Heavy magic is happening
Fat thick rain finds window screen and splinters in pieces. 
I watch them baptize a line of yellow ladybug corpses, a ceremony without a religion
they call it an act of god
It is a miracle that no one prays for, 
a worship service no one attends.

Wailing tornado siren calls, a despondent banshee across the field behind my house
Gathering my family around the emergency storm supplies, watching storm trackers trace geometry runes onto weather maps like wizards

Heavy wall clouds that we are swirling around us like cloaks - fearing the cyclone, waiting for the touchdown moment like wheat bowing down to reach under red clay, rooted but unable to stop trembling 

A tree that bore my carved name lost it’s arm to the twisting wind, my neighbor’s houses destroyed under the next days sun 
But

I am somehow untouched by them, 
they flatten the earth around me, but I still stand, 
Three have sent me flying down half flooded backroads, 
hammering heart 

I held every day they let me go, unharmed as a mercy. 
They know their children when they see them

I am born of their heavy magic
smell of eerie and purple 
shiver of danger before the storm
whip of trains howling past you 
that breaking under the cyclone winds, 

Have you ever been chased by a thunderstorm? His eyes flash like Lightning, his hands are like Thor’s hammer, 
I think that it is all show and no danger, 
did you know that heat lightning is just too far away to hear his thunder 
you don’t know what danger you are in yet. The only thing you can do when you encounter such power bearing down on you is call on the heavy magic you were born of to baptize you.
To take you.
To escape him I summon the storm, the danger, the rage
Leave destruction 
Shattered lamp in my wake
Hands made of wind and ether.

I was born a wall cloud on watch, 
wind in my veins, wet hair, electric skin
I pay the price for my generational curse
I look over my shoulder for my damage,  
spiraling, breaking, 
loss of control.

I want to be a cloud again, before I summoned this birthright.

Something lives deep in our bones, 
dark matter only observable in the forming and crashing of galaxies,
solar storms only threatening to debilitate at certain times
Eclipsing moon throwing an inky curving blight across moments
You are afraid that my shadows will take me violently from you
kicking and fighting into the vast nothing that waits under a fragile skin
Coldness seeping into every cell, ships without fuel, the lights going dark in the sky
And I have been making my peace with this every day
Storing up every last dimming of lights and ceremony of routine like an astronaut’s last day planetside

imprinting your skin on my mine until I don’t have my own fingerprints any more
Trying to fit all of you in my arms, but how can anything so wonderful be fit in something so flimsy?

The shadow that mocks me most is not mine
I see it in the corner of the things you 
say only when you think no one is watching
4 shots of tequila in
It is defeatism
It is I Will Never Be Good 
So Why Even Try
I Will Never Say It Right So 
Why Even Try
It is thinking of train tracks and freeways and loaded guns as escape routes
And it scares me just as much as hypoglycemic brain death and diabetes scares you.
And I wonder -- Trying to reach you but only getting static interference - will this solar storm pass?
If I embark on a rescue mission will my gravity send you spiraling out of control or bring you back home?

My shadow can wear a monitor
can have a leash

The vastness of space does not scare me because I can carry my space station home with me, spacewalk with you tethered
As long as I have you, I can feel safe from my shadow.


Holding on in desperation
I cannot save you.
You will slip through my arms like sand

I shave the side of my head like a person prepping for surgery.
Work says nothing because they cannot regulate hair length 
I cannot put a finger on what is different inside of me but something is buzzing, very low, a tinny whine I cannot place or diagnose, a faintness in my lungs

When I dress in the morning, I rattle a little like a snare drum left snapped in place, too close to a speaker hisssssses
My mother asks me what is wrong with you?
I can honestly answer that I don't know.

I dream about coming out, again, to my mother
I imagine the set of her mouth like the a warped paperback book. I’ve read this book before, when I told her about the first woman I fell in love with. When I told her that my partner used they/them pronouns and she used whatever she wanted.

Coming out and telling someone you were assigned someone you cannot be, I don’t want to read that chapter.
She will see this as losing her daughter.
And I wish she would surprise me.

I expose the shaved side of my head to the sky, begging anyone to dissect me 
and whisper into my bloodied ear all the answers that lie inside of me.
I don't want to tell my mother the results.

I do not fall under two choices
You know Luna, earth’s moon waxing and waning between full and new
I am the moon of a world you have never seen
You will try to name me
Shake hands with my dust as you walk across my surface
And with every step you drown out my true name
I whisper it still into my own body,
rocking on my axis
Soren, Soren, Soren

i trace the fire escape diagram
i hear a nurse say my exam room in a voice that is a hushed yell

and then i shape shifted
i became the door
i heard the results
of the urinalysis
the medical staff murmur
the door that was not just a door because it was also the other side
it was the end of ever feeling normal

and then i shapeshifted
i became the insulin vial
into shaking milky contents before drawing up
an addiction to survival
of marks into fat instead of veins
of hoarding life in the glass walls
of my benevolent cage

and then i shapeshifted
i became the doctor
who saw a 13 year old girl shaking
withdrawal symptoms from high glucose
promising false hopes and faith healing
promising a cure soon
promising god's love
that would never arrive

and then i shapeshifted
i became the faulty pancreas
under attack from a faulty immune system
giving it my very last push of life
i really thought i was doing the right thing
i didn't know i could **** the girl

and then i shapeshifted
i became the floor cleaner
acrid and masking the smell of the previous occupant
pressing against the girls face, etching myself into her skin
becoming the fear in her trembling hand

and then i shapeshifted
i became my mother holding her daughter
slapping her cheek
rubbing glucose gel into her gums
willing her to live

and then i shapeshifted
and i became a thin, pale girl
who just wanted to leave the hospital
but after a diagnosis the hospital never leaves you
you return for every checkup or emergency or surgery
and you never know when the end will be but
you know will die in a hospital

i just wanted to be the that girl
who did not count out 13 and half grapes like all the other kids would never even think about
i just wanted to be the ******* the other side of the door
who didn't know the diagnosis
who knew the way out
tracing an escape by heart

they do not fit into my hand
or under my bed
no
the ghost of them looms over my house like a cloud
i know the feel of them in the night
they breath on me, fingers in my hair when the wind blows
and each day they whisper my name
and i don't know why they still make me sad
they pull me under
catching me in a riptide

but here
pouring my tears into the ocean
i can finally feel empty
washing my wounds in the brine stings me with regret
but the sea salt spray has taken their smell from me
the wind drowns out their touch
i rise from the foam, a new kind of Venus
now the screaming gulls echo in my ears
finally alone
but i cannot stay here because
the shine on the crest of the waves
is the highlight on their blue eyes
and the sand is too rough
like their hands
my lips chapped from the sea breeze

after years, now i no longer dream of them
the scars have healed over with new skin
their faces forgotten to me
their shape i cannot trace by memory
their names a song i no longer know
not anymore

you ask me how i got over them
i didn't get over it
i just drowned it out until
it was no longer able
to drown me

i think we both wanted to believe that it would get better
i think we both lied to ourselves,
that I would ever really want to have children
that the ****** space between my legs
would ever look like anything but disappointment to you
lie 1 after my career got started for real,
i could think about adopting
lie 2 after your commitment was over,
you would move somewhere for both of us

so much education and learning
4 college degrees between us
you build things to go into space and guide missions to galaxies
what was wrong that we could not learn how
to build one ******* simple bridge
i feel like so many times I googled it and you seemed surprised
Like open source relationship advice
Had never occurred to you

White papers stained with black numbers for *** therapists liter the bed
White pads stained with my blood for increasing numbers of days in the litter bin
Maybe if we stop looking at it, it will go away
Maybe if we stop talking about it, it will clear up

If ignored like a pimple, it will clear
Instead of doing the right thing, we sit through
two years of arguing in a counselor’s office
I’m not sad that we "tried to work things out"
i’m sad that i tried really hard
and you left me
with my scars still stinging.