Tall Girl Shadow Self

I have never had access to poetry about the moon. I said
I was performing feminine because I wanted access
to oppression, my own corner of the margin, to use this
to explain why I am always in conflict with the world.

Then I came up to the edge and beat myself backwards
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.

I am the kind of bitch Shirley Jackson would have called “dark”
pale, a six foot five princess, a heterodox paradox, Girl Atlas
holding up the world for the littles underneath me,
an asinine androgyne anodyne shooting for femme
sometimes I’m a pissbaby
sometimes I’m a bastion of wisdom

How to destroy a girl’s confidence in one innocent question:
“Do you know any dance moves?”
After I danced for hours.
After I looked and waited and checked my phone for them
for hours and hours. Before 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, coquette gestures, sounding woman most on my way
to orgasm, clutching sheets, pulling hair
the clothes made the woman
push my tits together and make a line
look in the mirror and see square jaw, stubble chin
look in and see nocturnal lashes, lips, forest of locks

I will move well, like a secret hero, like a secret
British big cat, smooth, exact, deploy precision stride

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, a manhood
things I could never quite hold, never quite want. I love me radically
and you can choke.