Before
by Peter Josiah Leith
- She is pulling on shirtsleeves again today,
- taking the shaking of a limp arm as response, as permission.
- She is the squeaking recitation of her father’s opinions,
- a blind parakeet has no choice but to be all ears.
- Little girls trust that the world welcomes them.
- Little girls in hallways will enter rooms marked “do not enter”
- as long as someone leaves them unlocked.
- Claiming adverse possession takes ten years,
- so she is squatting here.
- Legal eviction requires paperwork,
- other solutions do not.
- She is alive inside of you,
- and you want to kill her.
- Little girls commit grand larceny,
- commit fraud.
- She hold things that belong to little boys,
- but she is too young to understand price.
- So she shatters something because she thinks
- the shards will look like glitter.
- When she nicks her fingers on him,
- she bleeds that little boy’s blood,
- the difference imperceptible to the naked eye.
- Now suddenly all little girls look like her,
- jack-o-lantern mouth and lashes touching eyebrows.
- You would think she was beautiful
- if she didn’t look so much like a dead boy.
- And you grew up to look like the whispers of her
- and the living proof of your mother,
- so you want to shatter porcelain,
- so you want to carve flesh,
- so you want to hold a pillow over a little girl’s face
- until she brings the little boy home.
- You are grieving in blue light,
- so sure that she killed him
- just by living,
- just by baby girls becoming
- little girls becoming
- teenage girls becoming
- young women becoming
- fists shattering mirrors
- and nicks bleeding little boy blood.
- Sometimes little girls can’t read when a sign says “do not enter”.
- Sometimes little boys get caught in the crossfire
- and little girls learn and grow into young men
- even with no handbook
- and a homicidal body.
Today
by Peter Josiah Leith
- I wait every day for a tug on my shirtsleeves,
- so that when she visits,
- my arm is never limp again.
- I am gentle with her. I treat her with dignity.
- Both of her hands fit in one of mine.
- How did I ever hate someone so small?
- I can still feel how my bruising hands gripped her throat
- just before she spit them out:
- blinding white baby teeth.
- I can taste the metal,
- and I can see the crimson drip from her mouth to the concrete:
- the little boy’s blood.
- She is bleeding his blood
- and thrashing and screaming and begging me to see that it’s him, really, and it’s always been him.
- I cannot beat her out of me in a way that isn’t suicidal.
- She has been building for as long as I have.
- Maybe it was always that simple.
- A little girl framed.
- A little boy resurrected.
- I exonerate her from his murder.
- There is a house among the gray where she lives now.
- She can go wherever she pleases,
- and no doors are ever marked “do not enter”.
- There is no more dead boy in her face,
- because he is in her blood, he is in her bones.
- I don't have to see him to know he’s there.
- He is a metaphysical reality.
- Omnipresent.
- I am learning to move towards him
- and not away from her.
- I don't hate her.
- I know her.
- I see her in every jack-o-lantern mouth
- and in eyelashes touching eyebrows.
- How lucky I am that she is still here.
- How humbling it is that I get to be everything she has ever dreamt of.
- She and I are stitching together a tapestry of a young man that we will never complete.
- We are privileged to do this until the time runs out.
- He will be made in our image,
- and she is the foundation for all of it.
- She is the wheat,
- She is the fruit.
- We rejoice in the act of creation.
STARDUST
by Sophie Mutiara Nova
Look up. Stare at the night sky.
See there?
A star-- just a bit further from the rest.
It glimmers like a fish caught in the precipice of a giant wave, uncertain whether to ascend toward the sky or descend deeper into the abyss. So close-- I can reach out and pluck it. Sometimes a star seems close enough to be a gemstone on a finger, dangling from a hook in an ear, a stud on a bellybutton at late night tattoo parlor visits, at piercing shops with other friends who laugh in the face of constructs-- the folly of bigotry and narrows. Another decoration on unmarked skin-- writing in ink and metal what the universe was too afraid to make me.
Sometimes, the stars seem closer to me than any human can ever be. I like that theory. We are of stardust, and to stardust we return.
Sometimes, I drag my nails against my skin and see the soft crescent imprints like moons and I wonder where the time goes. If light years are really as far as they say…
I wonder what the distance is in perception. If someone who looks at me can ever see the way I see myself in the mirror. Or is it as a scientist adrift amongst cosmos and nebulae, trying to name the planets yet failing to see the entirety of the galaxy?
Physicists get it. Quantum physicists do. They’re a bit like alchemists vying for the Philosopher’s Stone. Weaving in deities between scientific codas. Quantum physics does not limit particles but expands upon their nonconformity. Particle-wave duality. No single atom is fixed-- so how can we expect human constructs like gender to be?
I reach up into the night sky and gather a single star to my being. It’s soft and warm, a bubble in blue. There is no singular word for gender in my language. Just like there’s no single star in the sky. I put the star to my lips-- it tastes of nothing. Of everything all at once. Bitter. Sweet. Medicinal. Homey. The star falls past my lips, my neck, my belly. It settles there, glowing for all the world to see.
Like stars, I am close to you now. With these words, I am woven in your story. Come with me. Look up-- up at the sky. Boundless. A celestial possibility.
Like stars, there is no loneliness now. Come, sibling, do you feel it too? How the world says one thing, but we know the truth? The truth: we are of stardust.
Let’s set the sky free.
Trans Bodies Are Sacred by james rice
Am I pretty, Mommy?
by Young Joon Kwak
- No; your worst fears about yourself
- are true.
- So then, the ideal truth is beauty
- but the truth about me is ugly.
- Our project is to turn the monster.
- Turn into, turn out, turn around.
- And attack the grid with the
- incalculability of muck, ooze, fluids.
- Monstrous monstrosity, monster,
- monsterate, demonsterate,
- remonsterate.
- We are not born monsters, one
- becomes it.
- The becoming monster is howling,
- calling to face the ideologies and
- affects that frame them, carve us.
- It's the call to recognize who are
- worth our love: those with the
- capacity to recognize that we
- our worth our weight in love.