by Pascal Emmer

Pascal Emmer, *Trancestral Altar Vessel*, hikidashi-fired clay, 6 x 3 x 3.5 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Quartz Inverts

Pascal Emmer | JUNE 2025 | Issue 46

This poem is after and for Ella DeCastro Baron, whose generous spirit of collaboration in Trans[...]missions & Transgressions crystallized this offering.

when they felled our bodies
with an ax of nine hundred edges
we became a petrified forest

our arborescent forms fracturing
as they hit the floodwaters
we rioted
limbs breaking
we entered that ancient river

they tried to bury us
not knowing
we were
time machines

the river inserted a PICC line
in our heartwood
suffused it with silica

our decaying bodies
entombed in volcanic ash
turned to stone

we bejeweled ourselves
citrine, amethyst, smoky quartz
transing rainbow bands of chalcedony
a welter of jasper and agate

we emerged from the river
millions of years later
lithodendrons
our orogenous zones
rupturing fault lines of respectability

we spalled ourselves
into the tiniest cells of quartz crystal
to become clay

dancing in quartz inversion at 1063 degrees fahrenheit
our crystal cells swelled and transposed
each one a hand weighted at the thumb joint
we enantiomers threaded like fingers, a chiral symmetry
and chose to live as each other’s interlacing

resplendent in alumina, manganese, and iron oxide
our fire clay bodies became that first brick
sailing toward the throng of police
at the Stonewall Inn in 1969

we reforest ourselves
in the memories of those
who refused the flood that night

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A couple of notes on this poem. The line "an ax of nine hundred edges" refers to the more than nine hundred anti-trans bills that have been proposed in the US in 2025. The title "Quartz Inverts" combines the anachronistic medical term for queer people, "sexual inverts," with the process of "quartz inversion" in firing ceramics in a kiln.

Pascal Emmer is a trans, neuroqueer, multidisciplinary artist and writer living in O’Ga P’Ogeh Owingeh (Santa Fe, NM). Through collaborative design, participatory action research, and speculative fiction, they seek to create stories for a future otherwise. They are a researcher with the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability and co-author of Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing, Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures, and This is a Prison, Glitter is Not Allowed: Experiences of Trans and Gender Variant People in Pennsylvania’s Prison Systems. They co-founded Hearts on a Wire, an organization that supports incarcerated trans people through art, poetry, and letters.