TW: sexual assault

I was 19,
My parents hadn't noticed yet, the budding breasts that grew under my black tshirts
Street bought Premarin and Provera
I covered them in the South Florida heat in the same motorcycle jacket I still wear
Face sweating off concealer I'd applied too thick
No one to teach me
No one to tell me how much better it'd work to cover the blue beard shadow if I dabbed on a layer of lipstick, red/red, under the concealer
No one to teach me,
Use powder to set
No YouTube, or Internet, this was 1987.
I remember how thrilled and scared I was when approached in the Xtra parking lot by a man who asked for my number, even though I was dressed
Butcher than butch
That was also the year I was forced to blow a biker who called himself Satan, the broken tip of his fishing knife pushed
hard against the side of my neck

I discovered my bravery in Femme a little bit, before my parents kicked me out that year.
Door knocker earrings- my other punk friends made fun of me. Terri just looked at me, shook her head and smirked outside of Jonestown on South Beach.

No one taught me Femme. It was something I pulled out of myself like teeth.

When I first came out as trans, I did it in small, scared steps,
So used to this body belonging to
Everyone but me.
When I came fully into my Femme,
It was violent, like being born.

He knows despite the Harm Reduction Outreach backpack
"I'm not working tonight though sweetie, you need any cleans? Cookers, cottons, ties?"
He knows he can have me anyway,
because I'm Femme, because I'm Trans,
Because this is the stroll.
As we walk back to my car, parked on a side street, away from streetlights,
still a fishbowl, still a silent prayer for
invisibility & safety, I ask him quietly
"how much do you want to spend tonight?"
He knows the local prices but I
get him up to 35 and covered.
When we get into my gray Hyundai,
windows dirty enough from the
road salt and backsplashed FDR slush to
hopefully afford a little more privacy,
he notices on my dashboard,
the purple, Styrofoam, glittered skull,
the two plastic Christmas Disney Princess snow globes from Duane Reade,
the dried roses and dogwood blossoms.
"You don't seem like someone who'd be into this shit" he laughs,
as I lock the doors,
peel off my leather jacket,
and dig out a fresh condom from the plastic bag on the floor behind his seat.

I would scrape the capitalism from my bones, but how,
When it's my first impulse to let you build a shelter from my ribcage?
Just please always live in it
Please, always keep it warm

I write because I constantly feel like Im dissolving
into my role as caretaker
into my own sick and sweaty bed
into daynightdaynight22-24hoursaday
into just another tranny whore
into everyone else's ideas of who I am
I write because I so often want to dissolve
into nothingness
I write because part of me is still rooted in resistance
I write for my own resurrection
I write so that I might meet myself
again and again and again

1.
I dreamt of some future museum
(A memorial, like Yad V'Shem)
Here, in New York
And, instead of shoes
There was a pile of canes.

2.
If such a place should come to exist,
I hope that the curator
will tell all the crips
Who come to remember
To pick a cane,
To carry it with them
To let it support them
So that our stories might too be carried forth.

I want to write axes
write bullets
bricks
& bats
Want to write bombs to bust this world wide open
This Mayday, (which our dictator wants to rebrand as his "Day of Loyalty")
This day of our rage
We sick
We crippled
We poor
We brown
We Queer
We trans
We lie in bed
Our bodies, furnaces of blistering flames
Our knees, hips, elbows and spines,
crusted with stiffening rust
And words are all we have to throw.

Weeks disappear between the sweaty, dirty sheets of my sick bed.
I want so badly to be the Warrior Cripple, but instead, I feel helpless.
I twitch and
jerk in pain,
sweat and shiver and
lose myself
in disconnected thoughts of
ending my own life.
I think about the
paramedics who'll
collect my corpse; likely with needle still leaning from my arm.
will they misgender me? Will they notice more the 4 days of stubble than they will my
Painted nails, or my tits?
As they
zip
me into that
taupe, plastic bag, will they
tell my partner how sorry they are, as they
strap my stiffening body to the wheeling gurney, load me into the elevator, into Coroner's van, and as they
Fish in pockets for exact change at the counter of the the corner Bodega
stopping for coffee, a Pepsi and a bag of Cheetos
will they laugh, and tell the visual, and say
"First one of the night
You see everything in New York"?

I used to have a sticker on the back of my phone, one of those label maker ones that said in black and white, "aphasia",
for when I couldn't remember the word for
not being able to remember words

Aphasia
It's a beautiful, velvet blue and twinkling yellow light, a god dammed Van Gogh painting swirling to life
A goddess who hoards the wealth of our crippled experiences, doling them back to us- stories to whisper or text to trusted loves

Aphasia
Even now my mouth feels its shape, the "s" that strokes the inside point of my jaw's joints

Allodynia has always been another favorite of mine I
wrote once of the conflict of having to explain to a partner that her
overzealous touches- though appreciated were too much
About having "to cover her bruised heart with my
Burning skin"
This is Allodynia

I wish my clouded brain would allow me to write an ode to the beautiful language of sickness
Instead I tell myself "be content,
You were able to honor two of your favorites."
I don't yet know a special word for that
For adapting
For learning compassion for
self
for learning to be ok with less.