The Earring Collectors
by Robin Gow
We are the earring collectors. We are goblins. We are hungry. We are queer.
Our most recent pair are stained glass windows. A wooden frame with thin colorful glass on the back. They’re on the heavier side, but when they catch the light just right, they’re worth the slight ache in the earlobes.
“I like your earrings,” is probably the most common greeting we get, whether it’s on TikTok, or waiting in line at the coffee shop.
There is no accessory more symbolic of our gender. Our collections are eclectic, ranging from hand-beaded barn owls, to sets our partners made from testosterone vials.
We laugh at the question: “Which ear is the gay ear?” The correct answer: “All of them.”
Late at night, we ravenously click on a small business’s promoted post of Mothman earrings. We forget we order them, and when they arrive, we rejoice.
Greedy, we will make whatever we can find into something wearable. Dollhouse food miniatures, and our exes’ fingernails, and tiny jars of jam.
We are the keepers. We are the chain link fence back to our gold-earringed ancestors. Back to a needle heated over a flame before piercing skin.
Our flesh asks for more. Asks to hang on. Asks for burial jewelry and bridal pearls. Asks for picture frames and the smallest possible figurine of a dog.
Remembers the clip-on days. Remembers what it was like to first hammer a nail into the wall of a room we knit of our own hair.
Elegant and gaudy. Profane and sincere. We pick up shards of necklaces off the subway floor. We take orphaned earrings to lost-and-founds, saying, though we know it’s probably not true, “Someone might come looking for this.”
We are not sure if we are dragons or angels. We are not sure, sometimes, what draws us to shape or design, but we know we want to be remembered.
A few will stretch our ears wide. Scream into that opening. Place a plug there. A stopped drain at the bottom of a lake.
Often we are told we are too much. In loving ways and painful ways. Our bodies are turned into catalogs and museum gift shops. Our glitter, gulped down too fast. Some of us are eaten. Others let the hole close. Say, occasionally, “I used to wear earrings.”
Some of us pile our hoards in old jewelry boxes. Some of us hang our lives neatly in a grid on the wall. Share earrings with lovers or say, “These are all mine.”
Our culture is one of harvest and holy. Of reused pickle jars and first dates on the moon. Kissing in the backseat of a car and saying, “Wait, I have to take out my earrings.” Earrings on end tables. Lost in passenger seats. Held onto by the other party, unwearable in their loneliness.
We do not ask what they will think when, in hundreds of years, they try to make sense of what we wore. We already know. We know they will say, “I want to make something, just like that.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Robin Gow (it/fae/he & él y elle) is a trans poet, witch, and community educator. It grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and lives with his partner Rain and their menagerie of animals on unceded Lenape land also called Allentown, Pennsylvania. Robin is the author of several poetry books and young-adult and middle-grade novels including Dear Mothman and Lanternfly August. @robin_gow_poet on Instagram. robingow.com