An angel on my shoulder tells me, "You have good things to say."
A lovely devil to his right says I'm "a petite six foot five,"
I'm their "six foot five princess," with a lusty look, and I melt.
I'm the kinda bitch Shirley Jackson would have called "dark,"
pale, an asinine androgyne anodyne shooting for femme, a heterodox paradox
Girl Atlas, holding up the world for the littles underneath me
Sometimes I'm a pissbaby, sometimes I'm a bastion of wisdom.
How to destroy a girl's confidence in one innocent question:
"So, do you know any dance moves?"
After I'd been dancing for hours and hours.
After I looked and waited and checked my phone for them
for hours and hours. Before a professor, a reverse Socrates
("I only know that you know nothing,")
welcomed me to womanhood after six months of me injecting it
walking woman, trying to talk woman, hair woman, hairless woman
soft skin, coquettish gesturing, sounding woman most
on my way to an orgasm, clutching sheets, pulling hair.
I have never had access to poetry about the moon. I said
I was presenting feminine because I wanted access
to oppression, wanted to own transmisogyny, use it
to explain why I am always in conflict with the world.
I came up to the edge and beat myself back down
but you can only see a lie in the mirror so many times,
I can only see a lie in the mirror so many times,
before I get too angry to repeat it.
Transfem strugglers around the world
black swordswomen, black sheep, dark souls
So atomize me, persecute me, sentence me, force me out
Look askance, look outraged, look but don't you fucking touch.
I am fat, I am a pervert, I am perverse, I am weird, mad,
I love me for it.
I will not go back for cisgenderism, respectability, manhood
things I could never quite hold, never quite want.
I will move well, like a secret hero
like a secret British big cat, smooth and exact
deploy a precise stride, I love me radically
and you can choke.
