you haven’t had a salient thought since seeing the film, which still plays inside you on a loop. a valley splits open revealing mirroring paths. a lake like glass. there’s no need to name it. you are terrified that the men will hurt you and you are terrified they won’t be bothered. Jack is bathing in the river with his back to you because you love watching him turn to face you. the smile he holds out to you is the same one you attempt to bridle. when you are you, some things will align. denim hangs off your body with a certain correctness. those who don’t know you may see you as more adjacent to violence. the slurs that apply to you aggregate and split. the scene where the man wearing plaid strikes the man in a denim shirt, drawing blood before they embrace bore no distinction in your mind at sixteen when you got snowed into your car with your crush, who you asked to hit you as hard as he could. he refused your request, so you never asked for a kiss. sequence is crucial. no one will touch you like a man if you aren’t one. despite whatever work you’ve done on yourself since, the mountain air tastes like an ocean of river stones, gossamer, some frivolous instinct shifting into weather. it’s too much to ask to become what you have seen.

I was on a walk when I was struck by the precarity of the gender that wore me,
which moved my matter, wrote books, and fell in love. as a child, I scoured 

the forest for brittle cicada skins abandoned on trees. husks present differently now
a pair of nylons caught in the thicket, a beak surviving its decomposing bird, 

a mural of George Floyd with a purple cock spray-painted on his beryl cheek.
among these discreet mutilations, I pull a line of thought through flesh 

where a misled margin slept. I was uninhabitable before I snared a man
for his hide. I was not unlike the skin of a drum thriving under a stamina 

that made music of me before I split. you wouldn’t recognize me now
if you saw me in the trees, played out, scattered to the undergrowth. I took a life 

and returned it to scale and membrane. I foraged a life coated in plastic
and mud from the highway overpass. it reeked of wheatpiss and it was mine.

Where does the future live in your body? 
Touch it 

1.
Sri Lankan radical women never come alone. 
We have a tradition of coming in groups of three or four, minimum.
The Thiranagama sisters are the most famous and beloved,
but in the ’20s my appamma and great-aunties were the Wild Alvis Girls.
Then there’s your sister, your cousin, your great-aunties 
everyone infamous and unknown. 
We come in packs                       we argue 
we sneak each other out of the house                       we have passionate  agreements and disagreements 
we love each other very much but can’t stand to be in the same room or  continent for years. 
We do things like, oh, start the first rape crisis center in Jaffna in a war zone
in someone’s living room with no funding. 
When war forces our hands, 
we all move to Australia or London or Thunder Bay together
or, if the border does not love us, we are what keeps Skype in business.
When one or more of us is murdered 
by the state or a husband 
we survive 
whether we want to or not. 

I am an only child 
I may not have been born into siblinghood 
but I went out and found mine
Made mine. 

We come in packs 
even when we are alone 

Because sometimes the only ancestral sisterlove waiting for you
is people in books, dreams 
aunties you made up 
people waiting for you in the clouds ten years in the future 
and when you get there  
you make your pack 
and you send that love 
back. 

2. 
When the newly disabled come 
they come bearing terror and desperate. Everyone else has left them
to drown on the titanic. They don’t know that there is anyone
but the abled. They come asking for knowledge 
that is common to me as breath, and exotic to them as, well,
being disabled and not hating yourself. 
They ask about steroids and sleep. About asking for help.
About how they will ever possibly convince their friends and family
they are not lazy and useless. 
I am generous—we crips always are. 
They were me. 
They don’t know if they can call themselves that, 
they would never use that word, but they see me calling myself that,
i.e., disabled, and the lens is blurring, maybe there is another world
they have never seen
where crips limp slowly, laugh, have shitty and good days
recalibrate the world to our bodies instead of sprinting trying to keep up.
Make everyone slow down to keep pace with us. 

Sometimes, when I’m about to email the resource list, 
the interpreter phone numbers, the hot chronic pain tips, the best place to rent a ramp, 
my top five favorite medical cannabis strains, my extra dermal lidocaine  patch
—it’s about to expire, but don’t worry, it’s still good—I want to slip in a
P.S. that says, 
remember back when I was a crip
and you weren’t, how I had a flare and had to cancel our day trip
and when I told you, you looked confused
and all you knew how to say was, Boooooooooo!
as I was lying on the ground trying to breathe?
Do you even remember that? 
Do your friends say that to you now? 
Do you want to come join us, on the other side? 
Is there a free future in this femme of color disabled body?

3. 
When I hear my femme say, When I’m old and am riding a motorcycle with  white hair down my back.
When I hear my femme say, When I’m old and sex work paid off my house  and my retirement.
When I hear my femme/myself say, When I get dementia and I am held with respect when I am between all worlds.
When I see my femme packing it all in, because crip years are like dog years and you never know when they’re going to shoot Old Yeller.
When I hear my femme say, when I quit my teaching gig and never have to  deal with white male academic nonsense again.

When I hear us plan the wheelchair accessible femme of color trailer park,
the land we already have a plan to pay the taxes on 
See the money in the bank and the ways we grip our thighs back to ourselves 

When I hear us dream our futures, 
believe we will make it to one, 
We will make one. 

The future lives in our bodies 
Touch it.

I used to think my body craved 
annihilation. An inevitability, 
like the slow asphyxiation 
of the earth. Yoked to this body 
by beauty, its shallow promises 
I was desperate to believe, 
too fearful to renounce my allegiance 
even with its hand closing 
around my throat. When I chose 
myself, I chose surrender. God 
is the river that remakes me 
in its image. I didn’t know what 
was waiting on the other side. 
I swam through it anyway. 

When I opened my cyclops, I remembered the sun.
Another mouth forms the phrase “wrong body”
and I correct them and say you mean “wrong context.”

I am thankful to not be male. Instead, I am a blade of butter.
A shoe’s worth of land. They measure their worth 
in acres. Invent tools to peer out at the hills

and break them into parcels. As a game, I decide 
to travel as far as I can in this life. Could I arrive 
where I’m told I belong? Would I even want to.

Something I love about my exile is the color of stoplights.
How their red challenges mine like a game. 
When it returns like a gifted and un-gifted ring.

I too am like that pattern. Unwanted and admittedly 
beautiful. Moths tattoos themselves on the street lamps.
A remnant is towed away. This is my blue September city. 
 

^{In response to Sharon Olds’ poem “Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor”}

            In an operating room outside of the cis woman’s imagination,
no tray of organs—severed.
            No blood for her to leaden with a massacre’s name.
After anesthesia, nothing is removed. Nothing wasted. Instead, skin
budded inward, a rose blooming into its own mouth.
            While the patient is still sedated, the doctor scalpels genesis,
sutures her body toward the truth.
            There is no organ severed & named a weapon for the convenience
of a body’s disposal.
            No organ severed & speaking at all. Made a puppet in the lazy
pantomime of metaphor.
            If anything is cut away, let it be the word his from the tip
of the cis woman’s tongue. Let it be her tongue.
            If anything speaks, let it be the new & perfect organ, who says
I was a Georgia O’Keefe painting dressed in drag & now, darlings
see how I bloom, how my petals slowdance the breeze.
            The cis woman’s severed tongue says nothing—least of all
to name trans women animals.
            The poem is about imagination? Right? I want to tell you
that I believe the tongue would whisper I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
            I’m not willing to lie.

Our earliest understanding of seizures
                                    was that they must be the devil

                                                                        possessing the sick.

                                                                       ▼

                     At the onset of my condition,
                                the doctors were convinced it must be
                                                                                                        epilepsy. Kept me
                                                                                for a week. Bedridden & wired
                                                                                           to their machines.

                                                                       ▼

“Epilepsy” from the Greek

                      epi—upon &
                      lambanein—to take hold.

                                              The body snatched away
                                  from itself.

                                                                       ▼

My first seizure was not like this
instead, voltage in my blood,

my body draped in wind,
in wings, in nets, & veils
of heatless light.

                                                                       ▼

                                                           Sometimes, I think I must be
                                                           a bad feminist. The days that
                                                           all I want to be is owned.
                                                           An object. A possession.

                                                                       ▼

An apostrophe denotes possession.
Means to turn toward.                          Thin hook

          of ink that joins one body                   to another
by its name.             Small black latch

that clicks the distance between
                                                two things shut.

                                                                       ▼

Most days,
my pink leather collar
collects dust in a closet.

                        Though once, I wore it daily.
                                                           Marked territory’s familiar
                        weight. Though, once,
                                                           a dom made me wear it out
                        in a dive bar’s dim light
                                                           to read poems for tips
                        & I bruised my throat
                                                           from the force of speaking.

                                                                       ▼

                For weeks after, my voice
                                                                        was choked
                           with ghost-palms, padlock
                                                   caught in my throat.

                                                                       ▼

                Once, the common practice
                                        for treating patients
                            in the midst of seizing

                                                                was to force a piece of wood
                                                                between their teeth

                            to prevent them from biting
                                                    through their tongues.

                                                                       ▼

                                                                                       Epilepsy shares a common root
                                                                                                      with latch. Thus, the lock, & band,

                                                                                       the collar, & cuffs, & trapdoor
                                                                                                           of a mouth—cousins to illness.

                                                                       ▼

                                          The doctor tells me this is Not epilepsy
                                          but a cousin-illness. Misfiring nervous
                                                system shocked & baring teeth.

                                                                       ▼

Certain kinds of seizure are categorized
                        by the feeling of euphoria that overtakes the body

when you return to it. I first knew to call
                        these seizures from the dead-light they left behind.

                                                                       ▼

                                    My lover tells me they have heard the voice of god
                                          since before they understood human speech

                                                & this is how I know we are thunder
                                                        -blooded in the same way.

                                                                       ▼

The seizure—a kind
of theft. Speech stolen
from the tip of my tongue. I wake
            from sudden darkness & words

                                                            topple
from my mouth, unhinged
            from their tangled meanings.

                        Back against the floor, my tongue
                        babels a tower skyward.

                                                                       ▼

                                                                                Sometimes I hear voices
                                                                           in the darkness. Sometimes
                                                                                 I hear my love, reaching
                                                                               for me as if through water,
                                                                            even from 1000 miles away.

                                                                       ▼

The same lover told me                      that  the  distance  between
orgasm & seizure is thin

                                                                           as a split lip’s skin.
The body overtaken                                                     by itself. But

there’s something different                                   in being trembled
by another’s hand.

                                                                       ▼

                                                      Their hand: a hook & a name.

                                                                       ▼

Possession—a mark of sin.
                                                Of course.

                          An invitation. I give myself
                          over & this must be a deviled thing.

A dirty prayer. If a nun has wed
the lord, pray tell
                                                              what strange marriage is this?

                                                                       ▼

                       To be bridled is to be held,

but contains within it bride,
           could be confused for bridal.

                                  They hold me through a seizure
                       or pin me to the bed, fingers
                                  a bit inside my mouth. I am wed
                                                         to their hands.