after Untitled (Cahun with Mirror Image)
                                1929, by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore

I’ll never forget the first time I saw you,
turning as if someone called your name. If
I stood in the right place, that someone

was me. In the mirror, I spied your throat
between checkered lapels, shadow of bone. 
Newly in love, I was especially 

thin-skinned, prone to spillage. I wanted
to reach into the frame and grab you
by the collar, demand to know what 

you’re doing here, in 1927 shorn
of time and wearing a pinky ring? 
What did she call to make you turn? 

What did you call yourselves, at once
stepsisters, now lovers, collaborators, 
inventors of language? You taught me

we must be scholars of our own
lives, of the desires that drift within
and I burned with jealousy that you

had someone to do that with. Did
that make the labor sweeter—certainly
not less difficult. Of course, I read

everything I could get my hands 
on while the woman I loved 
soured, turning me into a cat 

howling at the mouth of a culvert. 
Everything I read bored me. All 
this talk of the subconscious and 

phallic symbols. So much worry 
over who to attribute. I wanted 
to know what your first kiss

was like. If it was anything like 
my first kiss with a woman. Was 
it something like taking 

a picture? Shutter winks, reverses
dark and bright, shivers on a pool
turn to bark, reflection cleaves

the present, demands we rearrange
the future. I thought, This is the most
important moment of my life. Luckily,

it wasn’t, and I don’t know why 
I’m telling you this. I should be asking
about methods or theories, instead

of gazing at your hand white-knuckling
your collar or noticing how your ear
comes to a little elfin point, wondering

if the notch in your neck is warm
from the sun, indulging my habit 
of falling for the long dead. Invite

me to Jersey to leap down cliffs
onto the beach where we can wrap
ourselves in seaweed, fling 

armfuls of water into the air. Let me
cradle your camera to my face as
you lift your hand to block the light

from burning the negative, blurring
our figures into one bright shape,
free of details and distinctions. 

//

Author’s Commentary:

I saw “Untitled (Cahun with Mirror Image)” in the basement of the Art Institute of Chicago and developed at instant crush on Claude Cahun. It was years ago, and I was just trying to figure out how I wanted my queerness to appear in the world. Like most queer crushes, it was difficult to figure out if I wanted to be withthis cocky, androgynous person or be like them. Not really a crisis as they died in 1954, however this crush caused me to dive into research on Claude. This research resulted in a book-length work beginning with the poem included here. 

Claude Cahun was a writer and artist who is credited with a large body of photographic work often made in collaboration with Marcel Moore. They were born in 1894 in Nantes, France, and their parents named them Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob. In their memoirs, Cahun described their mother’s bouts with mania and disappointment at her child’s Jewish features. Eventually their mother was permanently isolated in a psychiatric facility. 

In 1917, Cahun’s parents divorced, and their father married Marie-Eugénie Rondet, the mother of Cahun’s collaborator and life partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe in 1892). A few years later, Cahun and Moore moved to Paris, working on the edges of an art scene supported by lesbian publishers, bookstore owners, and salon hosts.

In 1937, Cahun and Moore, using their birth names and calling themselves sisters, moved to Jersey, an English island off the coast of France. After the Nazis occupied the island in 1940, the two launched a resistance campaign that, though quite whimsical, was also effective. When they were arrested in 1944, they met prisoners who had deserted the army after reading their notes handwritten on cigarette wrappers.  

Cahun and Moore were sentenced to death, but the Germans wouldn’t execute them until the named the men in charge of their activities. (They couldn’t believe two women could mount their own resistance efforts.) The pair was freed after the Germans surrendered to the Allies in 1945 and lived on the island until their deaths: Cahun in 1954 and Moore in 1972. 

Scholars and fans have claimed Cahun for feminist, lesbian, trans, and nonbinary history and have used multiple pronouns to refer to them. My project should not be read as an attempt to weigh in on which lens is the most appropriate or settle the question of Cahun’s gender. I’m no expert. (I can’t even read French!) But I do find in them a model for gender and genre self-determination. I love the way their archive dodges and bedevils the question of identity. When gender is an open space, I feel like the possibility of liberation hovers just over the horizon—for all of us.