Presently, it considers what it could be while laying on a cold hard operation table made of antibacterial surface and chrome. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster not only has the ability to think, this monster has the ability to feel.
‘Put me together piece by piece” it begged through cracked lips, cobbled together bone parts, and a feeding tube. And so he did. With chemicals and fat deposits and bone chiseler. ‘More’ the monster begged. But the doctor said all there was to do was heal. and consider. and shape. and style.
Meanwhile
an angel falls. From heaven. Soaring through many miles of clouds, air, and birds. With a spotlight of gold orange hot poured sun on her skin it felt the whole world watched her fall. Watched her, losing wings and gaining gravity. ‘I used to be an angel’ she thought through the plummet.
‘and now what?’
at the same time
a congressman, any one of them. puts on a tie in the morning. gazing a solid thing with color coded significance. but all the while his eyes catch on his blonde bobbed wife’s kitten heels. “i’m going to go destroy some lives” he thinks
Every moment could be the moment before a breakthrough. There are an infinite number of things that could happen
before you all question-
What is this body I have?
and
will my soul brightly outlast the shell of my body?
A question I find myself frequently asking.
Can’t I exist for the thing on the inside rather than all that which comes with an exterior?
Why me? Why does my body not match the color my soul knows? Where do I get off that I get a choice? Am I disobeying the cosmic order by deciding I am something different. And the something different… What is it that I am convincing myself I am? And why does every day feel like a costume show and fashion parade? I think I don’t know how to answer any of these questions. And my conservative catholic upbringing and my family's disowning of me have me constantly feeling like I made one big bad choice. And near daily I open my phone to see the media slander and the reports of violence. My cis friends claim they care. But the product action of their words have yet to be apparent to me. And I rest sleepless in the fear of what tomorrow may bring. And I am exhausted by the wondering so I can't think straight. And I just started healing from the family thing
and I go to write
but what?
What could I possibly write about at such a time?
What words do I have to add to the cultural conversation?
What am I hoping to leave behind when future historians dig up my text?
What will they think of the grey land I describe where bleak reality is the newest paint shade of the living room. Bad news is the style of reporting. Human kind exists for the purpose of killing.
Daily, I wake to new exhaustions I didn’t know possible. The days are now filled with prying eyes wanting to know the genetic and chemical make up of my flesh. Everytime I catch new eyes I pray I’ll be turned to wind, sea foam, branch. Something not nearly as capable of contemplating self as my human form is. Every day feels like a new debate of whether I am allowed to survive. Each night is another nightmare of what they have done and what they will do. I check my phone and it's a blank screen lacking calls or texts from the family I devoted my heart to - the family who left when the days got difficult.
Then, I get lost in the pages and pages of text I type as an escape into a world that gets to be mine in the making. Revenge is a thing I can write. Future is a home I can imagine and create.
Inside my bedroom and in front of my keyboard is a haven of warm lighting and friendly animal faces. The second I go out I fear every stray look;
a few months ago, I was walking home when I heard cat calling. Per usual I ignored the chants and continued on my phone conversation with a lover. The cat calling persisted until finally he heard my voice. Everything about his demeanor changed. And then he came at me. He tried to punch me. I had moved out of the way just in time. I was so startled not by the scene and the profane things he was yelling, but terrified that it would be made even more clear to my lover (who had seen me naked) that I am trans, so I quickly hung up the phone. In my confusion I just started screaming at my assailant “But I’m such a good person” until he tried to punch me again and I started to run. He screamed after me ‘faggot’ for block after block.
My lover didn’t answer the phone calls back, and then later told me the situation was too much to handle.
And even in telling it, I’m so scared to reveal to you how I’m one of ‘those trans people’. Who is clocked and attacked and followed. And this is not new information to me, but I’m afraid for anyone to look too closely under the hood and realize what I am.
I am constantly more afraid of my lovers reaction than the stranger on the street
because truthfully, I fear that their hatred of me will spread like disease and impact every person I hold dear. I spend time preparing for the departure of every close cis acquaintance in my life. Because isn’t that what I signed up for? A life of leaving because this body is neither this or that and this mind is altogether jumbled from chemical replacements and trauma. How do I love and trust? When the closest of original kin turned their back and left, then blamed me. I could not simply conceive of trusting my own decision deep enough and well enough to hope that others will stay hereafter.
Because I chose this? Right? Couldn’t I have lived a life free from this?
And if I chose this thing to be… is everyone just choosing to see me in a pretend fictional sense, or in the true hardened fact of my bone and flesh?
And if I hack it all off, where does the burden go when you cut off the dead limb?
And if this mind is just biological and chemical material can I really trust it? Am I just a flesh computer whose wiring got crossed and now I’m functioning incorrectly?
And then I go to study the classics
where I read of war. Doused with the perspective of survivors and adventurers.
How many Troy’s must we burn until Helen is free?
Where am I to be found in the pages and pages I pour over? And where do I represent the least among us in the parade of floral language I share on untrusted platforms? And am I still an artist if I don’t know how to share my work? Am I still an artist if the work I share isn’t very good? And is my art worth it if it isn’t tearing down walls and destroying fascist regimes of oppression? Can I be the stone thrown high enough and strong enough to break a glass ceiling?
I think something that is holding me back is the need to know it all. The worry that if I portray my identity in a light that is not exact and infallible I will be doing great dishonor to my community. I also resent the idea that this is the thing I talk about. Haven’t I talked about being trans enough? Isn’t there something more universal and less controversial that I can sell to a publisher or theatre that doesn’t alienate the older more conservative donors whom they rely on for half their funding? Haven’t I lost enough jobs because of my identity? Don’t I work in the most queer friendly industry (theatre) and yet an artistic director and NYU professor told me in front of a room of silent graduate students to move to San Francisco if I wanted to be around more queer people.
And when I write this. I remain in a state of frustration for all the things I feel I can’t say. The people I can’t talk about. The deeply harmful words said to me by some of my closest. The name my family refused to call me for 18 years.
I dream near nightly about the bruised wrists, choked breathing, and forced pleasure I have endured. The eyes of men who say ‘didn’t you want this?’. Going on apps and seeing the faces of nephews I will never meet. Enduring the silence of those who never were interested in knowing the truth of my blood and body. And when I cry myself to sleep missing the sisters I would have done near anything for, I regret this choice.
Choice. A word that haunts me on lonely holidays and radio silent birthdays. I’m afraid to give name to this choice. I am afraid what it will bring should I wave my arms and give attention to this thing I chose. And I often wonder at the life I could be living had I suppressed everything burning deep within my soul. And you could say
‘Would that even be living a life?’
and I would say ‘No I probably would be dead’
But would I be? Dead? How would I know what life I would be living had I not chosen the truth?
The other morning I got on the train
My headphones were on and it was early
I wasn’t paying much attention
But I heard yelling
A faint buzzing like a mosquito ready to suck what I thought was just internal
make what's sticky and red exposed to the air
I pulled back my headphone
“I’ll kill you tranny”
he screamed.
the man on the train is enraged at me from first glance
“i’ll kill you” he yells
i understand why
i understand why
i wait for a pause in his yelling
and
gently
gently i reply
“kill me if you must
but i’ll be reborn as petal and leaf giving you the life preserving air you breathe.
kill me if you need
but my kin continue to bloom as wildflower on the median of a forgotten roadway
kill me if you will
but all you do is scatter the echo of me to those who listen
they collect rage for me in a jar set to burst in the final fire
they sing songs of my siblings till you have snuffed out everything
and even then i will not die
because i have been made (such as you)
with cosmic wonderings,
and moon dust,
i leave my memory in the smile i give to a driver
hand over my reflection to a stray on the street.”
Though the train was full, not a soul stood to comment or defend me against the man who threatened my life. The silence is what made my tears fall, not the yelling. And then I cried for all the times I have stayed silent. Because I think it is very easy for us all to believe the worst can never happen. That the current state of our society is both normal and acceptable. I beg you to reconsider. Shake your shoulders and admit, after we continuously watch atrocity after atrocity, that there are communities and people we currently are able to help. Or at the very least stand proudly and loudly with. I urge you not to get complacent (as I too can be guilty of). Seriously ask yourself how many people are you willing to sacrifice before they are knocking on your door. Posting online is not the same thing as communal engagement.
And when I imagine myself in the mind of my lover or of the train yeller, I wonder what they would see me as if I had just been born in the body they aren’t confused to sexualize? Wouldn’t it make both of their lives easier? But, what would happen if we looked at one another as a temple for a soul ready to be decorated and honored. Not as nearly flesh that we are either attracted to or repulsed by. I think the existence of trans identities makes cis people realize that they have spent far too long worrying about the wrong things. Our bodies are merely vessels. Our being is eternal.
When I go online, I compare myself to bodies that I don’t even want. I read headlines spewing nonsense about the perfect body type, and I know it will never be one like mine. And then I’m told I’m hot, I tell myself I’m hot - but I want to shout ‘Isn’t my soul beautiful?’. But they only see my body. They only see me as an outward projection of some sort of sexual preference. My identity and presentation lets all around me ogle and question what’s in between my legs.
And it's all taken from me. Over and over. My sexuality, my passions, my needs, my body. Don’t I get one thing I can call mine? I am craving to call anything mine, and hold it tighter and tighter as the nights grow darker and colder. The salty flow of my tears rehydrate me with my own electrolytes. You can taste the years of sadness with just the tip of your tongue on my cheek.
When you run a tongue along my skin
when you run your tongue along my skin
you can taste
the salty remnants of tears that steal down my naked
dolphin flesh
in the dead of night.
heaven is not a place i go
heaven is my mind
heaven is the divine intervention of my mind finding perfect unity within my body
heaven is the years of cultivation to find my flesh reflecting like a mirror exactly what my soul is colored as.
taken as divine inspiration
i’ve been selling
this
the skin I was given
the skin I was made in
i am the first sign of the months moon
and with binoculars you can see my craters.
time and and time again my body is reminded of the things it cannot provide
year after year the barren gap between my leg bleeds
bleeds with tears of stale promises and heartbreak
stale with the reminders of what I am not.
i’m not
what they want
i’m not
what they bargained for
they are giving up too much
to love the in between
they can’t fathom what to do with my body day after day.
ducks crave water
and sheep need grass
i am nothing but sun beam
after a while you’ll find my heat is oppressive
I believe in a metaphysical consciousness that exists far beyond my body. I believe there is a connection to all that is spiritual and therefore the thoughts and choosings that come to me are made to be considered, reasoned, and personally moralized. I learned recently that some scientists refuse to use the word mind instead of the brain because the idea of the mind transcends the physical. Mind as a separation from the brain implies another metaphysical plane. And I think I must believe that these scientists are wrong. There must be metaphysical existence. There is anima and music and unfathomable chaos behind the velvety black ink curtain, I know it. Because something about how we got here makes me know the fundamental stuff of the universe is not mass energy. It’s spirit.
And if it is spirit, I know what mind or my soul or my consciousness exists as can be confused with the binary existence of a close minded world. But my body is not displaced. My choice was considered.
I am not the in between of this or that. But rather I am somewhere in between all that could be.
Wait… you’re telling me you think gender exists on a y and an x axis?
ya. kinda.
The miraculous machine of change spins around in constant loops and maze lines, almost daring you to get lost. But they try to tell us that change isn’t for the knee scrapers and hand workers. Change is for those with the magical ability to transform coin to water, numbers to espresso machines, paper to coast line second homes. And still they struggle to leave a dollar tip for your services. ‘So you get everything?’ I want to scream at them ‘the magic you possess by turning nothing to something and the last dollar?’. But the rich seldom get to change the way I did.
but once upon a time,
I was just a girl. of 4,5,6, then 7 stealing hair bands and makeup from my sisters room. Praying to a god I no longer believe in to die and be reborn as a woman. At 14 I laid head soaked under the tap of my bathtub, with a blade in hand hoping to make myself what the creator couldn’t. And in the memory of this near maiming I sit infuriated at the legislators and government officials who stand making laws and rules for a life they don’t understand. Maybe they are too privileged, maybe too dumb. Then at 20 I woke and found the bravery to make change for myself. I didn’t think this true revelation of myself which had always seemed somewhat obvious would lead to the loss of each of my family members. But as my number was blocked and my begging remained unanswered it felt I had died. I hadn’t died, but I had lost many of the things that tied me to this current existence - and I was thrown out to sea to make my own way and to catch my own wave.
One of the most valuable things taught to me in my merging of soul and body is - we do not live on this earth to struggle. We live on this earth to follow our nose further and further. We create to express not to sell. We engage in a constant museum of intergalactic chance day after day
i saw today in the intergalactic museum of chance, a cherishing of many planet’s individual treasures. it was full of green life and fossils of the most noble and rare varieties. i walked around echoing and near empty halls evaluating past treasures. and i got lonely. and i missed all the things i used to have. discovery always leads to preservation of the past. new land always makes you long for home. and i thought about how i don’t know how to value something for what it is.
i would never tell a beetle
one with radiant color and exquisite pattern
blue iridescent shell and mind of endless wonder
to look at the skin of a cheetah to compare notes.
i would simply remind them of both their splendor and birthright.
there is no king that could stop the snows
with all her angelic frost and life coverings
from dazzling in the winter sun just because the summer burns bright too.
there is something stripped away
when all a horse hears is babble and gather on
just because it doesn’t smell of blueberry pie.
and a dandelion’s wish still blows for another even if it didn’t have the grandest wish for itself.
my point is, the things worth savoring are the things that often feel the most boring to have. only when a lasagna supper doesn’t fill you up may you wish for the sun to be the moon.
There is a pressure from the surrounding every day to conform to the path we have planned for us. Our parents saw birth, school, love, marriage, children, retirement. I see day after day as a constant rebirth. Today I exist as the cocooned thing trapped in my bed, tomorrow I am a butterfly soaring over breeze and never ending air. There is nothing I can be trapped as because I have engaged in the life of constant choice and rediscovery. I hope to never exist within my mind as an inflexible and unwavering pole.
I hope to know what my soul is day after day
even when
the man on the subway tells me he’ll kill me
the man on the street attacks and calls me names
the boy at Yale claims “he’s such a fraud he thinks he’s a woman”
the professor at NYU tells me to move to San Francisco where the queer people are
or the calls I dial to my sisters lay unanswered
because I know what I believe in
and what I believe in is kindness, truth, commitment, and honesty.
Things I will pour into myself even when the world doesn’t.
here are my generous givings of all together hard learned truths
hundreds of cars driving on one road
makes you feel smaller behind the wheel
than anywhere else.
you could lick the hand of every stranger
and you wouldn’t get sicker than you already are now.
proof of patience exists in the crescent moon clippings of my too long toenail.
the disgusting little body of a fly stuck and stung into a zap trap is altogether more morally sound than a gossip with a bullet in his neck.
peanut shells make amazing hats for the right sized creature.
anything has the possibility to be something.
when you call it by its name.
I think you will find
that you can
and you are
and you will be.
8 gallon fish tanks hold no more soup than water.
on the top of a pond lays a layer of muck that could hardly be moved or skimmed. In the preserved algae and the grown over leaf I saw the proof of ten million lives and heard the song of infinite universes. How could I be scared to die? The proof of my rebirth lies in the galaxies we encounter daily. I am not so limited to believe that I exist as something so special it could only happen once. Rather I am infinite and my speciality paints this current canvas of time with just a drop of color in a sea of boundless shade.
As the monster wakes
and the angel falls
and society crumbles in the hands of repressed cross dressers
all I can think is
Oh how lucky we are to have a transparent atmosphere and to see the stars.
ANGLER_______________________________[*
Something like the angler fish has me moving forward with my own light ahead. I am guided, constantly, by the ability to locate my own glow through the deepest of depths. I find myself a beacon, for the past version of myself, the smaller fish who needed guidance on where to go. I wonder, as I swim, if those in my habitat know we are suspended in saline stuff that the ones above call water. And I wonder then if those above, tied to something called land, are breathing something vapid and less tangible than I am. I wonder if the thing in front of me isn’t to catch - but to follow. It is inevitable that forward is the only place I can go, and the light will reach me inevitably. I can only swim forward, swim in its ever guiding glory.
Glory. Glory to a god who is the highest. The one who made this in seven days. Who knew separation was the key and gave us space and air. Who dictated with his hand that night be dark and the days brighter. Who made me, on the 5th day with the other sea creatures. Or at least that’s what he meant to do. Instead now I’m stuck in the mind of a human in an era dated after the Sin of Adam. Adam, who we were created from and who knew peace and innocence in the first days. If only the thing of his rib didn’t eat the one thing we were forbidden from having. Maybe then we could have realized all we needed was in front of us. Radah never meant dominion, and certainly never pertained to domination. We even name and border our seas, only to fill them with wooden horses and plastics.
There is something all calling to the ocean. A conversation just out of earshot from the thing that crashes on the beige meeting of sea and land. The whispering of bubbles and sand crab making their way up from being long buried. I want to know what it is they speak of. Like the sand crab, I too was raised on a beach and grew in the sand, knew shell and firm hide. At night, I would lay wide awake with the windows open. All you could hear was car horns, the call of a neighbor, and waves crashing and succumbing to the rock of sand. I was convinced each crash was a sentence from the universe. Trying to convey to me a long unknown secret. I was eager to listen, training my ears for the furthest sound, the faintest whisper. Knowing our mother earth was telling me something in the high and low of each tide. Some sort of reason we call this place home and pollute it with oil. Why he made it and where it is headed. With each wash and backstroke I was convinced I would drown in this sea - not of intent but happenstance. The rush of a current and my brothers too far away to catch me. Maybe the wipe out of a large tackling thing. But this never kept me from the water. The prospect of a drowned fate enticed me. I thought maybe I’d be swept away and grow gills. Become something else that was made for saline solution. Finally in the deep depths my body may feel like my body and I would know her secrets. Sung by mermaids and popped in bubbles full of air.
As I aged I was determined I would drown, not of happenstance but of purpose. A late night walk into the deep blue thing. Stones weighing me down in the pockets of a long considered final outfit. I dream about it, near weekly still. The final night of my life. The decision that the days are too long and the ocean is so deep. The wandering into a thing I have known all my life and finding final sleep beneath its surface. As I walk deeper into the waves, and my eyes train to the water, I will pass ocean life and sea things. The fish will welcome me as their sister. The dolphins will sing their praise. And a mermaid will lead me to a city long thought buried. There I will finally feel whole.
I wake from these dreams on land, in my boyfriend’s basement apartment with only windows in the bedrooms. Black out curtains cover his singular window and I find myself often sleeping till noon. I am still haunted by the dream of the ocean and a pocket full of stones.
This morning the two of us spoke of the end of the world. The hotter days and wetter 5th season. He told me it would happen slow, over time, and painfully. I told him it would happen with the emergence of a giant squid from the Marianas Trench. Something we had never dreamed of. The squid would annihilate all humans before life became unsustainable. And squids would take over both land and sea. Destroying capitalism and demolishing chain restaurants. Building only sustainable mom and pop bed and breakfasts. Dominating our domain. He found this unlikely. I find that I don’t know when the days will end, whether my own or our civilizations. But I run through scenarios like an episodic television show with years of residuals to send out.
I wonder if the thing that will kill us will be a catastrophic flash from the sky. A shooting thing that starts on the ground of one land and propels as high as it can go until it falls with an awesome crash. I think my eyes will soak in the flash as though the greatest community church production of Les Miserables [the 29 year old choir teacher who plays Javert is excellent during Stars, not a dry eye in the house]. For what greater theatrics and drama are there than a bomb and Stars. How many characters must reach their highest fever to cause the end. What does it take to jump from the Pont Au Change? And how can I even consider the end when the beginning is still a thing so unknown? No scientist has reached back through the many strings of time to find the exact moment Adam opened his eyes and saw Eve. Someone born closer than any can imagine - of the same bone and dust. Proving that every person to follow is more than kin but bone brother. I think Eve knew something we didn’t. She was propelled by the inevitable to eat the fruit. She knew we would spiral ourselves into the ground. Crash and burn from the first bite. She represents the inevitable.
Waking in the garden of green and lush Eve finds herself staring into the eyes of another. A galaxy in the ring that surrounds that hole so vast and black. Green in the making, just like her fathers plan for the globe. “So they made it” she thought. Sent to a place called Earth by her heavenly father with her counterpart Adam. Now separate but once made of the same cluster of starchance and moondust. She was told her rib was his. But what a rib was she was unsure. But she knew hers was his.
She wakes now with his eyes in her eyes. Stars of the same stuff. She can’t help but smile. For all he has ever wanted was to make her. Now in his eyes she can tell he wants to please her. And she just might let him.
Then her eyes find movement. Like a string tug behind the socket, she scans what’s above and below. “Lush” she thinks, as she takes in the promised garden. Green, in its leaves and caterpillars. Blue, in its sky and asters. Noisy, in it’s ribbits and cricket song. Her bones creak with her first stretch. As she feels dirt and soil beneath her back and her muscles stretch to waken the living thing she is now a part of. Can she separate herself from the ground? Or is this rib a tether to the place she currently is? Slowly, she allows herself to move her toes, accentuate the curve of her back, and lift the nape of her head. She can be totally separate. She is body and blood. She is a mover and moved.
And she stands. What a marvel this human form is. As it separates itself from everything surrounding. She can lay and feel close to the center that is her earth. Or she can stand and feel her head stretch towards the heavens and her father above. And as she wonders in her bodies every movement, she feels his eyes on her. Like sun rays directed to her back she knows he’s staring. And while she loves him, she needs no eyes on her now. She, for the first time, is savoring her individuality.
With a single step she is wobbling. And with a second she is stumbling over, but she knows her body can handle it.
“Eve” Adam calls to her, but she barely notices and his head is still pressed to the dirt.
And she’s off moving alongside the wind. His echoing chorus of voice and sound calls after her but she cannot care. She is free to explore the land that was made just for her. Passing by the brown of branch, red of fruit, and purple of flower, she breathes in the life and floral smell of her perfect garden. The land made forever for her.
There is something addictive to the idea of the garden. A land of green and lush that was made purely for our pleasure - and here I slip into the humanist misogyny that has me blaming Eve for the expansion. We rule now, right? We have dominion, don’t we? With our expanded mind and our material obsession can’t we develop this into the utopia we have always dreamed of? I ask this with full knowledge that dinosaurs held dominion for over 160 million years, a beast which uses its determination to hunt and follow the chain to survive. No adaptation or development encourages it to think logically or pick out an outfit. And no matter how big their bones grew, nothing could stop the asteroid. But yet we are, the rulers, aren’t we? We the species of 300,000 years. Can’t we build the giant space canon that shoots the asteroid off its path? Aren’t we the destiny changers? The land conquerors? We, the species who surrounded the Mediterranean Sea, called it Rome, divided it into east and west and watched it fall because our communication was not quick enough and our blood lust too hungry. But my blood lust isn’t too hungry - right? You don’t see that in me do you? You see me as a thing of ease and time and rest and communication… don’t you? Aren’t I the follower of the light, or maybe even the thing producing the glow? I hope to be anyway. But the addictions, of course, still plague me here in the patriotic land of dollar bill, brutality, and street sleeper.
I grew up an addict, addicted to the things that allowed me to numb the truth. For if terrors kept occurring and I kept numbing, I could subside the truth for many years. I remember the first time I truly questioned my addiction. Sprawled out on a bed of a man I didn’t know. $50 in my jeans pocket that hung over the closet door, the last $100 in his wallet he would give me when he was finished. He had told me we were going to get high. And when I sat on his bed unburdened from belt buckle and shoelace, I had asked him where he kept his pills. He took my face in his hands “I want you to feel it” he told me. And feel it I did, with tear stains down my cheek and blood that pooled in the seat of my car later that evening. I find that our society exists in the same function. Here we sit, the witness or victims of terror after terror. Pumped full of obsessions and government sponsored carcinogens to keep us complicit. What happens when we have to be confronted with reality? What do we learn when we know the horrors don’t stop just because we are numb to them? Do we push to continue, or do we tear down the whole thing and start over from a kinder and gentler scratch.
I find myself often needing to push myself to continue. Continue writing. Continue working. Continue living. There is nothing natural about the way I push. But rather I am like old knees on a rusted bicycle trudging up hill. I hear the gears crack and my joints snap as muscle burns with the fire of summer blacktop. I am convinced there will be a top to the hill, and what follows is an excellent view and a leisurely roll down. But what happens when there is no peak? No roll down to follow? And what happens if there is a clear peak? Only to be followed by deep descent with no hope of once again rising. And the unknown of countless options leaves me peddling without proof. And I think I am a truth seeker. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) Faith is all I have in the days to come. Faith that beyond anything the sun will rise and the moon will set, even though I have no proof tomorrow will bring what today did. I have no proof that with time of healing from the horrors will I be able to move forward. Because near daily I both remember and witness, continually I am horrified.
What I do have proof of is to catch a fruit fly, fill a jar with either apple cider vinegar or a small piece of fruit and soap. Cover the jar with plastic wrap and poke holes with a toothpick. The flies will be able to get in but not out, and the soap will make their wings too heavy to fly. ‘Go back to where you came from’ I hear myself calling at fruit flies, but they can’t find the hole. And now they are momentarily deafened and shook by the magnitude of my gigantic sound waves. Isn’t the fruit fly our proof? We climbed through the toothpick hole - and we ate the fruit of the future, our wings are too heavy to fly, we will drown in the product of our temptation - isn’t it our nature? Isn’t this what I learned when as a teenager I laid with older men to make money? The temptation of a hot meal and a bit more comfort brought me into bed, but the pain and weight of the act keeps my wings too heavy and I fear I will never fly again.
Isn’t the proof that things began the proof that things must end. And isn’t the apple the proof that we will cause our own end. We foretold it in religion and science. Didn’t we hear when Genesis told how we were born of clay and the dust off the ground? Didn’t we know we had all we needed? Doesn't the proof we are doing it wrong exist in the way that the earth is rejecting us. Like an infection that brings about fever, the earth is boiling itself until the virus is killed.
I am a product of constant nightmare, sleep rarely brings me comfort and nearly always brings me terror. But when I am contagious with a flu or a cold that brings about fever, I find that boiling of my insides sends me into a new plane of terror. Often in moments of true sickness I wake from dream land only to still be surrounded by apparition of the dream plagued me. Frequently I find myself locked in nightmares of the first time I found abuse, only to wake and see the abuser sitting at the end of my bed. And here I know the truth of our earth - she keeps dreaming and hoping to wake with the parasite gone. The contagion boiled out. But we exist as the fever dream, always continuous until the infection has passed. And I think we may be boiled till we die.
I hope once I’m gone I go under the twisted roots into the dirt that leads me back to the things I have spawned from. I want to see dinosaur fossils and travel between dirt particles to find the first human long decayed bones. Kiss Eve on the cheek for what she thought was following salvation. The compact particles of dirt and stone make me realize that all I am is collective. Seasons change and the dirt stays the same.
I took a trip one summer to a hole in the ground - devil’s bath I hear they call it. I felt like swimming to the very bottom. I wanted to find lost things. An archeologist of modern human lost trinkets. Find a pair of glasses, a bracelet, sunken shoe. Let the silt sift through my wide spread fingers, taste the grit and salt in my fingernails as a midnight snack. I found on this trip that the depths are my neighborhood. Below the dirt is my personal address. I’m waiting nightly for my transformation from human back to fish. I want to be an ugly thing with a wide open jaw. Give me a lamp on my forehead to guide me forward. I want to be more than this.
If we had simply let the pieces fall into their perfect place, maybe then we could be more than parasites. For after all, tomorrow will just keep coming, and the trees always produce fruit where the soil is fertile. Fish will evolve in deep depths when the shallow surfaces get too hot. Lights will appear or eyes will grow stronger to make any depth seeable. I read that scientists believe that deep sea anglers only evolved after a period of great global warming. Drawn to the depths because human destruction over the land that God told Adam we had responsibility over. The depths provided space and cleaner waters for the Anglers to grow and here they learned to glow. They developed the ability to glow, not to see in the depths - but rather to attract prey - though they do not glow on their own. Rather they cultivate a colony of bacteria called Entrovibrio which is made of luciferin. This cultivation occurs when Entrovibrio searches for a perfect home, which they find on the tip of a protrusion on the Angler’s spine. This home provides oxygen which when in perfect combination with luciferin, do the Anglers start to glow. He can even control how much oxygen reaches his esca to control the amount of light or even direction. And through adaptation, has developed reflective tissue to balance and enhance the light in deeper depths. The bulbous dreamer, an angler that lives at 2500 meters of depth has developed such black skin that it is impossible to see, and has developed its reflective scales to deflect any of the light from its body and only outward drawing prey to its already open mouth without moving a single muscle. And maybe here I see the perfect plan. The perfect puzzle must come to place to make the Angler glow. And every function, every molecule is perfectly designed.
There is no world that cannot be built in the sanctity of a human mind. There is no conflict that cannot be salvaged. There is no brilliance that you do not have - for a light hangs off your face, or shoots from your chest. And in that beam I hope you find dedication.
From Egg, to Tadpole, and finally I'm Frog
Tell me what shape it is, that my body makes, when you feel me rest safely as a tadpole in the palm of your outstretched hands.
I first held a tadpole in the backyard of my Aunt’s North Eastern home. Grass and green was her backyard with a pond full of swimming things. In the spring we watched frog eggs bubble to the surface, come summer we held tadpoles, by the heat of August they hopped up our arms. It was my brother and I’s summer task to make sure the coi didn’t devour the eggs. I would take careful action in this. Ensuring netting and stone segmented off the frogs' very own oasis. Sometimes my brother would take a rogue egg and feed it to the coi. I screamed, watching one body be handed over to another body. I took deep care of the frogs because I, like them, am born of egg and isolation. I, like the egg, was out of control.
Years later, by happenstance and not from looking, I found another. He was something natural and forthcoming. In my egg, I too, did not want to be touched. But as summer blazed in the height of the sky I softened and melted. Hatched into something swimming. Grew into something hopping. And then the wind blew time and debris around us as tornados. Suddenly I found him in the winter solitude of flake and slush. He was there. Standing and waiting inside the steeple shaped cinema on a snow capped night.
I was surprised when he didn’t want snacks. How are we to watch a movie without snacks?
Maybe, I tell myself, it’s because I was late to the start time.
I was late stuck on a blue train with a man who made eyes at me as he touched himself. I marveled in my head that I had seen bigger things. And laughed at both of our misfortunes. He stared at me from Nostrand to High Street, and I almost took it as an omen to turn around. But here I was, on the uptown A, having already made it halfway through my trip - to meet what would become a lover, in the middle of winter snow slush. He was standing and waiting inside the steeple shaped cinema. Damp and wet for a two hour thing we were about to watch. Standing before me with my eyes wide open, I see him and all his humanity.
i am in absolute awe of how his muscles shape and form around his forearm and calf. because in the shape of his individual body i see the life cycle of countless generations and gestations of human blood and sacrifice.
in that eye color that i could only discern as his, i feel the molding and shaping that time does on the malleable tone of a body. it makes me think of oatmeal and how after only 15 moments, the dry stuff is slick and the flavor is cinnamon and topping the beige with fruit make it all more bearable.
everytime we connect i feel my hand against the glass. shatter and sparkle as my body shoots through everything in its path. pieces of us lie scattered on the floor.
i think i’m starting to like my self improvement. glasses help me see so i go down to lens crafters and get 2 pairs. four eyes bogo.
i laugh to conceal something impermanent such as sadness and pain. the color blue. same as the train. same as the eyes. i wonder if it should all be something more sensual. or if sensuality and sexuality are a distraction from the war crimes. i eat emotional leftovers daily. that's if i even eat at all. i turn my phone off to mask the loud silence of my phone not ringing. i have sisters i wish would call.
123 I keep reading on my phone screen. 1:23 seeming like a sign from angels to remember that things come in steps, and patience was my word of 2024. Every year I pick a word I want to embody the virtue of. Last year it was patience. This year, my word is discipline. But I find myself more often than not drawn to patience. Patience in myself for being undisciplined. This is the life of an artist. I want to believe. This is the life of a survivor. I beg myself to think. This is the life of a train conductor. I know. Barreling over track in the direction of her life. I am on course but out of control. Overheating in the engine. Overbearing in its load. When I was sixteen I had taken the Northeast Regional to stay with the same Aunt - presumably in the North East. My dad had been missing for weeks, as he had been known to do. And I had just enough change left over from my last paycheck to go grocery shopping or buy a train ticket. When I got to Penn Station from DC, the train stopped and I was informed it wasn’t going any further.
“Not on this train” the conductor told me.
I was disappointed in the ending of something that seemed so on track for my very own destination. And overwhelmed for the first time with the true realization that you could have a perfect plan, and the cosmic weather could blow in a solar storm that stops this train in its very track. Leaving me stranded in the heart of a hive. The train station buzzed with the swarm of worker bees and a few queens. I made my way to a ticket booth, desperate for help. Which I didn’t find. What I did find was the sound of keys clacking with the ferocious tap of acrylic press ons attached to the spindly fingers of a grumpy woman with small readers, the type of which I recognized from my recent trip to LensCrafters. I wondered if she utilized the bogo. Without a word she pointed at the pricing board.
38 more dollars. 38 more dollars it took to get the connecting train. And yet all I had was 5. 38 had always been my most lucky number. For you see my mom died in the 38th minute of the 15th hour. But god, I’m not here to talk about my dead mom. People always want to talk about their dead moms. I exited Penn Station onto 34th street. Taking the number as another sign and the rain as a motivator to move quick. I had been selling my body for a few years at this point. [Mainly to get food. Sometimes to get a movie ticket and sit in the back row by myself stoned with a large popcorn, sour patch watermelon, and a water. Here I’m reminded he didn’t want any snacks.] But at 16 I felt I had already known the rules to the trade. I could make a quick 50 dollars and he wouldn’t even have to fuck me. I could shut up and use the time to hone my imagination. Since I was 9, and the first hands held my face down into the carpet and I lost my body, I had used this time to hone my imagination. At least that’s what I told myself to feel better. It wouldn’t feel like rape if my mind was somewhere else.
Funny. I think to myself currently because everytime I go to straddle my lover today, I feel each of them squeeze in the space between my thighs and their breath in the creak of my hips. I can hardly stand the pain they leave in my lower back a near ten years later. And at 16 I found myself on the streets of middle town Manhattan looking to make a quick $50.
I knew the internet like the back of my hand. The digital thing my groomer from a young age. It taught me everything I could know and has lost me many years of my life. I was 16, needing $50, with the internet and some man’s fantasy as my salvation. And I found him. Quick. Standing on 8th avenue next to the Time Square Mcdonalds. Easy landmark for something fast. Faster than potatoes stripped to shoestring, my clothes stripped in a bathroom but leaving my shoestrings tied.
As he took what he needed from me, I became the queen of my very own imagination -
Vivid days in monumental sun and warm heat. A kingdom wide and expansive and I am the ruler. I want to be lost in stars floating alongside candles and memories. Seeking out things for the story and the feeling and then floating along to the next. In the stars I live in my fantasy, away from the trauma and bore of humans. In my imagination I am wind on a wing. I am breath and tomorrow. I am light reflecting a rainbow in a dew drop. I walk down rainbow road as characters from games I know fly past on karts. I jump off the boundless edge of tracks and flys deep down into a pool of blackness that never ends. I feel the wind and compression of video particles pour against my skin and clothes as I hear the distant sound of cheers and 8bit music begin to fade. Fade further and farther. Farther and further until I am deep in a black void of stuff and nothing. Floating and bounding for eternity. I get lost in the deep pit of my mind. As though a diver in the subliminal waves of my own brainfolds. I think I could fall forever. Until suddenly I am hooked by a cloud and brought back to the surface. In my ascent I wonder who will be worried by my absence. Planning who I can tell about the fall and the space. - But when I returned the race kept lapping and no one had noticed me gone. I finish the last lap on foot and everyone thinks I’m a sore loser.
Everything here felt salty. Salty at what filled my mouth during and after. Salty as the tears pressed down my cheeks, for even though I was used to it I still despised what I felt made to do. Made to do. Yes, here was my choice I thought as my knees pressed into unmopped tile. I blamed myself, and still do, for a childhood of sexualization and torture. And as I sat, in a stall with the smell of human brine, wet paper towel, and New York City in the air, I stared up at him. His eyes registered something sad to me. There was something swimming in the deep brown that gazed down onto my still soft cheeks. I felt, in that moment, connected. Safe. Like he really was the fantasy of savior and $38. He glanced at his hand. I thought he was glancing at his wedding ring. Something I had failed to notice earlier. I wondered if his wife knew his fascination with teens he could buy off the internet. And just as I opened my mouth to say something consoling, yes consoling, I saw him raise that very left hand. I closed my eyes, felt the back of his hand and what must have been the false gold of his ring make contact with my cheek. My head bounced off the porcelain bowl and down onto the unmopped floor. I heard the zip of his zipper, a clatter of belt buckle, and the patter of rubber soled boots on slightly wet McDonald’s bathroom tile. The door opened. The door closed. And there was silence except for the humming of faint fluorescent. In the buzz I heard the field of flowers in the backyard I was traveling to and once had played in. Felt the soft spring wind of an April day on my cheek. Smelt the brine of the pond and saw the white bubbles that meant frog eggs. Smiled at the memory of sun, for here on the floor I was no longer in a fast food restaurant. The ground beneath me was no longer hard but soft and pliable as it was mud, grass, and flower blossom. I laid for what felt like hours. My head swam with memory and headache as I slowly propped myself up. I dusted off my jeans, and washed my hands and face with the pink bubblegum soap in metal push container and left. Walking through the heart of the hive my stomach felt sour with all I had just swallowed. And I still needed $50.
And $50 dollars I found in the form of $300 cash paid to me by a man I still remember to be named Richard. Or at least that’s what he told me. He also told me he was a high profile banker who had a bit too much money on his hands and not enough company. When I asked how far he wanted to go he said he would pay me just to see me with my clothes off. He wanted to let me shower and warm up. He was in the mood to feel parental, and the thought sounded more appealing then I would like to admit. And in my haste to make money before the last train departed I let him convince me I would be safe, and if not I was convinced I knew to protect myself. There was something lovely about the way he bought me hot chocolate at the hotel bar when I first stumbled in from the rain. I was completely soaked through and my head pounded with an ache so fierce I thought my skull was soon to burst. When he offered me the pill from the unmarked pharmaceutical container, I should have said no. But after he told me about his daughter he had just sent to college, I wondered how harmful he could be. On the walk from bar to elevator I noticed for the first time how gross the lobby was. Dim yellow light polluted the air along with the light intoxicating smell of years old ash and tar baked into the maroon carpet. In retrospect the hot chocolate was thin and watery. The second the elevator doors closed I knew I needed to sleep. Everything was blurry and nothing in my mind made sense. Where was I? Who was this man? I think my back just slammed against the wall. I think someone’s hands are in my pants. Slowly my eyes blinked closed. My feet no longer touched the floor. I was being carried through a hallway. A door was closing. A few voices swam in my head. “We won’t hurt you” I heard. “I promise this will be fun”. The rain fell harder outside. And as I felt the chill from the air conditioner whisper against previously concealed skin, I forced myself to focus on the sound of water falling from the heavens. I no longer existed in a body. I was simply imagination.
In the dead of August when I was twelve, my brother and I sat home alone. From our upstairs window you could hear the crack of wave and the pull back of water on sand. When I focused, I could feel the rock of the tide from the top bunk of my twin sized bunk bed. If I used my imagination well enough, I could be anywhere. And anywhere I often was.
“Let’s get drunk on the beach” my brother told me, snapping me from the rhythm I had been rocking in and the waves I was imagining beneath me. “With what?” I questioned, sitting up and cracking my head against the ceiling in the same place I would on the toilet 4 years later. He held up a handle of Captain Morgan. “Race you” he said, taking off down the block the second we stepped onto the sidewalk. I was about to start running when I noticed how full the moon was. “hi mom” I whispered as I walked in pursuit.
Sitting on the lifeguard tower my brother passed me the bottle. “Does it taste good?” I asked. “Of course not” he replied. I felt the breeze on my nose, a chill on my wrists, and the swirl of a thousand thoughts in my mind as I pressed the bottle to my mouth and sipped. At first the slight cinnamon flavor masked the medicinal quality. But as I swallowed I knew I had made a mistake. I gagged and threw up over the edge of the tower. I looked over at him expecting him to be mad at me as he so often was, but all we could do was laugh. And we laughed. And we laughed.
There is a knocking on a door. And laughter coming from a far off room. “Good Morning!” I hear being called through the door. “Room Service!” And suddenly I am throwing up over the edge of the bed all over the maroon carpet. Richard’s gone. $300 was left on the nightstand next to an alarm clock that read 9:34 am. I had never held so much cash before. My head falls back on the pillow and -
“Good morning!” I hear
I am being woken. Woken into some memory of a day long past. God I am being woken from a dream world. A dream world that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. Dreams of my mother on a table and snow angels and doctors. I rub my eyes and face and begin the stretches and movements that allow me to sit up.
“Get up! I have your suit ironed. We leave for mass in 30 minutes.”
I am 9 and they think I’m a boy. They meaning my aunt who is raising me and my older brothers who are actually my cousins and my older sisters who are actually my sisters. They think I’m a boy because they have no imagination. But I feel like a boy in the same way that a spider feels like a 4 door honda civic.
I wake up and stare at myself in the mirror. Gazing into eyes that gaze back. Eyes that look of the sea just as my mothers did. We are the only two in the family who got sea eyes. All the rest got brown and for this I for once connected to the thing that holds my soul.
And within 30 minutes we begin the trek in button downs and sperrys over broken pavement. The sea air of our sea town clings to our nostrils with salt and brine. A swirl of blue and darker blue swirls in the sky and white puffs dance to make clouds. The summer feels like a painting here, and I wish I could get unstuck from the acrylic.
Mass drones on in the constant way that catholics make sure everything drones on. We sit and we witness a white man pretend God speaks through him. But in reality his own ego and self interest speaks through him, colored by deep childhood trauma and a mother he wants to make proud. It’s embarrassing really, I think. It’s embarrassing to become a priest. And it’s even more embarrassing for everyone in the congregation to pretend that this isn’t embarrassing. And in this I want to leave, because I feel so embarrassed. Embarrassed that I am supposed to believe this but don't. Embarrassed that everyone does believe this, but I don't. And how can I, at 9 years old, see through the clear man made errors in a book that was supposed to be holy. How were these adults believing that a woman got pregnant without sex? How are these adults believing that some guy fed 5000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fish? Are they stupid? And now I starve myself and feel the call of my stomach so we can all suck on white wafers I’m supposed to be convinced is a man’s body. Thousands of years later and this wafer is supposed to be a body? Just because some white dude told me that after he spoke some words and rang some bells that a transfiguration took place between bread and wafer to body and christ? And yet she can’t go through that same transfiguration? Honda Civic to Spider.
I was 25 years old and on the J train, I watched a little boy wave around a sandwich made of white bread and processed meats. Talking with his mouth full, gesticulating with his sandwich hand. the gay boy in the seat near him sat repulsed.
I was 22 and at the port authority bus terminal, I took off my headphones to hear a mother say “i am really quite concerned about kevin. he has not touched his caesar salad cake yet.”
today i believe that god is actually just perfect collaboration. the unification of a forever being that is multiple souls for the same cause.
today i was tasked with the duty of preserving life's mysteries in a glass. hold the mysteries in a glass bottle - like lines on a tree telling its years.
I was 11 years old sitting in a McDonald’s. In Front of me was a cheeseburger, fries, and barbecue sauce. Across from me was my father. In the cup I drank a mixture of High-C Orange and blue Powerade. The green liquid stained my tongue the same vibrant hue. We sat in silence, as was our long standing tradition, and I filled my burger with my french fries.
“Why are you doing that?” My dad asked.
“Because it’s delicious,” I answered.
“I haven’t seen anyone do that except your mother, who taught you that?”
“No one” I said, standing up and I turned and walked to the bathroom.
I couldn’t remember the last time my dad had talked about my mom. I let the door slam closed behind me. I limited my breathing as the air smelled of human brine, and wet paper towel. I stood in front of the mirror. Stuck out my tongue. Examined its newly stained green quality. And told myself I was the first human/ frog hybrid. That’s why no one understood me. I was something yet to be understandable.