Crease

I met someone today.
I am standing at the mirror of my bathroom
in my underwear, eyes gouging flesh like dull chisels,
with the same expression they adopted
when I first knew I wanted to be attractive:
No mercy.

I’ve been training to be a fighter
because after my last girlfriend- excuse me, partner-
excuse me, friend- excuse me,
partner- excuse me, friend- excuse me
Polyamory! Millennial shorthand for
Please **** me even though I don’t know what I want.

She revealed to me once that,
early on in our relationship and unsolicited,
she’d begun to refer to me as a they.
To this day, one half of me
believes she just couldn’t admit
to her radically feminist,
anarcho-permaculturalist
wild witch woman persona
that she’d fallen in love
with another cis white male.
The other half can’t help but smile
each time I recall the memory.

To be seen,
******* god, to be seen,
for someone to trace all the creases of your being with amorous fingertips
unfolding you as gently as an origami flower, gasping at you like art! -
then, a curling beneath your ribs, a closing of eyes,
cheeks and palms smudged terra cotta.

For 2 months straight, I woke up angry.
Few people know this sensation.
Most have only been kissed by rage;
slapped, provoked.
But when devastation gestates in your abdomen,
you can feel your body chemistry shift,
the oxygen in your blood replaced by volatile gases,
bones glowing white hot beneath unloved skin,
the tectonic plates of your psyche roiling,
every hissing breath a collision and separation.

I began to fear myself, this anger,
what it might take from me
after I was already pregnant with grief,
my body less and less my own,
so I threw myself at things I could not break-
all my polluted oceans, my clotted skies,
my smothered mountains and putrid valleys,
tearing them madly from my insides
that I would not see them birthed.


I am standing at the mirror of my bathroom
wondering how I will carry this.
Looking at my body again,
softer somehow;
my arms hewn and wiry,
my chest ample.
I see my stomach is scarce
as my gaze traces the angles of my hips.
My thighs thick against their garment,
I can’t help but twist to see my *** curve upward neatly.

I am standing at the mirror of my bathroom,
the same smooth bulge in the front of my briefs.
Under the fabric pulled between my thighs, a crease.

How beautiful
to hear a hurricane
so gently
whisper verses
that a butterfly
might listen—
and how much more
beautiful
to hear a butterfly
rage
fierce
and open eyed,
stirring an ocean
to frenzy.

I saw you first,
as shadows do, afloat
in the churning of stars.

As stage lights poured out
over that dark sea of strangers,
awash in ruckus blooms
of color, a thousand

souls flew like banners
around us, and you
were the wind that swept the world
from stillness.

The first time
you ever turned away from me,
I could feel my gaze
smear across your cheek

like a hand against a mirror,
transfixed
by my own reflection.

Then, you looked—
God, those eyes!

sleepy, as if waking to a dream,
pillowed against the glow
of your amber skin.

As you tipped your light
like a cup against my lips,
my heart fell beneath its weight

and there, like the moon
turns the sun upon the earth,
your waxing crescent rose

against the cosmos and all
those endless fires paled in your presence

as you stood carving me perfectly
from the sky.