Can’t be a model
cuz of the roll of love around my middle
Can’t be an arm model
cuz of the **** scars
Can’t be a stripper
cuz I’m too insecure
(and lack the strength)
(and I look better in lots of layers)
My hands are too broken and crooked to ever be beautiful
nobody wants a hand model with chewed off nails and ragged cuticles
And that **** little scar on my left hand

But then I dug
through all the can’ts and found my guilt and my sorrow and the dull ache that she left behind

And I realized that
I may not be good at
a lot of things
but I can sure as hell write

So I coughed up
all the blood that she left clotted in my throat and spit it on to a blank page
used all that anger and guilt
to make something beautiful

Because my friend
we can’t
you can’t
I can’t
save everyone from this war that is life

But she is more than
just a causality
she is so much more
******

And my pretty words
laced with “I’m sorry’s”
and “I miss you’s”
really don’t do her justice

But I have learned
that writing is something I’m good at
even if my self loathing seeps through the cracks in the foundation sometimes

So I will write
fill pages with the veins from the gaping hole in my chest that her absence occupies and wonder if she’d be proud of me even now with how broken I am

I wish I had something else to offer
but I am only a poet
with notebooks to fill with
goodbyes that I never got to say

My god
I miss you

John Green and Jay Asher
they are at war
between each other
in an epic battle of epic proportions
to see who can glorify and romanticize
the most terrible and potentially life-ending things

ACT 1:
Jay Asher started first
with 13 Reasons Why in 2007
because why can’t suicide and depression
and blaming that on other people
be romantic, huh?!

Well from first hand experience
there is nothing romantic about being so depressed
that you want to die

I was 12 years old
two years after Jay Asher’s book came out
and I was in my room
not knowing about the book
cutting myself for the first time
and jesus christ I bled like a stuck pig

Fast forward to seventh grade
three years after the book was out on shelves
and I had my own copy
that I read through in one day
and came away from it with a vaguely
sick feeling in my stomach

Because I saw myself
in that girl
who wanted to die so badly
that she actually went through with it
but what I couldn’t understand was why
she felt the need to set up this sick game
where she gave 13 whole reasons why
to her fellow students
some of which she had never talked to
they were each why she had killed herself
like what the hell

And even more so
I couldn’t understand why
Jay Asher thought he had the right
to write this book
to make suicide and depression
into this tragic and romantic
and horribly glorified thing
because being suicidal is just so much fun

But what wasn’t fun was
jumping ahead a few more years
to when I was 16
and doing online school because of the massive
mental breakdown I’d had over Christmas break
in my freshman year of high school
and I tried to **** myself

And there was nothing romantic
about waking up in the middle of the night
and then in the morning
and having to tell my mother
that I had taken forty of my sleeping pills
there was nothing romantic about that at all

ACT 2:
then in 2012
just five years after Jay Asher’s book
it was John Green’s turn to fire back
and since depression and suicide and blaming that
on other people was already taken
why John just shrugged his shoulders and
made it his mission to
romanticize and glorify the big C of diseases
CANCER

Because what isn’t romantic
about these two dying kids
and so many others and chemo
that makes you puke and strips your body
of its immune system so that a cold
might **** you
and what isn’t there to glorify about radiation to ****
the thing that is attacking your body
from the inside out and even if the radiation
does **** your white blood cells
and leaves you wide open for all other kinds of infection
at least the cancer is temporarily under control right

Because even if you lose your hair
and your brain has a potential of being damaged
as well as your thyroid
blood system
heart
gastrointestinal tract
reproductive tract
and bone marrow
just think
an author may choose to make a romance story
around this disease that is slowly killing you
and doesn’t that make you feel better

And even though
if Augustus Waters was real
almost every girl and guy within a five
mile radius would probably sneer
at the cigarette that was never lit
because it’s all about the metaphor sweetheart
he was just the perfect guy in the book and then
in the movie where the audience was
actually able to kind of not really see the
prosthetic leg that that character had
because hey why just go after cancer
when you can go after amputees as well
go big or go home ya know

And even though
the book wasn’t so much about cancer
as it was about this girl
that even though she literally has to
wear a cannula all the time
and drag around an oxygen tank so that she
can even breathe
at least she can still somehow have *** right
and there’s no bruises in the morning
because that wouldn’t be realistic to
someone suffering from cancer right

This is where you nod along
and try not to think of the
people you know that have had cancer
two of which have died
and just get through the book
because who are you to let the
cute little pastel blue packet of tissues
that come with the book
go to waste huh

ACT 3:
Well god
big kahuna in the sky that you are
you see mam sir holy mother and father
I have never harmed a book before
except in that I dog-ear the pages
I wanted to burn these two books so bad
that it almost physically hurt
like going to the funeral of a good friend
and I saw red I was so angry
and it hurt so much

Well god you see
I have a proposition for you
okay and it’s a good one

Well god you see
I’ll go out and buy these two books
The Fault In Our Stars
and 13 Reasons Why
and I’ll build a great big funeral pyre
and burn them into the ground
okay and then you take those ashes
they’re all for you
take them
and give me back my friends

the funny thing is
when my mom was together with my dad
--like as a thing and he would
run to the pay phone across the street from where
he lived whenever his pager went off that
she was calling him--
his dad asked her is she was going to
give him a grandson
and my mom
being the person that she is
told me that she laughed and said maybe

the funny thing is
when i was born and the midwife
announced that i was a girl
my nan who had mistook my umbilical cord
for a ***** leaned over and asked
the midwife if they were sure

the funny thing is
my grandfather’s mother
she always thought that i was a boy
and yes i know that she had alzheimers
and was not all there
but now i feel like she was able to
see through my dresses and long hair
to the boy that i would one day be

the funny thing is
i was often mistaken for a boy as a child
and when that happened there was always
a little burst of warmth because yes
i was a boy
i looked like a boy
i felt like a boy
but no no no
silly girl they all would say

the funny thing is
when i first met my father’s father
my grandfather if you will
i was a lesbian
and in texas that isn’t a widely accepted thing
and i was told a lot during my two week visit
that i just hadn’t found the right man yet
and so now that i am a man
i wonder what they would tell me now

the funny thing is
i don’t have bottom dysphoria
have a ****** does not bother me
i like being able to comfortably ride a bike
and read ****** novels in public
without it being obvious that that is
what i am doing

the funny thing is
my grandfather’s mother
who we all called papa lucy
died before i realized that i wasn’t a girl
i had that terrifying revelation at seven
and though my memory is foggy
through much of my childhood
she passed a year or two prior to that
and no i do not mean it is funny that
she died because that is terrible and i loved
her with all my heart
but it is funny that she saw who it would take
me nine years to be
and i didn’t get to reintroduce myself to her
and tell her she was right

the funny thing is
now that i am a boy
i am near-constantly misgendered
and it seems that no amount of slouching
or wearing a binder under it feels like my
ribs are cracking with every breath
and wearing pronoun buttons on my sweatshirt
and bright rainbow beanie
is enough to make people see otherwise

but ****** i am a boy
and my nan thought i was a boy
and my papa lucy knew i was a boy
and i used to get mistaken for a boy
before i grew hips and ****
and despite all those things i am still
a boy and i always have been and i always
will be and the really not funny thing about that is that
people seem so eager to tell me i am wrong
and try to force me back into the box of
daughter and woman and mother and sister
and no i will not be those things
and it is not my fault that i live in this world
where they do not know what
a body other than theirs means and how terrifying it is
to realize you are not the girl you were raised as at such a
young age you do not have words to describe how you feel
and they do not know
and they will not know
until they shut their mouths and open their minds

so please do
before any more of my transgender brothers and sisters
have to die for your ignorance and hate and fear
because there is nothing funny about that

so you call yourself pro-life
okay, I guess I can pretend to respect that
which then means that you must also
respect the fact that I am very loudly pro-choice
and thanks to science
I know that a bundle of cells
and a living child are not the same thing

because an actual fetus is not fully formed
until the third trimester
and by fully formed I mean that it is
for all intents and purpose alive
but before that
there is nothing but a group of cells
there is no brain
no heart
not even pearly pink fingernails

so now what, huh?
you’re probably going to keep protesting
Planned Parenthood and harassing the people
that work there, right?
because all that Planned Parenthood does
is condone the vicious and inhumane ******
of defenseless, unborn children, right?
right?

either way, you don’t care about the child
once they’re born
all that you care about is making a woman
and other individuals who have a ******
carry this thing that is literally feeding off of them
and why should a child be brought into this world
if the circumstances through which it was
conceived are non-consensual?

because, if you really did care
if you really were “pro-life”
then you would care about the child
after it is born
or better yet
you could turn your attention and time and money
and anger to all the millions of orphans living
in the US

ya know, the living children?
with no homes?
with no parents?
packed like sardines in orphanages?
what about them?
do they not matter because they are not a group
of cells, and therefore not defenseless?
and therefore they do not matter?

because,
if you only care about that bundle of cells
and because some states actually make women
and those with uteruses
have funerals for the aborted “child”
then by default whenever a man
masturbates and then *******
shouldn’t he be made to have a separate
funeral for each of the thousands of children
that he just killed?
because one of them could have cured cancer, ******

and tell me
when I was still menstruating
should I have said “amen”
over all the potential children that bled out
of my body and into the pad
and the sides of my boxers?

should I have
said “grace” over all the
little pad mummies that I threw away?
should I have cried when I flushed
the ****** toilet paper?

because,
since I have a ******
how dare I want and feel as if I should
be owed control over my own body, right?

how dare I believe that
each and every woman
biological and otherwise
have a say in what they do with their body
how dare I be pro-choice, right?

well, let me knock you down
a few pegs with this closing statement:
if you only care about the “child” when it is
just a group of cells that doesn’t feel a **** thing
and couldn’t care less about it
once it is born
and homeless
or an orphan
or queer
then you are not “pro-life”
what you are
is an *******

putting into words
why swimming in the summer
is a thing that does not exist
be it pool, lake, or river
is almost as difficult and painful
as seeing bare flesh in the mirror
with all the wrong parts
in all the wrong places
and the only thing that goes through
an already moving-too-fast brain
is *wrong wrong wrong