Ritual

The sounds of her pills, my pills being counted / This diurnal inventory that greets me each morning.

Just A Comment

When someone tells me I'm "very brave" for transitioning, I can't help but think it has less to do with bravery, than it does that survival instinct that kicks in when one's house is on fire; if one wishes to go on living, one gets up from their easy chair and runs outside. My decision to transition was- indeed IS no more nor less than that primary instinctual imperative to get out of a burning building.

untitled

I did not choose this otherness
I did not choose isolation or
the fear
of leaving the house
unshaven and without my face
I did not choose this otherness, this
life apart, of complexities
and complications
I never chose anxiety
over which public restroom to use, nor
to be a target
just for walking in daylight
I did not choose this otherness
any more than to have two hands
or to be 5 foot 6
or to have curly hair
I choose only to be myself
Unapologetic
Unashamed
Let others be shamed by their sameness, their lack of courage
I did not choose this otherness
but I will accept it with
wide open hands.

Suheir,
The brothers in olive have
wrapped you in your own anger
You smother there
For whom?

this morning

We shared a pint of
giant blackberries
stained our fingers with
Blackberry blood--
a sweet memory from
our first meeting
and now I sit in my
yellow chair
reading your Hammad
my fingertips still red.





*poet Suheir Hammad

By way of my contribution to the "I need feminism because..." meme circulating on Facebook:

I need feminism because
people think it's ok to suggest that:
(a) I've sacrificed status, and
(b) I shouldn't be surprised or upset when people
regard me as a joke because I'm transgendered.

offering

Some intruders
come with hammers and torches
Knocking down walls, throwing
books to the pyre
Others come full of
only good intentions, with
Ziploc bags full of
sage for burning.

Cleaning The Refrigerator

Cleaning the refrigerator
in the country house
Is like some perverse exercise
in something the opposite of archeology;
In yellow rubber gloves and with
Lysol cloths
I erase the ketchupy finger prints
of a brother-in-law, 4 years past,
some short black hairs from "Spikeward",
the German shepard who shared my wife's bed,
2 years before me
and crayon marks from my 3 year old niece
(who's now nearly 17).
"Powerful Cleaner- No Bleach Harshness" reads the blue and white canister, but
what it fails to warn me of
are the myriad other ways
in which
the harshness of a clean refrigerator
might be felt.

7/28/2012: Kerhonkson

The radio off, we
drive in silence
She sits beside me
listening to cricket gossip
I, driving, write this poem:
The Kerhonkson roads
have a smell in summer:
At 62 Fahrenheit and 70% humidity,
Old wood houses
and lush green roadsides, and
ancient trees with porous bark.
(Occasionally, a skunk
a smell I like.)
My t-shirt sleeve grows wet by the open window,
And slow motion moths change direction before the windshield
white wings blue in the dashboard light
We round a bend where three 

Local boys died
Their truck split in half on a telephone pole
(the newest ghosts of Samsonville Road)
Each time
At this bend, I hold the wheel a little tighter
resisting the seduction
of entropy
We're almost home now,
There's a pickup close behind;
"better signal early, so he doesn't rear end us"
-my practical wife pulls me out of my own head
"remember to put the ice cream away before you sit down to write your poem"
She says to me as she
disappears down the hall.

The Following Account Is Absolutely True

So, at 5:08 a.m., I wake up to pee. I flip on the bathroom light, (silly me,) and one of the three 100 watt bulbs that hangs above my medicine cabinet explodes into a shower of shattered glass. Now I have to run and get my crocs (I only wear them in the house), plug in the tired old vacuum we inherited when we moved in (from my sister-in-law's "granny" in law), which has the shortest cord of any vacuum in history, and make sure every splinter of glass has gone with Elvis (left the building). I do just that. Mind you, I still have to pee, but now, so does Carrie. She gets HER crocs (she only wears them in the house too, I swear!) and shuffles into the dark bathroom. While she's peeing, I decide to put the vacuum away. When I pick it up from whence I'd leaned it, the canister, in an apparent show of sympathy with the bulb, forceably ejects, spewing dust, glass, and- inexplicably, peanut shells, all over the living room floor. Carrie says it must be something in my aura, and I search my Broca's brain for new and interesting curse words with which to experiment.
Through no small amount of therapy and gentle coaxing, I finally get Granny's vacuum to agree once more that it is, in fact, a vacuum, and clean up our now war torn living room. I still have to pee, and go to do exactly that, but first I don yellow gloves and flip the circuit breaker to make sure I don't get electrocuted as I surgically extract the root of the terrorist bulb from its socket. Carrie gives me the once over, says of my naked-but-for-yellow-rubber-gloves-and-black-crocs look, "You know, I'm certain there's a fetish for that somewhere if you google it", and helpfully shuffles back to bed. I meanwhile, replace the terrorist bulb with a new one, one of those twisty new bulbs which promise four hundred years of use and mercury poisoning if they break.
Job well done, I congratulate myself with a well earned pee, flush and get up to wash my hands. As I stand before the sink, I notice how bright the new bulb is. As I notice how bright the new bulb is, I glance in the mirror, and when I glance in the mirror, I see something stuck to my forehead. Is it dried blood? Had a kamikaze shard actually gotten through to its' target, missing my left eye by less than an inch, scarring me for life? As I lean closer to the mirror, it becomes apparent that it's not in fact dried blood at all, but a clump of dried tomato. "Where on Earth did I get dried tomato on my face?" My brain races through improbable scenarios until... Suddenly I remember last night's failed chili con queso operation, exploding salsa and all, and, as images of techni-color culinary misadventures splash across the movie screen of my mind, I make a decision: I'm going back to bed, and staying there until October.

Mizmor L'Avi (a new psalm- in progress)

I am running a race
for which there is no course
My feet
are insubstantial as dreams and
I'm running alone
Though the world stands by the side
they mostly do not cheer
but throw holes and rocks
instead before my feet.

1986

Instead of muscles and money, we
wore our guts on our sleeves
Open and ragged, bleeding and raw
Our strength was in our difference, and
With razor cut arms we pledged our allegiance
to all of the gods of
“not one of them”, and with
boots laced high, and
hair painted and spiked, we
stood aside,
while the parades passed by
mocking the band with our
own frantic beat.

A Transwoman's Declaration of Solidarity

A rare introduction: I wrote this piece, when someone accused me of trying to "cash in on female privilege", because I told them I'm transgendered; oh, that I thought fast enough to let this roll off my tongue at that moment, but oh well:


Female privilege?
Tell me all about female privilege, because
my sisters and I would love to know;
You mean like
getting dry humped from behind during rush hour on the
6 train, or
Paying more money for
haircuts and clothing
all while making
33% less than our male colleagues for the same exact work,
for the same exact job?
Or,
that patient condescending smile we get
when we
go to the auto parts store, and
actually know what we're
talking about?
Or how about
year after year
sitting in a cubicle
while some
20 something Jack or
Johnny-come-lately
suddenly gets his own windowed office?
Tell me,
Tell me about female privilege.
Tell me again how most
any woman could go out to a bar, most
any night, and
never pay for a single drink,
or
How lucky we are, that
even on a frumpy day
we can get laid,
whenever we want,
I'll counter your assertions by telling you that most
every day,
some poor woman who let some strange man
buy her a drink, gets
drugged and raped
and sometimes worse,
but never mind,
You were saying,
You were about to tell me
all about female privilege,
Because really,
No, seriously,
I'm pretty sure I speak
for my cis and trans sisters alike
when I say we'd
love to know
what it is we've
all been missing.

Caution

Pronouns are
heavy blunt objects.
Falling pronouns
may break your bones.
Swinging a pronoun
in a crowded room
may result
in grievous injury.
Beware of pronouns:
Use with caution.

Bitch

St. Mark's Place
Crowd of male voices
teenagers chanting
"Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!"
A young woman's voice breaks through:
"Let me go!"
All of this happens
out of my sight
Behind the protection of a
parked box truck.

How Blessed

How blessed to feel
at home in my own skin
For years, so worried
over minutiae, like
the proper way to carry schoolbooks, and
the masculine way to walk
How I covered up my body
in the South Florida heat
Covered my soft curves
in denim and leather layers
Now how blessed
not to hide
unembarrassed for my soft hands
and to no longer fear
the natural sway of hips
to take off the mask
To become
unstiffened
How blessed it is
to be myself.

Please Don't Ask

Please don't ask me if I'm going to
"cut it off",
it’s none of your damned business, and it
reduces me to
an object of
“genital dissonance”.
Don't ask me who I'll be tomorrow,
I barely know
who I am today.
Ask me instead, how does it feel?
What was it like to be
forced into boyhood,
(then manhood,)
to have been made to don some kind of
learned masculinity,
all the while fearing the fragilty of my disguise.
Or, ask me what it's like to be a
double agent
a secret spy in the
war of the sexes;
I'll happily give away all my learned secrets,
see, I've always been kind of an antiwar activist!
Ask-
what was it like to grow up in a world that told me
time and again that it's
better to pretend,
rather than to risk anyone finding out the horrible truth.
And finally,
ask me what it feels like, at the age of 43,
to grow tired of pretending, and I'll gladly tell you,
it's like
taking off a pair of someone else's shoes,
shoes that have always been 2 sizes
too small.

When I'm An Old Woman

When I’m an old woman, I’ll wear denim shirts

and big turquoise rings on my

tanned, knotted fingers

When I’m an old woman, I’ll paint in my garden

mixing red dust from the earth

into oil, and light

I’ll grow out my gray hair

way down past my ass, and be

“that strange old woman, who barely ever comes to town”.

When I’m an old woman, I’ll laugh about the time

when everyone around me, thought that I was a man.

When I’m an old woman, I’ll smile at the mirror,

because the woman smiling back at me, knows

who I am.

I'm Trying To Invent A Brand New Language

I’m trying to invent a brand new language
to tell you about the place that I’m from
but I can’t use words such as
female, or male,
you’d never understand how they don’t apply.
So I’ll tell you instead how I
come from a marshland:
a soft place between
two fortified nations with
impassable borders and
natal requirements for citizenship.

If I tried to explain how I’d been handed
the wrong disguise
by the border coyotes when I came to this place, or
if I told you I don’t have a green card
and that I feared discovery
every second of every day,
maybe you’d see,
maybe you’d understand, how
try as I do just to fit in,
and try as I have all of my life,
none of that matters.
I’m just not from here.

And I wish I could tell you
how lonely it is here
when nobody else can
speak my language:
a language that
even I have yet to learn.

if truly

If truly I hated you, I'd
roll you in sugar, or
douse you in Tabasco,
whatever I had to do
to make your bitter taste
easier to swallow.