We thought you’d like to look back
cw: gender dysphoria, oppressive voice and setting, misgendering
Here’s a Memory
from 10 years ago: your hair fresh out of the shower
a wet-dipped paintbrush to your shoulders. You pull a face
not knowing who you are. Are you a silly face
kind of girl? You weren’t
outside this brownie chunk of life. Here’s
a void as a border – doesn’t everything just tilt
into this year? Aren’t you here
again. Here’s you. Because people
don’t change. Aren’t these your eyes? Don’t you remember
looking out to that camera and pulling your face, the wet
dip paintbrushes of hair, and that feeling. Here’s
your room, pink and lipstick stained, the tick
of the school day coming and the pages of the pleated skirt
against your thighs. Here you are. Don’t be tempted
by those scissors, you never are. Here’s everything you are:
pink flush to backs and fores of your eyes from the flowing
of your blood because that’s what you are, a flowing
lipstick stain that you brought to the wall because that’s
what girls do. Isn’t it. Here’s you. Ache of the waterline
stain from bringing out the pretty of your eye. Couldn’t just
wash it off, could you. Here’s
a face. Sharpened jaw smattered with scratched
spots jutting under the frame and there’s your eyes.
Fine. Pop back like our picture-framed won’t trickle
past that waterline, lipstick stained.
cw: menstruation, blood, genitalia, deadnaming, war rhetoric
unnoticed, until the flood of its removal labelled failure from a body labelled female. solitary. like a word forbidden in the throat. longing to unfurl into a tongue, like a body before a body before a reckoning, like label is the autonomy of a tongue, the laying of a kiss on something you can’t otherwise touch, unless it’s the furling of female around an outlier (like outlier is a word escaping the tongue) the close of empty like lips into a silence unlike a kiss which is a reckoning unlike language, the knotting of tongue into a deadname and womb into a reinstatement. you think: shrapnel. i think: undetonated. i think: male, repackaged before it can be known. like empty is like a swallow. i reckon these fem-slicked muscles tongues furling like lovers into a reckoning.
unnoticed the flood of removal a body solitary like a word throat
longing tongue like body a tongue before for label autonomy ofa
furling an outlier escaping the close silence to kiss reckoning unl
into a dead name reinstatement un detonated repackagie swallow
thinking repackage ed
un notice so body likeablie a word
longing autonomy lieiir in close a
reckoning like i into a am swallow
[1] Inspired by the Escapril 2021 Day Three prompt: “empty, except for ___”.
[2] The ‘burning haibun’ form is by torrin a. greathouse, as debuted in her debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions 2020).