The Promise

My poems are dysphoric. My poems are weeping about shape. I’m sorry. You wish a poem had hips. You wish a poem whipped itself natural and narrow, edging the left side, pumping fast and wrist-thin. You wish a poem was broken long before being offered to you, like a stallion, or a will, or a porcelain doll. I don’t hate you. I can’t hate you for the biological way that you’re wired, sexually bound to a need for distinction. My poems are apologetic. I would curl and swell the way you wanted, if I could. I would cram my block-text shoulders into the tight alley of your prestige dress, because I do love you. But I have an epigenetic need towards regicide. I have a conquest-of-conquest in the lining of my arteries. And you would ask my poems to snap their lines into pieces you can fold into a suitcase. My poems don’t have time to sink into a lake. My poems are too busy raising their voices, like one raises a child. Once my poems sprouted a head for every name of blasphemy, spoke to me in a delicate cask of Babel heritage: “To break is to conquer.” Define transphobia in a textbook myth: transphobia is the demand that creatures obey the law of shapely beauty. Somewhere there is a song, recited from the heart of a girl who hasn’t been born yet. It hiccups and borrows and jangles against the parts that come from her other resplendent monsters. Her voice deep and welling, like a stab wound. It hurts to hear because it should. My poems forgive their bones. I’m sorry we can’t be the doll in the window, we can’t be the tulip hopeful blossom. This poem is unbroken, like a promise, or a curse. This poem promises to love you no matter what. This poem has decided that she is beautiful anyways.