Cover this body with layers upon layers,
Each one hiding the secrets I don't want
To tell. They yell my ***, Scream it out
Shout it and others follow suit.
Four letter words may make violence but
S-H-E causes earthquakes inside me.
My curves curse me to wear my **
Chromosomes like neon paint
Warning sign: This person was born
Female. Born into an imaginary category,
Forced to conform. My mind
Is at war with the mirror eyes staring back
Those little details sticking out
Highlight them, cutandpaste to another
Body.
Maybe this bandage will keep me safe from
The gender police maybe people will be
Confused and not ask Maybe they will ask
For once and not assume.
Maybe I'll lose enough oxygen that it won't
Matter.
Matter is all I am, atoms twisted together in
Disarray and how can you call that Anything but what it is.
I defy this binary, refuse to walk the
PinkorBlue tightrope.
Let me fall and land in purple.
Let me live in the inbetween.

There are days when my body doesn't
Support me doesn't
Hold me close and
Protect me.
These are the days that I am a clay figure
Molded by clumsy hands shaped
With curves where there should be flat
Planes where I exist to create a mask a
Persona of who I am who I want to be.
These are the days when I want to avoid
My reflection yet check it to make sure it
Matches what I want to see.
These are the days that my reflection Never matches what I want to see where
My insides twist in disgust and I want to
Crawl inside myself and hide from the
World. These are the days when I wake up
Two hours early to prepare to layer first Binder then undershirt then shirt then Shirt then sweatshirt then jacket because
The bulk makes my body a secret.
These are the days when my body is a
Secret that I never want to reveal when
My steps are unsure and my face is set to
Boy-mode.
These are the days that I watch guys and
Imitate them stealing their walks hoping
I'll steal their identities so I don't have to
Live in my own.
These are the days that my heart fissures
When I am called "her" when a pronoun
Becomes an insult and
These are the days that I wish my mind
Wasn't so dead-set against my happiness
That I could just feel "girl" that I could
Just pretend it away.
But these
Are the days that I fight hardest to be who I
Am and fight to educate others and
Imagine a day when I won't be misgendered or gendered at all.

I was a little girl yesterday morning,
With a flash of red hair and a gap-toothed grin
Laughing and playing on the swing at my favorite park.
I was a confused pre-teen that afternoon,
Scraping her knees on jagged insults
Holding in tears for secret bathroom visits
Where she would push her fingers
Into her throat and
Pray on her knees that her lunch would
Reappear like a magic trick.
I was a scared teenager by evening,
Kissing girls and running away from
The demons in my head with voices
That sounded like my mother’s.
By midnight I was on the floor shaking,
Back to twenty, back to who I am now
Wishing those past me’s would understand that I needed
Something more.
Yet this morning I sat up in my bed and greeted the sun with a
Flash of red hair and a close-gapped grin
And I am here now,
Here remembering, being present and
Knowing who I was
Ten years ago twelve years ago fifteen years ago five minutes ago
Is exactly who I needed to be,
Doing exactly what I needed to do.
Scraping my knees and elbows
And pushing my finger down my throat
And feeling ugly all the time,
That’s not what I needed but it’s
Who I was Who I couldn’t stop being because I
Didn’t know how. In my mind,
I am not
That little girl, that preteen, that teenager I am me.
I am
Bumping and bruising and
Breaking, sometimes, along the way but this
Is where I stand.
And those past selves stand
Hand-in-hand somewhere along
The equator of my brain
Like paper dolls unfolded
Through my history.

I am a stone
But if you watch me close enough
You will see the cracks in my foundation
The fissures in my layers
The erosion wearing away at my edges
I am a stone
But I am
**crumbling

12:30 AM.
I am a ghost drifting through the midnight-quiet,
haunting flower beds and grasses
Undisturbed in their slumber. My body floats
Through my neighborhood, stealing the
Secrets of the dark.

1 AM.
Ghoulish eyes peer out from Mrs. Butler’s bushes and
Become miniature 3-eyed deer with antlers sharpened to
Daggers. They roam about her dewy lawn,
Feasting on worms and blinking,
Slowly, one eye at a time.

3:30 AM
Arrives, and they return to their hideaway home,
Disappearing with one final b l i n k
Into the rhododendrons.

5 AM.
I never knew that morning tasted like
Strawberries and honeysuckle and smelled
Like freshly-cut-grass-mixed-with-bonfire-smoke.
My Tongue is heavy with its sickly-sharp odor
And my ears buzz from the tangy sweetness.

7 AM.
Corporeal reality coats my body, connecting my mind
to my soul, my
Soles to the soil and I am incarnate, whole,
A body amid the sunlit specters surrounding me.

9 AM.
A mumbo-jumbo grin slides onto my face,
Synthetic in every aspect of the word,
My mouth is cotton-dry as I slink into the bogusness of a weary day.

10 AM.
Crowds of people smoosh together, their words co-mingling
And I crash my bike into strung-together sentences,
Scraping my knees on the voracity of barbed words.

11. “She’s a constant damsel-in-distress, but she doesn’t work in a strip joint!” I step around the shards of her fallen tiara as I climb the ivory-tower’s steps.
12. My wide eyes view futility as a type of texture, and I imagine it feels like sandpaper. My first class feels like sandpaper-futile in this struggle to stay awake.
13. Bicycling to la clase de Español se siente como moviéndose a través de melaza.
Mis pies cansados empujar los pedales pero I can’t escape the quicksand around me.
14. Reading the thoughts of my classmates helps to pass the time, and
I can see clearer through closed-eyelids than open eyes.
15. Red walks among their peers, watching for passing dogs and smiling at them. Red is
Hyperaware of people they knew from past school and recalls names and faces in seconds. Red is
A zombie trudging on shaky legs, lumbering down the bricked path.
16. Murky sunlight streams through tired clouds and blinking is a visceral kind of pain.
17. My poetry stews in my brain, rotting and fermenting until it becomes a fine wine.
18. Trees wish me good luck, waving their branches affirmatively as I pass by. Their comforting
Footsteps warm my soul.
19. Darkness steals the sun’s warmth but I’ve hours more to be awake.
20. I am a ghost floating through this sea of people. I drift through them, haunting their conversations
Haunting my own quiet mind.

My body is a roadmap
Dotted with state lines and stretch marks and red arrows pointing to You Are Here.
There are scars like flags crossing my arms claiming gripping holding fast to this
Earth this life
Highways that lead nowhere
Train tracks that click clack against my ribcage
Cars that rumble in my brain.
Exhaust fumes fogging thoughts.
My body wears these hills on my chest like rugged territory unstaked unstated these weight plateaus like failure flatlining against the horizon.
My body is untraveled unfolded uncreased
These eyes like lakes see depth from new perspective dipping fresh into cool clear vision.
These legs like rivers cut through worlds rushing hard and fast
This head like boulder
steady and stoic even with anxiety
quaking through my core.
My body is a roadmap.
I seek only adventures within.

Two people walk into a bar:

A woman, early twenties, permed-up, puffed-out hair

Horn-rimmed glasses thicker than coke bottle bottoms

Fresh out the ivory tower eager to learn eager to become who she needs to be

Parlez-vous français? She does,

Her tongue speeding over conjugated verbs

Flying effortlessly through another language, she is ready

To move to Paris, la ville de l’amour,

The City of Lights, the City of Untold Possibilities

She is ready, she thinks,

To fall in love.



A man, earlier twenties, close-cropped, clean-shaven hair

Sea-green eyes and 20/20 vision-placid ocean

Fresh out Basic Training eager to act eager to become who he needs to be

Do you read me, Sir? He does,

His spine rigid from standing straight and tall,

Hand crooked at his forehead in an involuntary salute, he is ready

To build fighter jets with his oil-stained hands

To build a life for himself with his carpenter’s fingers

To build a house on the stability he thrives in

He is ready, he thinks,

To let someone in.



Two people walk into a bar:



A man, an Army graduate, an old soul



A woman, a College graduate, a kind soul



Guitar riffs floating from the jukebox drift through the air,

Playing the background music for newfoundlove story.



Two people walk into a bar:



Friends introduce them to each other,

She thinks, Those green eyes sparkle with the sun freckling his cheeks

Reddening his hair.
She thinks, Maybe he’s the one.

He thinks, That perm really works for her frames her face what a pretty smile.

He thinks, Maybe she’s the one.



Two people walk into a bar:

Sit down, have a drink,

Share some laughs, funny stories,

Break the ice with awkward questions,

Eat some food, too shy to share it

Get some drinks, guzzle liquid courage,

Dance to the jukebox buzz

Look a little silly but pretend they don’t care.

They don’t care.



Two people walk into a bar:


Maybe they leave hand-in-hand,

Maybe they hug goodbye at the door.

Maybe they think about each other and call right away.

Maybe they set up more dates, more bar trips, more laughs.

Maybe they already know that they are in love.

Two people walk into a bar:

Their history writes its own punchline.

Every time I talk about writing-
My writing, my
Frivolous scribblings-in a
Negative light, you tell me,
"You have to write 200 bad poems
Before you can write a good one."
And I have not known you
Long enough to understand the
Nuances of your speech but
I have learned, quickly, that you
Are poetry
Now, this might sound cliche but what I mean is
That when I see you with your bony knees and
Isaac Newton hair my heart
Dips backward in between my ribs the
Fluid motion of your mouth flipping into a grin is a
Chain reaction to my own smile your
Piano fingers stained with ink or paint or dirt caked in life,
In adventures, are their own language and the way you move
Them when you speak makes a dance, a
Twisty tango of gyration and gesticulation.
Exhaling clouds of smoke from your lungs, you
Frame your forehead with tobacco laurels
And I don't worship you, no, but I admire you,
In the way that you cultivate goodnaturedness but
Hide behind it
In the way that you discuss bigdeal things in a
Nobigdeal way
If you wonder why I like you, it's because you are
Honest in a way that is raw and I've never
Felt someone cut me in two with just a gaze.
You are nervous energy and social anxiety and bred to live in nature.
You are suave in a lanky way and still unsure of yourself.
You are a star collapsing in on itself blazing so bright before you
Burn out.
And I want that.
I want that easiness and integrity and
Dancingontablesbecausewhynot and
Singing a song you don't know the words to in a rubberduck voice.
And I want you.
I want you to want me, to
Want to understand my nuances and quirks and hopes and fears and
Why I cringe inside a body that I never belonged to.
I want your poetry for myself.
So if I have to write 200 bad poems before I write 1 good one,
Regardless of where it falls-and where I fall-
This one is for you.

My heart is racing skyward
Racing against the moon and stars and my
Ribcage. Beating everything in its path
Catapulting upwards out of my chest
Pushing through the atmosphere and
Ascending to higher dimensions.
My heart is a comet
Shooting through space soaring
Past planets trapping itself in revolutions
Evolutions of life floating about
My heart moves through moves
Forward moves on.

Oh heart! Stay planted stay firm stay rooted inside me! Do not leap to great
Heights if you won't take the rest of me Higher too.

What they don't tell you-they, the general public, society, doctors, your best friends-
Is that a hospital is more than four white walls
It exists beyond the doctors in starched coats hanging to their knees
Beyond the mutterings of schizophrenic people as they walk by
Beyond the daily pills given and tongues pulled up directly after
Beyond the strip searches, the vitals taken, the evening bed-checks
A hospital lives in stigma
Stigma where you are the outcast, the
Mental patient, the
Crazy one.
A hospital lives in your mind,
In the tormented nightmares you wake up from
Shaking and drenched in sweat
Sheets twisted between white fists
A hospital lives in your gait
The way you swish your hips away from people sometimes
Because you don't want them to know your darkest secret,
Know where your barriers form, where they wall the world around you.
A hospital lives in the faint scars attached to your wrists,
Your stomach
Your thighs
Your calves
Your heart
A hospital becomes a sort of monster in this way
It rots in your memory
Tells you about that one time when things almost ended
Tells other people that you are off, but not in a way anyone can see
Unless they look hard enough
A hospital
Is supposed to heal wounds, Not
Create them.

Din of voices crowding out thoughts
Thoughts constructed of safety pins and toothpicks held together with spit
Spit dribbling out of the hungry mouth that yearns for companionship
Companionship which is desired but not truly felt
Felt people saunter past, their fabric feet barely touching the ground
Ground into a pulp are the vicious spiders of memory
Memory is a tactile thing that turns in contemporary web
Web of truths spinning and spinning beneath agile fingers
Fingers dug into temples' throbbing ache of words words words
Words are not enough to describe this mortal dullness
Dullness like the din of voices crowding out
**Thoughts

When I open my mouth, I imagine a chasm exists there,
A hole in between my throat and stomach
That extends endlessly somehow inside my body.
It is dark and damp inside, and my spongy tongue serves nicely
As the floor explorers tread upon.
Sometimes I get lost inside my mouth,
Swallowed whole by the words I never meant to say
Or drowned by the words I didn’t say, still stuck on the roof of the cavern.
Sending down an echo causes my uvula to vibrate
And rumble all the way down to the pit that becomes my intestines.

there was surgical steel in my lungs
the day you told me how you felt how you really felt
and when i took a breath
it was hollow and swollen and metallic so
i thought i'd bitten my tongue too hard
when i kept my words behind my closed lips
i didn't understand what you were saying not really
but your eyes looked cold
like you'd been living in a freezer
your whole life and as your mouth moved your eyes bored into the wall behind me
i knew there was a hole there made by your icy stare and i felt another cutting into my own skin
as the cigarette smoke curled around you
i thought you'd never looked more beautiful
at the same moment i realized
you'd never been so
ugly
let's just be friends bears the weight of
so many unspoken feelings like
i still love my exgirlfriend and
you were just a warm body and
i've forgotten how to feel anything for anyone anymore and
it scares me
maybe i thought that last one
you were precision and tact
in its purest form
a single element designed to break my heart
and i think you knew
so when i asked you for a cigarette to melt the
steel in my lungs and justletmebreathegoddamnit
your retreating footsteps told me all i ever needed
to hear
and my sobs were hollow and swollen and metallic
like the blood pooling in my mouth from my
bitten-off tongue

Black and white ink-smudged lines letters
Spilling together combinations creating
Words
Words describing life breathing air into
Lungs paper inflated balloons and
Written into lines words
Flowing rivulets from my pen
From my wrists my blood
Is black ink pulsing through my veins
Words
So powerful I want to write them
Over the surface of my skin create
A canvas of color let them
Bleed in until all I am is
Words
All I ever could be all I ever want to
Are combinations of letters
Thrown haphazardly together thoughts Spilled onto paper like paint splatters Thrown at canvases
Creating beautiful violence
Words are a beautiful violence Manufactured for
Love or apathy different combinations of
Letters shoved together at random my Body is nothing
But an amalgamation of Words
May I never know anything less than this Truth.

I wonder if you decided twenty years ago
That this was the life you wanted.
If heartbreaker was tattooed into your
DNA ink flowing mixing with blood if this
Was what you wanted your legacy to be:
Fingers ghosting down girls' throats
Lips planting promises into their brains
Where your promise is a distraction
Where you start to lose traction on
Everything. But her.
How long do you intend to break them Down while you wait for her to
Say something that matters to you.
There is a war path where you step
And it is littered with crushed beer cans,
Cigarette butts, hand grenades and
Bombshells.
Is this your legacy?
It precedes you.
I should have known when we first met
That your smoke signalled fire
That you would burn everything to the
Ground. No village is safe around this
Destruction.
But go ahead, because this means nothing
To you.
With your fingers inside another girl
If you close your eyes, she'll feel the same
As the girl who's ******* with your mind.
And if they taste like cheap ***** and
Regret, if their skin leaves traces in your
Sheets, if their feelings leave traces in your
Brain, well, that's just a consequence of
The no-strings theory.
I'm sorry I'm so bitter because you're
Always in my thoughts and you don't have
ESP so you can't know this and I can't tell
You. I'm sorry I'm so bitter because you
****** our friend in more ways than one.
I'm sorry I'm so bitter because it
Wasn't me.
I would hate myself for being another
Tongue you wish was hers,
But the closest I can get to you is through
The heat of your skin, and I want to know
How to twist you inside out.
So I'm sorry this is messy and confusing and emotional but
I read what she wrote and
Threw up my heart. You did this.
You'll keep doing this.
I can't stop wanting what I'll never have.

Happy ******* birthday.

I miss the earlymorning quiet when teverything the world is
Waiting to take her first
Breath. When I can walk into the justbarely night sky
With my toes touching dewycold grass and
Lift my head to feel the breezy dawn,
When the moon fades to daylight and the
Sunrays breach the clouds they hide behind, that
Inbetween duskdawn state where
I am the only living soul.
There is nothing more beautiful than This quiet but summer trades the soft cascade of leaves for
Cacophonous daybreaks with birds chirping
Tirelessly
Awareness of being settles in well
Before 4 AM.
I want the tiptoefeeling back, when I step outside and
inhale the dawn.

I am waiting there, on my
Porchstep, promising to take my first
Breath.

My bag smells like cigarettes
My body smells like smoke
My mouth is an ashtray
But I taste just like you probably do

I hate smoking
Hate the harsh acidic stale burnt flavor it
Leaves behind on my tongue, the
Match swallower's favorite meal

But every girl I ever kissed
Smelled like cigarettes and smoke and
Tasted like ashtrays
So I wonder if I should maybe just get used to it

She
Is just like me
She
Is my age, smiles at the same jokes, cries at the same sad stories
She
Walks past me and in my mind I say
She
Is getting fatter why do I feel that I have a need to comment on what
She
Deems beautiful why does my mind run to the way her shirt fits tighter
She(ltering) me from my misperceptions of pretty
She
Is a human being filled with flaws filled with bones and viscera and
She(ll) fragments and so am I
She
Is
Me

Why don't you leave a trail of ashes where my body once lay
Scorch straight through until I return to the dust I was born in
Set me aflame with your words alone until I am writhing in a beautiful
Agony that only you could create

Why don't I stare at the sun until I dissolve into the atmosphere
Leaving particles of light in my place

I want to write a poem but
Poetry isn't something that you can just
Whip out lightningfast in the space of a minute-
which feels like a lifetime-
Poetry takes time has to
Tiptoe on the tongue of the Teller
Has to
Lie in wait in the bushes in the alleyways has to be
CALLED INTO EXISTENCE BY A HOLY LIGHT
Poetry isn't easy, baby
You needn't worry if it hurts