As Carthage's Queen
I recognized
The old flame's signs,
But it wasn't
Love:
It was
Pain.

Just hold me tonight,
I want someone by my side.
Let your scented skin touch mine,
Just hold me tonight.

Just kiss me tonight,
Even if it's for the last time.
I can't bear these lonely lips,
Just kiss me tonight.

Just love me tonight,
I want to be with you one last time.
I shall take it in my stride if you love me,
Just love me for tonight.

Before me stands a 'mirror',
Before my eyes open,
You tell me to prepare myself,
For I am about to see my reflection-
A live image of myself.
So I open my eyes.
And I scream.
And I run.
For what I see is not who I am.

When I was fifteen years old I came home from school one day and wrote a poem instead of cutting myself.
The next day I didn't write a poem.
Eighteen only wrote poetry in red.
Nineteen crawled under their desk with the lights turned off.
Twenty had panic attacks.
But thirteen still loved the world.
And ten only cared about going out to play.
And nine never thought growing up to be a gender would hurt so much.
But twenty-one can't breathe in this skin anymore.
And twenty-one doesn't want a twenty-two anymore.
And nineteen tried to pretend these feelings weren't real.
And fifteen tried to eradicate all the feelings altogether.
And seventeen just cried a lot.

My years have come together to unfold me into a disaster.
I am broken even in my most whole parts.
I am empty even on my most alive days.
If you send out a SOS into my chest the sound will ring off into its empty chambers and only answer itself.

It's hard to explain who I am.
Eyes flickering across my body,
looking for faults in the logic.

Contradictions piling up,
as standard operating procedures fail.
Anger and bewilderment to frightened to share...
one little question, awkward and scared.
who am I?

A broken binary falls at my feet
like the clothes I've come to dread
and the skin I wish to shed.
My body left an undefined and unwanted shell.

I'm somewhere deep inside,
trapped inside this human cage.

Women
are not mysterious.

We are not shrouded
in cloaks made from the night sky.

We are not anomalies
or irregularities in the data.

Our nature has been hidden
from men, by men.

We have not been studied;
Not extensively, thoroughly, over centuries.

Not the way men have been, either.
There was no equal footing in
analyses.

Women were test subjects, when men were patients.
When we were "relevant" at all.

This pattern literally kills us quicker.
In medicine, and love.
In the office and the bedroom.
In the workshop and the nursery.

In the kitchen.

In the kitchen.

Some food for your soul:

Everyone is magical.
You don't need a pointy hat and a ******.

Everyone is intellectual.
You don't need spectacles, white skin, or a *****.

Everyone is environmental.
Just go outside.

You just need to be you.

Subscribing to the binary
and rejecting it completely:
One ties your hands,
the other your feet.

Be all the parts of you. Then you can feel
Whole.

I am no girl
Nor boy, nor child
To squeeze my being
Into labels
Is not my style