I wailed at the cruelty
when the bi-planes felled him.
Learning then that man, malarial man,
buzzing round the wonder of the great ape like mosquitoes,
would kill us all.

I was Faye, entombed in the leathery digits of Kong,
a font of youth and tears and love, and I was also Kong,
the humanity in his gentled placid eyes when he clutches her,
his brackish rage; part righteous part misguided. 

She, shining through him with a hot softness
like a melting sunset over the jungle canopy,
and so sunning his brutality into compassion,
though never could it have kept. 

And so we’d have our great fall. In some universe she falls too 
flaxen Faye a glinting snowflake drifting on the steady tide of gravity, 
the gaping anonymity of New York waiting to catch her in its jaws,
in this one, they die together. 

In another, Kong squeezes her
until she bursts like a ketchup packet, stickying his palm. 

In still another,
the Faye within Kong is freed, but the Kong within Faye remains forever,
so she snaps the bones of men who invade her, she weeps for freedom, she weeps harder
where it is hideously absent, her fists are transcriptions
of an unspeakable arcing good – every landed blow maps its trajectory.

And in this way she honors the primate she has shed,
champions what will be found. In her shadowy eyes, the smooth ridges of her dimples,
the flounces of her swirling curls, Faye knows that she too will die
beleaguered and swatting, like the wonder born of Skull Island. Her own wonder
born in the firm grip of its ill-fated son. 
She is better for being held by him,
better still for being free. 

– P.J. Dominiski

Author’s Note: “Portrait as Both Kong and Captive” is both a celebration of my coming out as a transgender woman and a eulogy for the projection of self that I was shedding in the process of coming out. The mythos of King Kong has captivated me ever since I was a child, and it felt like the perfect framing device for a poem that is so deeply connected to the trajectory of my life and the embrace of my authentic identity after all these years of internal turmoil. The original King Kong film has some detestable racist undertones and overtures that aren’t lost on me, and so in some post-modernist way this piece is perhaps an attempt to reclaim and re-purpose that narrative into one that speaks for liberation instead of oppression.