes him irritable and aggressive

As he sees his own brother as a threat

As his mother says he is too strong to stay home,

Too virile to be left alone with his sisters,

Too fearless to watch over his grandmothers.

An elephant song is like the rumble of the earth,

A groan from the ancestors across time and hurt.

Elephant songs are too deep for human ears

But carry up to six miles away so that

They can always reach out to the memory.

Musth makes the bull oversensitive to sound

So the same song his sister hummed

To bring him home each night

Now drives him further away.

It Musth.

III

In the book, Detransition, Baby,

A character compares trans women

To juvenile elephants,

A generation of traumatized children

Trying to raise themselves

When the only memory they have is pain.

But the bulls would never have a memory.

Even in a perfect world

With no AK-47s filling the buzzing African air,

Drowning out the barely audible hum

Of mothers calling out to daughters

Like earthquakes call out to mountains

Begging them to return return return.

In this imaginary and flawless world,

The bull would follow his dick.

The need for a womb to fill

Turns him from a member of the memory

To a predator that kisses no brother

On the floppy ear before he goes.

He would simply charge towards pussy

Because he Musth.

Without the poachers, the juvenile bull

Would not be trapped in a cave where

Pain calls out to pain in waning echoes.

But that would leave him to the Musth,

Where each generation is washed away

With the inevitable kiss of a wave,

And the son reinvents himself

As the father he imagines having

Rather than the father who abandoned him.

IV

Some of my trans brothers describe

The psycho-emotional effects of testosterone

On their sex drive

Like Dr. Jeckyll’s magic formula

Turning them into monsters

Who want to claim a territory

That they can’t properly define.

One friend said he feels like a rapist

Whenever women bend over and fantasies

Of cruelly taking them fill his mind. 

It is the hunger that scares him, 

That makes every male a competitor, 

Even the married and chaste. 

From morning wood to wet dreams, 

Every cell in his body Musth. 

From the lonely Savannahs of football fields, 

Or the chained weights of the gym, 

To the father he can’t stand,

He Musth walk into a horizon, 

The lone wolf action hero as a mentor, 

And the memory of all the terrible things 

That happened to his mother, 

The memory he wanders further and further away from. 

Because he Musth. 

V

When Torrey Peters says I am a juvenile elephant

Chained to the corpse of the person I used to be,

I do not think she knows

There were never going to be parents

Whispering truth to me. 

My mother would be lost to a memory, 

And my father lost in the wilds, 

Killing off his neighbors. 

Because he Musth. 

I raised myself without a memory, 

Dragging the corpse of my family around, 

With no songs to guide me home or away, 

And only the testosterone raging in me, 

Pissing myself as I stumbled through the world, 

Panicked erections waking me up 

In the middle of the lonely nights, 

Hair sprouting from my everywhere, 

And only the Musth gave me any direction. 

Away. 

VI 

I want Torrey Peters to know that 

I am not a juvenile elephant 

Anymore. 

As my brothers laid waste and made war, 

I went to the graves of my memory, 

And begged them to teach me 

How to family, 

Because I’d rather lose my trunk, 

And my precious ivory, 

I’d rather eat watermelon,
And be chained to their corpses, 

Than be forced away from my sisters. 

Because I couldn’t take another lonely day, 

Wandering away from my own corpse, 

Temporin raging through my body, 

Showing me how to rip and ravage, 

Turning me against sister and stranger alike, 

Tearing the song from my chest

That has haunted me everyday since 

The sky opened up and hot lead 

Rained through me like razor blades. 

I do not know how to kiss the dead like my mothers

Or carry my lost children in our funeral rites 

Because I was once cursed to be male

And an elephant never forgets 

Even when she has no memory of how to grieve, 

Though somehow, I must.