This week’s poem, by Goldie Peacock, is an exuberant prose-poem paean to the adventure and journey of partnering — and to finally finding The One. I love this poem’s swift and nimble forward momentum, its revelry in the magical and mundane details of partners come and gone, and its sweet vision of the journey’s deep future.
Peacock writes stories, essays and poems. They’ve lived in six states across the Midwest and Northeast, including Maine, and exist digitally at goldiepeacock.com.
type
When they were born, my partners had pale skin, red lips and black
hair, so strangers called them Snow White. Like Snow White, animals
would flock to them. They were the ones friends went to for advice on
how to start or end a relationship, though they weren’t so good at the
ending part themselves. They had blood red bedsheets, dark wood rock-
ing chairs, stethoscopes that at some point they handed to me and said
Have you ever listened to your own heartbeat? They were Earth signs and
Water signs and Air signs, believers in astrology but also free will, a mud-
dy, bubbly mess, speedy neat freaks faster than me (except for The One,
calm beacon), strong swimmers, lovers of herbs they lit and beckoned
into their lungs, some secretly and others not. They drove me around,
drove me mad, drove me to drill down into what it was about me, us,
them, that brought us here. They had short hair and long hair, shaved and
shagged and fauxhawked and free. They wore eco-friendly sneakers and
boat shoes and army boots and Chelsea boots and $300 wingtip Oxfords.
We shared clothes. We wrote sticky notes of love. I think of them when
I open my jewelry box. We will not know the full story until one of us
dies. We are all the heroes of our journeys. They would claim they are not,
they are of service, more selfless than that, except for The One. I don’t
even want to say it, but being the hero of my journey, I picture myself as
the last one standing, on a rock in a stormy sea, feeling the tugs of their
tethered depths, so what I’ll say instead is with The One in the audience,
I’ll read this somewhere in 50 years, saying how gravity shifts when spec-
ulation comes true and I didn’t know how true it would be when I wrote
it, though no one can know this until they’ve experienced it themself. I
never had a type, I’ll continue, Although I guess you could say now I do, as I
gesture to The One, age 100, Who’s put up with me for over half our lives,
and everyone will applaud.
– Goldie Peacock
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
“type” ©2025 by Goldie Peacock, is reprinted from Monster Beauties (A Trans Poetics Archive Anthology). It appears by permission of the author.