It waits in the drawer till morning,
I feel it, watching me, through the wood as if it were a window,
This alien piece of anatomy with no soul.
I can feel it throb, hidden away,
It’s attached, though it isn’t,
Roots deep inside
My hips saddled with femininity I want to slice off,
They weigh me down without my consent.
A gift unbidden from my mothers before,
They squeeze my stomach,
These hips that carry me,
And I can’t
Step forward
Any more
When they call the wrong name.
I didn’t agree to be gagged under the surface of an ocean so deep
We all drown in it.
Let this me I was bleed to death with them,
Let those hips
And breasts
Fall.
As they slap the ground around me,
Wet birthing, and heat, sticking to my legs, let them go.
And as I tucked the piece
Between my thighs
For the first time,
I heard my skin slough away
And my fingers moved tapping on the sides of this cave within me,
Deep echoes of a human born
Again, yet
The way I was supposed to be.
No, I don’t strap for you.
I don’t pack to make you squirm,
I pack because without feeling whole I’m the one squirming,
Living a skin that never felt right,
Living a lie that always was too tight,
And you laugh because my eyes can’t stop looking at that drawer.
As I will that latex piece to me with my screaming skin,
And still you’re too blind to see
What has always been.
A Burd in Flight 