Batter my heart, transgender’d god, for yours

is the only ear that hears: place fear in my heart

where faith has grown my senses dull & reassures

my blood that it will never spill. Show every part

to every stranger’s anger, surprise them with my drawers

full up of maps that lead to vacancies & chart

the distance from my pride, my core. Terror, do not depart

but nest in the hollows of my loins & keep me on all fours.

My knees, bring me to them; force my head to bow again.

Replay the murders of my kin until my mind’s made new;

let Adam’s bite obstruct my breath ’til I respire men

& press his rib against my throat until my lips turn blue.

You, O duo, O twin, whose likeness is kind: unwind my confidence

& noose it round your fist so I might know you in vivid impermanence.

No matter how old you are,
it helps to be young
when you’re coming to life,

to be unfinished, a mysterious statement,
a journey from star to star.
So break out a box of Crayolas

and draw your family
looking uncomfortably away
from the you you’ve exchanged

for the mannequin
they named. You should
help clean up, but you’re so busy being afraid

to love or not
you're missing the fun of clothing yourself
in the embarrassment of life.

Frost your lids with midnight;
lid your heart with frost;
rub them all over, the hormones that regulate

the production of love
from karmic garbage dumps.
Turn yourself into

the real you
you can only discover
by being other.

Voila! You’re free.
Learn to love the awkward silence
you are going to be.

In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades. I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.

Sir who is no one, sir who is yet to come, I need you
to undo this zipped back, trace the chiffon
body I’ve borrowed. See how I switch my hips

for you, dry grass cracking under my pretend
high heels? Call me and I’m at your side,
one wildflower behind my ear. Ask me
and I’ll slip out of this softness, the dress

a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.

It’s true that I’m im-
patient under affliction. So?
Most of what the dead can

do is difficult to carry. As for
gender I can’t explain it
any more than a poem: there

was an instinct, I followed
it. A song. A bell. I saw
deer tracks in the snow. Little

split hearts beckoned me
across the lawn. My body
bucked me, fond of me.

Here is how you bear this flourish.
Bud, I’m buckling to blossoms now.

This is like a life. This is lifelike.
I climb inside a mistake
and remake myself in the shape
of a better mistake—
a nice pair of glasses
without any lenses,
shoes that don’t quite fit,
a chest that always hurts.
There is a checklist of things
you need to do to be a person.
I don’t want to be a person
but there isn’t a choice,
so I work my way down and
kiss the feet.
I work my way up and lick
the knee.
I give you my skull
to do with whatever you please.
You grow flowers from my head
and trim them too short.
I paint my nails nice and pretty
and who cares. Who gives a shit.
I’m trying not to give a shit
but it doesn’t fit well on me.
I wear my clothes. I wear my body.
I walk out in the grass and turn red
at the sight of everything.

Roses are red / violets are transsexual / welcome to womanhood / now get to work honey

Roses are performative / violets are biological / I have very sensitive breasts / and so do your breasts

Roses are biological / you have the nicest skin / I can’t stop kissing you / let’s read more nondualistic queer theory

Roses are fed up / with our binary fetishes / I tricked my doctors / and stole all the medication to hide it in a cave and share it with other trans people

Roses have got me / up against the wall / kissing my neck / which is socially constructed to be a super hot strong feminist neck

Roses are violet / violets are roses / I really like you / I like you tube

Roses are born this way / violets have a lesbian streak / something about your dry sense of humor and our soft intertwined limbs / feels transcendently female

Roses are blue / violets are violet / roses are nonviolet / blue is bluenormative

Roses are from mars / violets had the whole surgery / setting up camp / exclusively on Venus

Roses have gone too far / not to be what girls are made of / I’m coming out / to my academic colleagues as a poet and I bet they will run away screaming

Roses are roses / violets are born this way / someone’s got a hoard / of heteronormative transaffirmation porn you say?

Roses are cheeky / I want you to fuck me / drown violets like an accused witch / in your arms which feel like mine

Violets got a name change / roses changed a pronoun / we ate at a restaurant / and forgot to put the leftovers in the fridge

Roses are trochaic / violets have their original plumbing / let’s march in a protest / then go home and we'll cook something delicious and eat it with a spork

Violets are permanent / roses are impermanent / thank you for becoming me / offering to embrace your form your fate

Flowerbeds are umbrellas / umbrellas are rubrics / I support your identification / and your disidentification

Men are from women / roses are from Jupiter / women are from men / I can’t tell which is softer, your lips or this pillow or the snow descending gracefully outside

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

My two delicate hums. 

My pair of soft assemblies.

My want is a canary rattling the morning’s thin frame, 

the steady breath of droplets following months of bad weather, 

two small plates dismembered on the hardwood.

Despite evidence, I think love should indent the self in some way. 

My breasts, the swollen lunch of mosquitos. 
 

Sometimes, 

the crave is too much for one body. 

I take my woman pills with an apathetic edge because I’m brutally aware 

of what they won’t fix. 
 

My imagined daughter. My imagined son. 

Please forgive my circumstance. 

That winter was long and full of records: 
         snow up to our chests and the chill deep in our cells, 
                  the forever rain and with it, the mud that dripped 
                           like sap and became a part of us.

         Then came days of 
                  grass as soft as fleece 
                           bees flying like comets and goats 
                                     rotating around the creekbend we followed up until

                                              water water water was all we could hear, 
                                      until wild wild wildflowers were all we could see— 
                    a galaxy of them twinkling 
                            their bright violets and yellows and oranges,

a reminder of what has endured 
        what has always been 
                   what is now ready to be seen.

—

Like a lizard, I bathe           naked on a rock  

          and let the south wind and let the waterfall

and let the buckeye            lead me.  

The horizon is a line I cannot yet  say.

       The screen shows me what I haven’t seen in months,  

what others see: curves and a blur.

       Not a thing, but any thing. 

Finally, I am the animal that I am.

First they called me “it,” and then, ignorant of how my people
use this word, they mashed up the meager nouns
they had for gender and called me “the goy,” and said
to not be one or the other was to be nothing.
It ate the grass it was shoved in, knelt at salt licks.
It took the barbs and kicks and crushed them into
fur and leather. Oiled and burnished, it made those
halves into one galloping body. Horse and rider.
The centaur endured the school-day, cruel gray rag, filth-
stiffened. The boys and girls who fit so easily in their costumes
looked like stick figures, crude and two dimensional.

Dante already knew, it read later. In The Inferno, in the seventh
circle of hell, centaurs guard the river Phlegethon, one of Hades’
five rivers. Phlegethon: river of fire, river of boiling blood,
which boils forever the souls of those who commit violence
against their neighbors. Centaurs guard the edges, shooting
arrows at any of these sinners who try to move to the shallows.

When sometimes I wish I’d had a boyhood, I remember those
days instead, my four muscled legs. I was seven feet tall then,
riding myself, carrying myself. A centaur is never lonely.

^{Mordekhai fed and sustained. Really?! Indeed, Rabbi Yudan said, “One time, he went repeatedly to all the wet-nurses but could not find one for Esther at this moment, and so he nursed her himself.” Rabbi Berakhiah and Rabbi Abbahu [said] in Rabbi El’azar’s name, “Milk came to him and he would nurse her.” —“Bereshit Rabbah”}

The milk of a body like mine,
first seen and named as male,
budding against expectation,
fed and sustained the small girl-body
of Esther, whose story
feeds and sustains.

When I was a child,
our rabbi became a queen
flaming through the Purim spiel
in a tacky harem costume,
a mockery of the terrors
passed down in our blood.

I offer this blessing to you,
reader, sibling, sister. The milk
of a male may feed and sustain.
This is not a question, for me,
of belief. The body is holy
and is made holy in its changing.

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. 

Cause we’re not allowed in public, not really.
My mom thinks everyone is enamored with my beauty,
But I know they are surprised to see one of us
Living. Outside is a stage & I’m a pretty player.
I love what I see on the other side of myself.
A man tells my mother he couldn’t take the doll,
Because my heels, my legs, my tattoos stopped
Him from looking me in the eye. He wants to meet
Me, to apologize for eating me from my sole up.
He’s the worst I’m aware of, but not alone in lust-
Filled gaze givers. All I want to tell my mother
About me. How they like my parts. She thinks
I’m unclockable until I speak & I know she’s trying
Not to blame me for any danger I dodge. Desire
Is in the eye of the beholder, but I live in the empty
Hands of discombobulated bastards. Disintegrate
In their salivating. I am shards of selves
They wish to suck between their teeth.

^{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.

I have not been having an easy HRT experience for a trans gal, especially when it comes to blocking testosterone so my body can develop properly in response to estrogen.

*

Spironolactone gave me brain fog, so to block T, I switched to Finasteride.

*

The blocker dose of Finasteride made me too sleepy to function, so I switched to Progesterone.

*

Progesterone had some nice effects but it made me loopy and had a kind of thought-freezing effect, so I switched to Dutasteride.

*

Dutasteride made me too sleepy to function and caused me to phase shift into a fourth dimension at unexpected moments, so I switched to Walzanone.

*

Walzanone helped ease off my body hair, but it gave me unanticipated telekinetic powers which would cause a table to fly crashing acrosss the room when I got upset with someone, so I switched to Benefiontin.

*

Benefiontin seemed to be working for a while and I could genuinely concentrate, until I slowly became aware that it was making my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces. Punk rock anamorphosis had ended long ago, so I switched to Penalzombion.

*

While I enjoyed the ultra-feminine high that Penalzombion enfaulked from my kinesthetic being, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing me to hate most poetry I hear, or maybe that was just poetry. In any case, the constant sore throat or what they call the “Penalzombion engorgement” became highly inconvenient when I needed to sing impromptu arias for job talks on composition theory. So I switched to Rubicon.

*

Though not technically a blocker, Rubicon had several advantages in terms of how it personified and mirrored my t-levels internally. A short-range tactical missile flew by in search of its drone-targeted recipient. Testosterone self-reflectiveness on Rubicon invaded my being on a coding level of intensity to the point where rows of shark teeth swallowed every time management skill I ever learned. There was no going back. I decided that Rubicon was too much of a simultaneously alienated and intimately ski mask experience. So I switched to Novascotia.

*

The best side effect of Novascotia was its remoteness. Though it made me feel slightly alienated around other poets, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. However, in the process I lost all sense of reality and missed my grant deadlines for the fourth time. A mouse ear grew out of my hand. Peach cobbler. So I switched to Nepotismapolitan.

*

With Nepotismapolitan I definitely engrotted some anti-testosterone connections in the entertainment world, which had me at an advantage when passing as entertainmentally female, but my pores became enormous. When I think back I wonder if Nepotismapolitan was taunting me the whole time. Gam tumescent wing growth polited out of the sinking vessel. Due to interaction warnings I couldn’t eat too much processed food anymore and my T levels were still too high, so I switched to Wellmasteride.

*

I liked the feeling of cosmic omnipotence corresponding with complete and utter abjection that Wellmasteride gave me, being at once a unique delicate flower/snowflake and a humanistic reproconfection seeking air time like every other platelet in the bloodstream, but it made me inconveniently leery of discussions about trigger warnings and delaying puberty in children. Pang of detained weekend fixture turned permanent yawp. I stopped thugging around in my endocrine blotter with Wellmasteride, and instead turned to Jaimeleecuritsol.

*

Jaimeleecurtisol made me witty and urbane. Being around me was like an episode of female Frasier slightly sped up. But soon the crash happened and we were in a recession. Jaimeleecurtisol caused me to scream and scream at the horrible truth coming at me about how people really perceived my gender suddenly rushing at me around street corners. So I switched to Smallpondilaxone.

*

Smallpondilaxone made me feel big.
For a minute I contemplated calling an agent
to discuss my enormous very specialized coupon stash, but I
couldn’t get out of bed. So next I tried Crepusculane.

*

Now the great thing about Crepusculane was that on this one I really felt like myself on five cups of coffee for a few minutes lugging a trampoline up the capital steps past the stone lions that guarded the secret to what’s inside increasingly smaller panties I never held any responsibility for, a good place to do research. I made all kinds of appointments to publish poet things and attend everybody’s readings in a stacker, almost steroid-like configuration demented with charm. But the hyper-concentration that Crepusculane offers caused me instead to stare at a Grecian Urn for days on end, transfixed by thoughts of lighting up and smoking the latest poet laureate or at least getting a medical prescription for him/her to become culturally all over me. Crepusculane rendered my t-levels nearly invisible as I lay swooning across a Chatterton velvet couch in my garret, but there was no one around but me to serenade, so I switched to Lesbiamine.

*

Lesbiamine caused .......................................... in peace talks ...........
...............................................................................................................
.............................. rankled tall girl spat juicer ............................ but
...............................................................................................................
......... looks at your spork ................... like a gorgon, tufts of ..........
...............................................................................................................
kissing us in the museum ....................................................................
....................... making me ................. attachment weekend blocker 
...............................................................................................................
my leg around your ..............................................................................
.................................. wetter, a death ................... bank holiday itch 
...............................................................................................................
clasped ……………………………………… in a restaurant booth ........
...... or vamp stamped .................. something chocolate ..................
...............................................................................................................
..............................anxiety being unsexy………………………..............
..................and you need lateness ……………….…………...................
destorying me .....................................................................................
.................................................................too intense...........................

like the crushed flower. I couldn’t take all the ellipses anymore and they were intruding into my dissertation writing time, so I switched to Pastoralwenchtrin.

*

I think I am going to stick with Pastoralwenchtrin for awhile and see where this goes. It’s quiet here and there are sheep and no wolves masquerading as bears climbing the hillside of an apple danish I bought from my student loan debt ceiling. As long as I pay the credit card bills by end of the month and get my name changed in time for the church basement sale, maybe I can find a way to live. As my body reaches a kind of equilibrium, I am trying to have as small a percentage of me as possible be fabricated as method acting and as great a possibility as a pink skull half-shaven skyline be real. The valleys are so lush and steep. How to end not wanting to be myself being not quite myself.

Who did not ask to join this world any more than I did. 
Who scans for trouble as he pecks the ground. 
Who announces when a hawk lands in the naked maple above. 
Who emits a low trill to warn the flock. 
Who does this on instinct to protect potential offspring. 
Who rarely takes a treat when offered scrap or seed. 
Who instead yips to gather the hens around it. 
Who sometimes does this regarding some shiny piece of trash. 
Whose wattle catches light the way red lipstick does. 
Who slept between breasts as a day-old cockerel. 
Whose first attempt to crow sounded like a flopping sock. 
Who directs with one stiff wing. 
Who we thought would be a hen. 
Who reminds all in earshot that like it or not another day has come and gone. 
Who disturbs the interior idyll of the neighbor writing lectures on environmental philosophy. 
Who keeps the hens alive to lay another day. 
Who would risk his life to protect. 
Who cockfighters gas up on steroids and provoke to battle. 
Who they then point to as an example of how violence is natural among men. 
Whose crow can scare away the devil and rouse the dead back to life. 
Who will provoke a strong response of either humiliation or joy.

God, I won’t be your sacred chicken if it means I have to fight, but I will fight. 
I already scan the perimeter. 
Testosterone, yes, I take it. Which is not the same as fighting.  
The shape you see has nothing to do with me, or the rooster 
Who sleeps in a cardboard box in the garage because the philosopher called the police, 
Then asked for eggs. 
Do you hear that crow that sounds almost like a recording of a crow? 
That’s daybreak. It is regular like daybreak. Or twilight. It rattles a certain  
Window that matches its vibrational frequency. Because the glass, under all that  
Strain of air molecules around it, finally decides to change.

Since hitting that deer outside your city, I’ve learned to measure
the distance between us
by counting roadkill. Engulfed tonight
in the perfume you left in my medicine cabinet,
I drive through sleep’s red edge
past twenty-two small lives splayed open on asphalt. I’m drawn
to your wrist by indolic jasmine, tobacco, and—trust a man
to bottle it—the first faint hints of cunt. The pressure
of your phallus against my thigh
elicits from my tuneless maw a song.

But our time together is mostly spent.

You watch medical lectures at double speed, taking notes
in your dissector.
I wash dishes.

Looking over your shoulder as a scalpel
separates embalmed skin from fascia and nerve,
it occurs to me: all we are is smeared out there on the road.

We discuss anesthesia.

Dispensing the drugs safely
requires an obsessive precision
we share. A lucrative career for you.
I could write without worry, you say,
knowing the cost of keeping a body,
how little might be left for language
after the daily labor of living
a little longer—as if either of us believe
in any such after, as if the last thing we share
is not this compulsion to study the corpses
of people we might have known,
to scoop out handfuls of white matter
so like our own bodies
as to leave each of us shaking
in a separate silence. We do this
because we share an ethic
of ending things gently—
if not without pain,
at least
with an exacting tenderness.

^{for my trans and nonbinary students crossing the stage at Lavender Graduation}

Maybe it was you learning to walk home

cross-wise, your own safety valve.

You, who trained a tongue

chosen name, listening for reflection to speak

back. You, I’m calling you,

grew yourself at argument’s end,

slept borrowed and burned. Who

filled in space of the wisecrack, who

emptied the sidewalk, who

cleared the toxic table.

You breathed down your own street, rose tall, stitched. Built your own table, lit candles for the living who couldn’t make it back. The invitations, the city, the hauntings and the hatchets, the you, the you, the you walking home safe, opening the door, setting the table for company.