From Rooster to Rooster: A Conversation With Oliver Baez Bendorf
Courtesy of Nightboat Books
The first time I went to a cockfight was the night the federal ban took effect in Puerto Rico. Accompanied by a journalist and a friend, I watched as men made and changed bets through gestures and codes, while in the center of a ring, two cocks fought to the death. Outside the arena, those who fervently believed in statehood that evening sounded like they favored Puerto Rican independence because who were los federales to come and impose such a law? Since the 16th century, the archipiélago has been home to cockfights, spaces where rural formas of masculinity flare, dance, spread their wings, and sing. It was a space for specularized gender performance, where I stood out with my lavender hair, my hard-to-hide breasts, and my flashy queerness.
Years later, I live in a house that once belonged to my father and my yard is full of roosters and chickens. I learn during my first months living here that Villa Nevárez is populated by these birds because a gallero died, leaving a neighborhood inheritance in the form of disjointed collectives of domestic, now wild, fowl. All over Puerto Rico, I have witnessed these beautiful reclaimings of our unruliness. The canefields where enslaved peoples and exploited fieldworkers were forced to cut, drain, cast, and dry—producing sugar for European or U.S. companies—no longer grow cane, but near the rivers, the guajana flower spikes sway free, divested of their exchange or use value.
I do not feed the roosters in my yard, do not train them. They are not mine any more than I am theirs. Their activities filter into my life through the window. We respect each other. I do not meddle in their affairs, and in turn, they provide me with their white noise. We have an agreement. As long as they stay out of the marquesina, the yard is theirs. In exchange, they eat pebbles and roaches, shit everywhere, and wake me up way too early. Seems fair enough.
It is in this house that I prepare this review, the house where I first read Consider the Rooster, thrilled to find "a bonding moment between (trans) men" across achipiélago and diaspora, across experiences, land, ocean, from one stray rooster to another. Here, I think of how seldom I have seen trans men publicly show affection, how few transmasculine writers playfight, or just play, on the page with each other. There is a growing body of poetry from transmasc peoples across Abya Yala that includes some favorites such as Dante Tercero, K. Daniel Díaz, Chely Lima, tomás pe proaño, Andrea Abi-Karam, and others. I am grateful to have so many places where I can find something of myself. Still, often ours is a poetry that grapples with solitude as much as solidarity. Perhaps we associate the rooster with the cockfight too much, and we fear reproducing those group dynamics that are so central to cis masculinity, but I would love the grappling of love toward each other, a play fight to replace the death fight.
I find some of that playfulness in these poems, where our shared referents, our distant yearnings for a sense of understanding of place and language touch, sometimes with a strong grip, others with soft tenderness, or both. Baez Bendorf writes "I try to unravel spanish." In the poem "they" from my book x/ex/exis (University of Arzona Press, 2021) I write "nuestro idioma es el español, pero no exactamente el mío. / our language is spanish, but never quite mine." Here is the play of transing a language differently and together.
In "Colony Collapse," Baez Bendorf writes:
feverish after that communal feeling. swear to god
when I’m
dead I’ll spend years waiting for the living
to call, offer wine and dance. I need
everyone I love. I’m too tired.
In "I want biodegradable sex," the poetic voice echos the ecological devastation associated with the word "plásticos" in Spanish, and then reverts to an older meaning, where "plastikos" is "to form or mold, an art long before plastics were invented." The poet, thus, breaks with narratives that equate transness with novelty, positing a self older than plastic, one where shaping one's body means reshaping language. Our genders are plastic, as in malleable or changeable, as much as they are plastic in relation to the fiction of the natural and unchanging hardness of our gender assignments. "Trans is a way of arranging the world through change, but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away."
It takes care to write a book like Consider the Rooster and a great deal of vulnerability. Baez Bendorf does not falter. He invites us into the rooster and that "feverish communal feeling" that is love. Without being too literal with my reading, I'd like to explore the ekphrastic poem "RAM’S HEAD WHITE HOLLYHOCK AND LITTLE HILLS," a text that helps me consider the possibilities opened up by metaphorizing transness. I am interested in the call I've seen in U.S. poetry circles during past years to move away from metaphor, especially as it relates to identity and trauma, but I feel some of the potential of figurative language is lost. It is this literary language that Baez Bendorf uses to tease out the relationship between representation and its failings.
The poem opens with a misreading, one that is just outside of earshot. The poem recalls how Georgia O'Keeffe responded to an interpretation of her painting:
O'Keeffe said the bone was about form, not death.
The shape the skull made floating in that blustery sky.
And so the ram's skull in a desert, which can so easily be read as a pelvic bone and two ovaries, does not signify death, nor do the effects of testosterone—the end of menstruation, the desertlike dryness, "where each/ drought is longer than the one before"—mean the end of abundance and life. The poem continues:
almost tucked behind the ram's ear. So the ram
wanted to know how it felt to adorn. To self-mark
with a bloom meaning there is something fertile here.
The ram could bear a lamb,
perhaps. Should.
If he wanted to.
Something is to be said for an ekphrastic that is also conceit, where figure is layered on figure, where artifice and nature are confused, a pharmakon. The obvious reading, the death of fertility in the ram, is countered by the artist, who is far more interested in "the shape the skull made." This is the risk and reward offered by metaphor, its distance allows for reification, but also for expansion, to be more than just "death" or the material in its basest sense, to also float in "that blustery sky" for a moment and become other in order to return to the self, transformed.
And so, in response to the bare bones of trans death, which we ourselves must often cite to remind the world of our lives, poetry offers this counterproposal: translife as form, as shape, as the abstraction and space we often need to imagine ourselves anew, not limited by gravity or the laws we were raised to believe were unmoving.
It is perhaps most refreshing to read a book about transmasculine transition that accounts for the unfixedness of gender, even as we are living it, fully and at times painfully, as a binary, which most often fits but remains open-ended. "Offerings Iphis Pledged as a Girl and Paid as a Boy" opens with, "I called myself a man (which I think / I am) so I could talk about how good / the crying feels now I've learned to let it." Although it could be argued this is a persona poem, its inclusion in the collection leaves room for the breadth of the transmaculine spectrum, and personally made me feel seen.
A great deal is left to be said about the shape Baez Bendorf's poetry takes on the page, the book's horizontal layout, the extraordinary cover, the poet's use of epigraphs, and the expansiveness of the writing. In fact, there is a great deal left to be said in general about Consider the Rooster (I didn't touch upon the titular poem!), but I wanted to give Baez Bendorf himself the opportunity to talk about it, which he has graciously agreed to do, rooster to rooster.
Intervenxions edited this interview for concision and clarity.
Hi Oliver! Thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions about your new collection. I really enjoyed reading it and know it will touch the lives of many. My first question is a bit predictable, I'm afraid. Could you tell us a bit about how and when you began writing these poems? At what point did you know it was going to be a book?
I wrote the poems without knowing they would become a book. They began as a way of thinking and feeling through a whole range of things. Walter Mercado’s crow came as a crystallizing force—a rooster who claimed his place despite everything.
The more I wrote, the more I started seeing themes emerge: the land around me, finding shape as bodies amid disruption, life and land beyond regulation, the natural world—of which we are a part—resisting binaries and boxes. The poems began to talk to each other and formed around shared gravity: survival, an ungovernable joy, a refusal to be good. I feel like our books are in conversation, erupting together through place and history, insisting into being futures where we each belong.
I began writing the poems in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I was teaching at the time. This was during the start of the pandemic, amidst the widespread uprisings against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, and through the summer of CantoMundo teach-ins. Nearby in Western Michigan, right-wing militia men were plotting to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Closer to home, the rooster who lived with me, who we’d thought would be a hen, began to crow.
All of that found its way into the poems and began to shape the poems into a book. I’m reminded of how you wrote about movement and place in antes que isla es volcán—the island refusing to be still, history erupting in unlikely places, and the role of imagination in persevering toward the future we deserve. I feel like our books are talking to each other like that. Thank you for your thoughtful reading of Consider the Rooster; it’s rare to feel one’s work understood and engaged in this way.
It was strange and exciting to find Caenus, the inspiration for a character in my work, appearing here in these poems, also buried by stones. How did you come to this story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and did you feel the first time you read it?
I’ve always been drawn to transformation myths, especially those where body and gender shift in defiance of limitation. When I first read Caeneus’ story in Ovid, it felt familiar and painful: the yearning to live as you are and the way the world tries to crush that, burying you in stones. And there’s this fierce will to outlast even the stones, like a glimmer of something unbreakable—I felt that in my bones, the yellow bird that emerges from his burial pile. That same unyielding pulse became part of my book. Walter’s crow. A call, stirring up all that stubbornness and shape-shifting that define us, as if to say: We’ve always been here, as mythic as the mountains or stars. I see a lot of this same struggle with myth, self, and legacy in your Algarabía, which reads almost like a deep reckoning of how language, history, and body interact. That resonated with me powerfully as I read it.
Tell us about the rooster, Walter Mercado, and how he came to have that name.
Naming the rooster Walter Mercado was an act of joy. Walter Mercado was a figure of magic, generosity, glamour—a queer Latinx icon. Naming the rooster after him felt like a tribute to that energy, that cosmic wisdom. Walter (the rooster) strutted around like he owned the place, even though he was a tiny bantam, smaller than the hens. He was this little, flamboyant presence in tune with the earth, but also with this grand sense of self. He loved to cuddle and would calm down on a chest. I loved him. There was something beautiful about the way he moved with both humility (humus, close to the earth) and grandeur. Walter was small but had that big energy, crossing worlds, just like his namesake.
Are there any trans poets or artists that have inspired your work deeply?
Yes—CAConrad, Wo Chan, Ryka Aoki, especially her “Raccoons,” Chase Berggrun’s RED, Meg Day, Trish Salah, Samuel Ace, Leslie Feinberg, Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Alan Pelaez Lopez, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha—and you, of course. I also feel inspired by artists like Mark Aguhar, Greer Lankton, and KC Councilor.
It’s the work of these poets and artists that makes me feel connected to something bigger. We are part of a web of trans culture and meaning-making across time and space. Reading Algarabía, I was struck by your world-building, how you conjure this mythic, speculative space that’s both a place of longing and resistance. That work and your ability to hold contradictions inspires me.
Where did you find support while writing this work? What was the editorial and publication process like?
Support came from so many places—friends, fellow poets, my editor, and the land itself. The rooster, hens, fleabane daisies, the pond—they each brought not only solace, but also delight, a sense of presence to the writing. This book came together across many places, in the end, each with its own energy. The land felt like a collaborator in its own ways.
The editorial process was a collaboration, too. My editor, Caelan Nardone, was so patient and insightful, helping me see connections I’d missed and encouraging me to take more risks. The manuscript underwent significant revisions and in many ways is a different book now than the one I first turned in. Working with Nightboat Books was a gift—they understood the heart of this book from the beginning, which made the process feel meaningful. The book’s size and shape feel just right. CantoMundo was also a key part of that support system, offering a shared sense of purpose and solidarity. There’s a real power in knowing the work is both personal and part of something collective, something larger.
This collection does something I'm not ready to name. Did you struggle at any point with the writing?
Yes, writing this book demanded a lot of me. There’s something about working with language, especially as a trans poet, that’s like drawing on magic, even when it’s uncertain. Writing becomes more than just recording experiences; it can also catalyze experiences. Sometimes that unfolds without fully understanding it at first.
In the words of Juan Felipe Herrera, “Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.” I've thought about how poetry sometimes calls things into being before you grasp them. The struggle is staying in that mystery, resisting the pull to resolve or clarify too soon. The writing asked me to surrender while staying intentional, trusting the book to hold both love and unanswered questions. In antes que isla es volcán, you resonate with this, too—writing Puerto Rico’s future with a sense of love and rage, asking questions without always giving answers.
I'm particularly surprised, though I shouldn't be, by the softness of this collection. Do you feel you also left space for rage in these poems?
I’m glad the softness came through. Yes, the rage is there, too, but it’s a slow burn, a fury still simmering, still cooking, finding its form. Being trans can mean constant resistance—there’s anger that wants to burst free, but often it just simmers under the surface, keeping you moving. For me, there’s rage even in the choice to lean into softness—a refusal to let bureaucracy or power turn my joy and tenderness into something small or hidden. Righteous rage and tenderness are both survival tools, and learning to hold them together feels a little like one of the hardest and truest things to do. And my future poems make more space for that rage, so stay tuned.
My final question relates to how we care for our younger selves in the present. I find that being trans often means we are nurturing who we were and who we weren't allowed to be. If you could give your younger self this book, what would you write in the dedication?
“Keep going! Your life is possible. You are made of the stuff of stars and song. I love you. I am grateful for your stubbornness and softness. Don’t stop writing.”
