Southern Gothic, Queer Survival, and the Poetry of Haunting

The South is not a neutral geography. For queer people, it is a landscape structured by specific forms of visibility and erasure, violence and beauty, inheritance and refusal. This is the terrain my poetry attempts to navigate — not as background setting but as active force shaping what can be said and what remains unsayable.

Southern Gothic as a literary tradition has always concerned itself with what gets buried and what resurfaces. Family secrets, historical violence, the rot beneath genteel surfaces. When filtered through queer experience, these concerns take on additional dimensions. The question is not only what history tries to bury but who gets designated as the thing that should stay buried.

This essay examines recurring themes across three poems: mortality and time’s passage, landscape as inheritance, and the formal experiments that attempt to match content with rhythmic structure. The goal is not to explain the poems away but to trace the concerns that generate them.

Time, Mortality, and the Body’s Betrayal

“Prime Health and the Last of Days Rust” opens with temporal anxiety made visceral:

— from “Prime Health and the Last of Days Rust”

The phrase “prime health” carries bitter irony. Youth and health are supposedly the time when the body is most reliable, most itself. Instead, this speaker experiences the body as something already failing, already marked by decay. The “sole wreckage” suggests not just damage but the aftermath of something catastrophic that has already occurred.

This temporal dislocation — feeling already old while still young, already haunted while still alive — recurs throughout the work. In “A Book of New Hope,” the speaker references “at least 20 years since the last Devastation” and an old man who has “almost forgotten what it’s like to Hear fear of the dark.” Time does not progress linearly toward death but circles back to earlier traumas, compounds them, makes the present feel like aftermath even when nothing has technically ended.

For queer people in the South, this temporal experience is not purely metaphorical. You can feel old at twenty-five if you have already survived things that were supposed to kill you. You can feel haunted in youth if you grew up around people who wanted you erased. The body becomes unreliable not only through biological aging but through carrying the weight of survival.

The Undertaker’s Perspective

The figure of the undertaker appears multiple times across the work, most explicitly in “Prime Health”:

— from “Prime Health and the Last of Days Rust”

The undertaker is someone who stands above ground while thinking constantly about what lies beneath. They are intimately familiar with death while remaining technically alive. This position — above the grave “for now” — captures the precarity of queer survival in hostile geography. You are not yet buried, but the ground is already prepared.

The agricultural imagery (“fallow field,” “yield”) connects death to the land itself. Nothing grows here anymore. The field that should produce harvest yields only absence. This mirrors the broader concern with Southern landscape as something beautiful and poisoned simultaneously.

Landscape as Historical Violence

The most explicit engagement with Southern landscape as site of historical trauma appears in the extended section of “Prime Health” that addresses slavery and lynching directly:

— from “Prime Health and the Last of Days Rust”

This is not metaphor. The South’s trees have literal history as sites of lynching. The beauty of Spanish moss and spreading oaks is inseparable from this violence. When the speaker describes falling “deeper into the south,” the movement is not geographic but historical — descending into the accumulated weight of what this landscape has witnessed and enabled.

The image of souls “tethered in the branches” captures something essential about Southern Gothic’s relationship to history. The past does not stay past. It remains visible, suspended, unable to move on because the violence that created it was never adequately addressed. The dead can see heaven but cannot reach it because they remain bound to the scene of their murder.

For a queer speaker navigating this landscape, the recognition of historical violence creates complex identification. The speaker is both witness to and potential victim of the South’s capacity for brutality. The poem does not resolve this tension but holds it: acknowledging the specific horror of anti-Black violence while recognizing that the landscape’s hostility extends to anyone designated as disposable.

The Speaker as Haunting

Immediately following the lynching imagery, the poem shifts to first-person positioning:

— from “Prime Health and the Last of Days Rust”

The speaker becomes ghost rather than person haunted. But this is ghost as active agent, not passive victim. The self-strangulation imagery is visceral and disturbing. It suggests both violence enacted on the queer body by external forces and the internalization of that violence — the way survival sometimes requires silencing yourself before someone else does it for you.

“Gossamer white at the collars” marks the speaker’s racial positioning explicitly. This is a white queer person navigating Southern landscape shaped by anti-Black violence. The whiteness provides certain protections while also implicating the speaker in the historical violence the landscape embodies. The poem does not resolve this contradiction comfortably.

Inheritance and Refusal

Questions of what gets inherited and what can be refused run throughout the work. In “A Book of New Hope,” the title itself signals both continuity and rupture — something old (“hope”) requiring renewal because the previous version “just wasn’t working.”

The poem moves through images of memory and forgetting:

— from “A Book of New Hope”

To be forgotten might be mercy. To forget might be survival. But the shadow of what broke you remains audible even when you cannot see it clearly. Memory does not offer the choice of simple release.

This connects to the larger question of what queer people in the South inherit. You inherit the landscape’s beauty and its violence. You inherit family structures that may have rejected you and cultural traditions you cannot fully claim. You inherit language and imagery saturated with meanings you did not choose.

The response is neither complete acceptance nor total refusal but something more complex: selective inheritance. Taking what remains useful, transforming what can be transformed, acknowledging what cannot be separated from its violent origins.

Rhythm and Formal Experiment

The “Polyrhythmic Pentameter” score represents the most explicit formal experimentation in the work. The title itself announces the project: taking traditional pentameter structure and introducing rhythmic complexity that pushes against the five-beat line.

The score maps stressed and unstressed syllables, indicates where cross-rhythms occur (marked as “3/4” triplet pulses), and provides performance instructions including tempo and breathing points. This level of technical attention to sound structure reflects the belief that how something sounds matters as much as what it says.

The opening lines demonstrate the principle:

— from “Polyrhythmic Pentameter”

These are metrically regular iambic pentameter lines. The complexity comes in subsequent lines where the score indicates cross-rhythms and variations that create tension between the expected five-beat pattern and the actual rhythmic delivery. The content — hearing shadows, echoes that remain false — gets reinforced by the formal instability.

This approach to prosody reflects broader concerns in the work. You cannot address violence and survival using only inherited forms unchanged. The forms themselves require disruption, complication, pressure. Not abandoning structure but introducing controlled instability that makes the structure reveal its limitations.

The Devil’s Certainty

“You Must Be Certain Of The Devil” takes a different approach to formal structure, building through repetition and sound play:

— from “You Must Be Certain Of The Devil”

The sound play here — “crackle, cringle, tingle” — borders on nonsense while maintaining just enough semantic connection to suggest ritual or incantation. The “witchening pot” evokes both folk magic and the historical persecution of women labeled as witches. “It all goes south” operates as both directional statement and idiom for things going wrong, collapsing geographic and metaphorical meanings.

The poem’s refrain — “You must be certain of the devil” — creates structural stability through repetition while the content remains deliberately unstable. What does it mean to be certain of the devil? To know evil when you see it? To be certain evil exists? To acknowledge the devil in yourself? The certainty demanded by the refrain contrasts with the poem’s slippery, transforming imagery.

What This Work Does

These poems attempt something specific: making visible the experience of queer survival in Southern landscape without sanitizing either the landscape’s beauty or its violence. They refuse the comfort of easy resolutions — neither romanticizing the South as quaint regional culture nor dismissing it as simply backwards place to escape from.

The work insists on complexity. Yes, this landscape is beautiful. Yes, it is haunted by historical violence. Yes, queer people can love it while being endangered by it. Yes, survival requires both intimacy with and distance from the culture that produced you. These conditions coexist without resolving into simpler narrative.

The formal experiments — the rhythmic complexity of the pentameter score, the sound play and repetition in “Devil,” the visceral imagery throughout — reflect the belief that addressing difficult subjects requires formal risk. You cannot write safely about unsafe conditions. The form has to acknowledge its own instability.

This is poetry as documentation of survival rather than transcendence of struggle. The speakers in these poems are not triumphant or resolved. They are standing above graves, listening to shadows, falling deeper into landscape that wants them silent. But they continue speaking. The poems themselves are evidence of refusal — refusal to be silenced, to be simplified, to be made comfortable for audiences that would prefer queer Southern experience presented as either tragedy or triumph rather than the more complicated truth of ongoing negotiation with hostile terrain.

Connection to Broader Practice

This creative work runs parallel to technical projects documented elsewhere on this site. Both emerge from the same fundamental concern: making visible what powerful systems prefer remain hidden. Content strategy work serves marginalized communities by attending to their actual needs rather than algorithmic preferences. Secure Pride builds cybersecurity tools for organizations that existing security frameworks routinely fail.

The poetry addresses visibility and erasure through different means but with related purpose. When you write about being haunting rather than haunted, you claim agency over your own spectral status. When you map the South’s violence explicitly in verse, you refuse the regional tendency toward genteel silence about historical brutality. When you experiment with formal structure, you demonstrate that inherited forms can be inhabited and transformed rather than simply accepted or rejected.

All of it — the content strategy, the security tools, the poetry — operates on the principle that marginalized people deserve resources built for their actual conditions rather than idealized versions of what those conditions should be. The poetry documents what those actual conditions feel like from inside them. The technical work attempts to build protections adequate to the threats those conditions generate.

From erasure to signal. Through multiple registers, multiple forms, consistent purpose.