"ghazal on how to birth a boy" by Isabella Borgeson
Let's gather to explore the form of ghazal and how it makes this poem work.
Welcome, welcome lovely readers. It’s October now, a full year (minus some hiatuses) since I began this newsletter. Once again, the leaves change all around me and the world enters its annual decay, and wow it is beautiful. Ocher emerges; the sun shines a brighter yellow at noon; people don their flannels and take early autumn walks. I want to go peek at the dying leaves and mourn the loss of the green.
My mom is a Halloween fanatic and her house is decked out in skeletons posed in different tableaus–an underwater scene, a 12-foot-tall skeleton flanked by skeletal dogs, bony spiders skittering on the rock wall surrounding her lawn. People slow their cars when driving by our corner house. Do you decorate for Halloween? Carve pumpkins? Dress in costumes? Play tricks?
The poem I have chosen today is by no means an autumnal poem, but something about “ghazal on how to birth a boy” reminds me of this change of seasons. It mimics this birth and death that we see in the natural world this time of year. Before we get into it, just know that a ghazal is a style/form of poetry and is pronounced “guzzle.” Let’s get into it.
ghazal on how to birth a boy
by Isabella Borgeson (she/they
in cover of shower / I comb my hair behind ears / press wet strands into back of neck / what if scissors can turn / tomboy to strong boy my brother gets to play outside with dirty nails / I watch from window / blow my tita’s new polish / beg / can I come along, boy? my church socks turn black from concrete / the boys play basketball their naked torsos sprint across lines / sweat shirtless & free / I long boy to enter the smoking garage / of uncle’s cigars on christmas eve for summer’s popsicle / to lick my chest flat / you belong, boy in my dreams / i run naked and it does not hurt / what if I never bleed? or my breasts never grow? / I am no one’s baby sister / after dawn boy
Ghazals originated as a traditionally Arabic form of odic (relating to an ode) poetry used to express love or desire and the pain of being separated from that love. There are lots of different ways to write a ghazal, but they all generally follow a few rules:
They are written in rhyming couplets known as “bayts” and a ghazal typically has between 7 and 12 of these (with a minimum of 5).
The last word of every couplet must be the same, with the word before rhyming across every couplet, creating this rhyming pattern: AA BA CA DA… (matching letters are matching rhymes).
Typically, the ghazal addresses the narrator in the final couplet, an acknowledgement of self.
Isabella Borgeson has written a beautiful poem about gender and identity. Ghazals typically have long meandering lines, but Borgeson decided to change up the pace by including the slashes in these lines. Borgeson sections each line with slashes, putting small phrases and sometimes single words in their own room (fun fact: stanza in Italian means “room” or “stopping place”). This poem becomes staccato–short bursts of sound–but the slashes slow you down, making you amble through the ghazal. It gives the poem a sense of contemplation and gravitas.
The narrator starts in the “cover of shower,” hidden away in a room where she explores herself. Here, she can press her hair into her scalp and imagine herself as a tomboy. In the following stanza, the narrator is still stuck inside, never allowed to express her inner identity, she watches her brother dirty his fingernails while she covers hers in nail polish. She separates “/ beg /” which relays her desperation, her isolation. In the first two stanzas of this poem, Borgeson isolates herself. In the third stanza, she continues to watch, to long to be a boy who can run around with his bare sweaty chest, darkening their socks with the dust from concrete.
In the last two stanzas of the poem, Borgeson enters her dreams and wishes, where she is a boy licking her chest flat, where she can run without the pain of dangling breasts, where she never gets her period (“never bleed”), the historical symbol of womanhood. In the end, she very subtly addresses herself: “I am no one’s baby sister.” This is her cementing herself as the absence of something–she is not a baby, she is not a sister, she belongs to no one. I admire that Borgeson chose to address herself this way as opposed to adopting her name and reneging all that she tried to build for herself in this poem: a new identity.
In “ghazal on how to birth a boy,” Borgeson tries to birth a boy from herself, from her body. She dreams up a life she wants to live and things that she wants to do. Birthing a boy is isolation and then emerging from one’s dreams. Ghazals are an exploration of deep love and longing, of desire and pain of being separated from that which you love–this form complements the content of the poem. There is a love for a lifestyle and body that she doesn’t have, and the slashes break up this love like daggers demonstrating pain or disturbance.
Maybe every day this dream lives and dies for the narrator, rises with the sun and sets in her dreams. “I am no one’s baby sister / after dawn boy.”
If you enjoyed this poem… you can read more by Isabella Borgeson and you can check out their website here where they explore spoken word poetry.
If you liked the ghazal form… I highly recommend reading “Tonight” by Agha Shahid Ali—a very spiritual/religious poem that draws on many other works.
If you want to try writing poetry… write a ghazal! Just start writing in this form and see what topics it brings you towards.