i suppose it is fair that i must trade one far-off longing for another. to have both would be greedy in the eyes of your god

as i lay on concrete the chill congests my nose. i feel it deep behind my eyes as i search the clouds for your laugh. tomorrow i will wake up choking.

inside, the darkness forces surrender as i whisper my want for you into a silk pillowcase and striped cotton sheets. they hold me and tell me all the things that i cannot have. “im sorry”, they say. im sorry.

before i left you asked me if you would see the pain on my body again and i told you i didn't know. but really it lingers from years prior if only you get close enough to look.

get close enough to look.

percieve my hurt. take me into your palms like a monarch with broken wings and stitch me back together again

pull apart the threads with your teeth next week.

in my dreams you hum false promises that i believe as i wake. in this bed i have learned many songs to be lies. yours are neither the first nor last.

i close my eyes in an attempt to hear the tune once more but the memory of your hand holds my throat and a moan takes the place of a chord

i hope to have the notes memorized on my skin by tomorrow.

the music vibrates my eardrums

each note possessing the dull insistence of a hammer

*

i negotiate with the speaker, plead that it drown out the hidden sound of your laugh

while I remained beneath the rapid illumination

freakishly visible,

yet profoundly alone.

*

jealousy burns a hollow in my throat,

a small, relentless poison

where words refuse to rise.

*

i look up for you again and again

but am greeted by smoke

thin, distant,

creeping and taunting where an answer should be

*

i close my eyes as if i could disappear completely, turn my very self into the colors dancing on the wall

*

i am illuminated. i am alone.

*

my shame wraps around my clothes and slips underneath with familiar hands, caressing at my chest in a foolish attempt to hold my heart

*

you know not what you have done

know not the mess you have plunged those hands deep into

*

your fingerprints turn muscle to strings, your touch reverberating against my ribs

*

you are ignorant of the catastrophic fire you ignite. you give me nothing, toss a finished cigarette onto the ground, yet my being, dry and desparate, clings to and envelopes around it.

*

if you do not begin to run you will be caught in the flames.

it is a small and unlit room of wanting that i have furnished with things you have never given me

i crave you with a hunger so quiet it has become almost indistinguishable from myself

there are affections that do not announce themselves but settle, like silt, until one day you discover that the riverbed has changed. i learn to live with that hushed alteration; to stand beside you carrying an entire weather I cannot name, while you, mercifully unaware, move through my world untouched - unknowingly an ache beneath the core

you will never break my heart. you never knew you were holding it.

*

i shiver in the cold

i freeze when i sleep

*

my ribs beg to be touched, pulled apart.

teach me to choke without your gaze

*

sink your teeth into my neck, take what is offered

*

let it seep into your clothes

*

scrape it off of your fingernails

*

sink your hands into my chest,

expand my bones so that i may see the stars,

so that they may look back

*

the wound in my sternum is sticky, it drips.

i rip open the scab so that i may search for you in the scar it leaves behind

*

again, please, again

*

eat of my body and drink of my blood

*

take

take

take

*

i am your god, your sheep

*

flesh of christ, forgive us our sins

*

mother mary, full of grace

*

make use of what i provide.

leave me to thrash and twitch in the mud.

do not turn when i cry out.

*

no one will ask you what you've done.

my blood has long since rusted under their pillow

*

they will catch a glimpse of my devotion

in the shadows of your pupils

and they will understand.

,

*

not as you were meant to be, but as something interrupted.

*

a luna moth,

green as the hidden underside of summer,

laid beneath the hose where our cat had left the evidence of a brief and ancient hunger.

*

your wings were gone. ripped off and through.

*

those which carried you through the dark had been torn away,

and what remained seemed too small to contain the beauty that had been there.

*

i knelt beside you on the concrete

scooped your delicate body into my hands

your little legs cling to my fingers

i will not let you go. i promise.

i will not let you go alone.

*

the world around us carried on -

an owl wept in the far off trees

the stars hung overhead

a feline stalked another bug in the darkness.

*

yet there you were,

a fragment of moonlight discarded in the grass.

*

i thought of how little time

you were ever given.

how little time you were destined to have.

*

luna moths, in adult form, do not have mouths.

they cannot eat in their time on this earth.

*

i thought of how you have starved.

within your tattered wings i see my own.

*

the things i reach for that cannot feed me,

the names i repeat like prayers,

the doors i stand clawing before long after they've closed.

*

you were born carrying an absence.

you were born hungry

we live to die, you and me.

*

the moth spends its brief life searching for what it was made to find,

burning through itself for a touch in the dark.

*

i myself have done the same

mistaking longing for nourishment,

devotion for bread.

*

we love you. please eat.

*

i think of your patience

the time spent waiting in your cocoon until at last you emerged

wings painted delicately, something dreamed rather than made.

*

and for what?

*

a handful of nights.

a few silent journeys through the darkness.

a brief search for another beneath the stars.

and this.

*

no storm.

no winter.

no grand ending.

only the claws of a predator.

*

did you find what you were looking for?

*

in my hands you struggle

over and over you try to fly, but everytime you find you are missing a part of yourself

*

your little legs cling to my fingers

it will be over soon. i promise.

it will be over soon.

*

looking at you,

i felt it settle over me.

i weep.

*

you are every song cut short,

every letter unfinished,

every goodbye arriving too soon.

*

you were so fragile.

not weak. do not be mistaken.

fragile in the way of the waters surface

in the way all lovely things seem to exist

on the thinnest edge of presence

*

i move your body and lay you in a budding flower

i hope it will feel like home.

*

the petals bent around you.

*

the wind moved softly through it,

as if night itself

were trying not to disturb your rest.

*

i wonder whether beauty always carries this sorrow within it:

the certainty that it cannot stay.

*

you hurt my heart

i cannot help you. im sorry.

*

for a long time I stayed there,

keeping watch over a creature whose name I did not know nor decide until after it was gone.

*

a small witness to a small tragedy

no one else would notice.

*

i love you. im sorry. forgive me.

*

standing above you,

i mourn not only what you were,

but all the beautiful things in this world that survive so long becoming themselves,

only to disappear almost as soon as they arrive.

*

i love you. im sorry. forgive us.

*

goodnight, sweetheart.

the walls of the house soaked with our laughter

*

each drop a quiet attempt

to keep us there a little longer.

each drop an addition to the bottom of the hourglass, swallowing up the time i have left

*

it gives and it takes and it steals and taunts me

*

later, when i walked outside,

his ring sat heavy on my finger:

a plea too fragile for me to say out loud

*

your jacket was in my hands,

smelling faintly of you,

its sleeves dripping at my sides

reluctant to leave as well.

I am clutching it on the car ride home the same way i did while i avoided letting go of you

*

goodbye came softly

damp sleeves, tired smiles, wet eyes

and the ache of watching a bedroom light disappear

through the rain we could not outrun.

*

years from now,

i will still hear the rain pour

and remember what love can look like.

borrowed leather in trembling hands,

a glint of silver in the cold night,

a promise to see you next time.

a constant presence pressing against my skin,

soaking through denim, through hair, through whatever version of myself

i thought i was supposed to carry into the night

*

i don’t turn back

*

there was a time when nights felt smaller than this,

contained by hallways, people,

that all looked the same

clocks that moved too slowly

and the quiet, constant question of who i was allowed to become

*

i remember counting exits all my life

from buildings, from expectations

*

now the street stretches open, shining,

each puddle catching a distorted version of the sky

and i jump and splash and let the water seep into my shoes

not careful, not rehearsed.

*

it’s loud in a way that feels human

voices layered over music, over laughter, over the sounds of other people who made it out too

*

we are all a little soaked, a little unfinished

but it sits lighter on us now

*

someone grabs my arm and shouts my name like they’ve known me forever

and maybe they have, in the way that matters

through shared glances across rooms, through surviving the same long days

through becoming.

*

there’s no moment where it suddenly makes sense

no clean line between then and now

just this—

standing in the backyard with raindrops lingering on my skin like your fingertips

*

realizing that i stayed

that i left

that both can be true at once

*

i am here on purpose.

*

the rain washes away the last of my borrowed edges, leaving only what refused to disappear at my core

*

the crowd is under tarps, trying to keep dry

but i stay where the sky can reach me, my eyes turned towards the stars.

*

the one that felt sharp at the edges,

all angles and almost gone

like if I disappeared just right,

maybe i'd be worth keeping.

*

now i feel too much.

too visible.

my skin is louder than my voice

(which already is so terribly obnoxious)

and every inch of me is something

i failed to erase.

*

i used to be hollow—

i used to feel clean.

*

but now i have to carry the weight of myself

everywhere I go.

*

i hate the body that survived,

hate the way it refuses to vanish

at least if i had died back then i would've died beautiful.

*

there’s a voice in me that still keeps score,

still speaks to me,

weighs down my shoulder and whispers in my ear

you were better when you were worse.

the other day my therapist asked me who's voice it was

i told her i didn't know.

my mother's, maybe.

*

but sometimes,

in the quiet dim of my room,

that voice sounds just like me.

sitting with the hum, its grotesque frame light painting us in soft, unreal colors—

violet, blue, something almost like truth.

you don’t touch me - don't sit near me, even -

but i feel you look over every now and then

i wonder what you're thinking.

onscreen, someone is unraveling—

static and longing,

a life that flickers wrong

until it doesn’t.

(s)he ripped open chest cavity,

something bright instead of blood

i watch the glow reflect in your eyes and wonder what you see:

a story, a mirror.

i want to say your name

like it could anchor me here,

like it could make this moment real:

- outside the trembling light.

- outside my trembling hands

please just hold me.

but instead I sit across you

half-formed, half-brave—

and let the colors wash over us both,

our friend with the cool name cried during the credits like i did

we both know we won't ever be enough of what we wish we could

our feminine frames, features, voices

There Is Still Time. There Is Still Time.

afterwards we all talked about silly things:

our weird exes, gay awakenings.

you made us swear to never let yours leave the room, and i won't. not even in my writing. but it was silly nonetheless

i wonder if you see me for what i really am. realistically i know you don't, and i can't really expect you to. as ive said before, im playing dress up. i look like a girl in all the ways that count.

if i could be a Real Boy like you i think i would dress the same. do my makeup and hair the same.

but i would be a Real Boy so it wouldn't matter

and maybe i could be a little bit more beautiful and maybe i could be a little bit taller and maybe you would want me like Real Boys want other Real Boys

but i can't bury myself with dirt and wake up different like they did in the movie

there is no pink opaque for me

i am stuck burying myself differently.

i have a lab in the morning. the shower is running. i need to get in

*

the steam comes through the curtain reminding me of what must be done

*

when i first came to college my trans friend asked me if i would ever start fully masc presenting. i go to this gay environmental woke school in the middle of a city. our library gives out free binders. both kinds.

"our college will get you" he said

i didn't believe him at the time.

*

but now it is 12:41 am and i am sitting naked on the toilet and i am crying because the trans tape videos on tiktok don't work the way i want them to.

*

the shower is right there.

it’s not even far.

i could pull the curtain and step in and pretend that everything is normal

*

but i can’t

i know what happens next.

*

i have to look down.

down at this fucking body that follows me like a curse

without permission,

without warning.

*

and i don’t want to negotiate with it today.

i don’t want to pretend it feels like mine

when it doesn’t,

when it never really has.

*

i want a flat chest

that doesn’t interrupt my breathing

that doesn’t feel like something i have to hide

or hold or ignore.

*

my binder is too tight. the trans tape will not stick without folding over and fucking up.

*

i want a flat stomach that doesn't peek from my shirts, making me known before i even speak

*

i want small arms and small legs and small hands

*

maybe i just want to be a kid again

*

i want to exist

without bracing myself

for my own reflection.

*

and I know this sounds so damn dramatic

there are a million worse things happening in the world right now and all i can think about are my boobs and big ass stomach

*

but when will that liberal agenda force the gender reassignment on ME?

*

so now it is 12:51 am and i am sitting here naked on the toilet and im sitting here and sitting here and crying.

avoiding something as simple as a stupid shower

*

and I don’t have a clean ending for this.

(certainly not if i don't grab my soap soon. lol.

do you get it? nevermind.)

*

no lesson. no sudden strength

*

i am still disgustingly naked and the room is far too hot now it's making me sticky and i desperately need to get up and instead i am writing this fuckass poem. and i have a bio lab at 8am. fuck e.coli cultures. they know nothing of gender dysphoria.

something vile looks back at me, limbs mangled and twisted, whispering sorrows into my ear

i was meant to look like something else.

i see those boys in passing— effortless, sunlight on their shoulders, their bodies moving like they were always meant to be there

and something in me folds inward.

envy, but not fully. something quieter. sharp.

a grief with no true loss to accompany it

i trace their outlines in my mind and wonder how it would feel to exist without translation, to wake up and not have to explain why breathing feels misfitted.

in my mind i borrow their clothes sometimes— threads of hope stitched into cotton

but the mirror reshapes them,

softens, curves, rewrites as if to say:

not for you!

i hate its words. the ones that insist i will always be interpreted, always explaining myself.

any pronoun is fine. any pronoun is fine.

you can't misgender me! i promise.

but somewhere beneath that noise, quiet as a pulse, there’s something stubborn and deep 

it has been with me since before i was born

and He will die with me too.

that just won’t stop touching it

obsessive, pulsing, inflamed

*

you smile and i almost forgive the architecture of my damage,

almost believe i could live inside something soft

*

how dare you be gentle.

*

i resent your kindness to me. your thoughtful words

you know nothing of what i do, how i think

*

i scream instructions on how to hold me correctly

and resent you for needing them

*

i am starving for something bitter and cruel

i have been starving since i was young.

*

i am six years old and my mommy stands in front of the mirror, bra and sweatpants on

i sit quietly on the bed

she dissects herself in front of me, picking apart every bit of disgusting fat.

"come do my workout! i don't want you to look like me."

i am six years old. i am never enough and always too much. far too much.

*

ten years later my ribs are bigger than my stomach until i learn to eat again

and again

and again

at 18 my body looks just like hers.

*

i see myself and feel disgust

i force the hunger to come back.

i force my fingers down my throat.

*

my reflection ripples, turning into an echo of her.

i sharpen the blade she handed me.

i desperately try to make myself smaller and my body begs for a mercy i refuse to give

please god make me beautiful again.

*

my rage turns inward and i spit it back up again (into the dorm bathroom as my roommate sleeps)

*

i carry my anger in my teeth and my fists

it festers and grows and claws its way out

*

i am angry at you for what you do

i am angry at my mother for what she does not

angry at myself for allowing it to get this way.

*

it never leaves, just changes shape

it burns out until nothing noble remains

nothing at all.

not in my stomach. not in my heart.

*

my rage dissipates into numbness

the wind whips ice into my eyes and i do not flinch

i simply continue to stare at the wall

*

i was designed to ache

to shrink

*

everything collapses into the same place

*

you stand beside me with warm hands trying obnoxiously to love a dog that won't stop biting

*

my mother's missed calls pile up with the numbers on the scale

*

and my anger - threaded through everything

turning love to friction

mother to pain

body to enemy

rage to silence.

*

i love you badly, hate myself well

i burn through every quiet moment, the end nowhere in sight

*

it's all the same hunger at the core.

when it reaches the idea of you

how it softens like it has learned a better language for beauty.

*

your name drifts through ordinary hours,

turning them tidal and strange.

even silence leans toward you,

gravity chosing a face.

*

you grabbed my neck 3 days ago.

*

not hard enough to hurt.

the perfect amount of p̶l̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ pressure.

i think you know that. were you testing me?

you unravel me enough already. anything more feels almost cruel.

*

i am the dog at the edge of the table,

trained not to beg.

still i lift my head at your hands' every movement

hoping it might be meant for me

*

i could not control how my eyes reacted to you

filling with something sinful and forbidden

when you let go i said "again" as a joke

but i think we both know i meant it.

maybe i think too many things.

*

since then the air remembers your hands.

my thoughts keep replaying that second:

a door left half-open

in a house that never sleeps.

*

last night i made a playlist for you,

your middle name hidden in the title.

a secret only the brave would notice;

my small flag planted in longing.

*

now i listen to it on repeat—

imagining your light eyes turned dark fixed upon me,

your voice lowered close against my ear,

the careful way your hands might discover my skin.

"*

and it aches in the quiet after each song

because you are a door I cannot open,

a beautiful distance i can't quite catch up to

*

the steps around my longing grow heavier

no longer tiptoes,

but my heels do not yet touch the ground.

soon i may stride across the pavement.

*

"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple:"

*

it lives under my ribs, a low hum that never resolves. every breath drags over it, a bow across a fraying string, and my chest tightens as it braces for a name it is too afraid to speak.

the echo reverberates in my throat

*

you always fall asleep on the floor next to me first. you lay close enough that our sleeves touch

not enough to mean anything.

your breathing, usually shallow and restless, begins to deepen—slow, even surrendered.

each exhale a soft confession you did not know you were making. or perhaps not really one at all.

i lay awake beside you, counting the space between us like a sin. if i had moved an inch my hand would have found your skin

*

instead I listen to the steady rise and fall of you

to the quiet proof that you could rest so easily 

next to what you make of me.

my eyes grow heavy but i will not sleep.

i dare not move, not breathe too deeply, or else risk disturbing you

*

the nights after you leave are heaviest

they lean over me, close and humid, whispering all the ways you are not here.

my bed takes your shape like a rumor, and I turn toward it as if absence could answer.

my eyes grow heavy from carrying the weight of you. not sleep— but the gravity of almost. Almost your hands in mine. Almost your mouth saying stay. Almost.

i pray you will ask me to smoke with you tonight.

*

i have longed for you in the quietest ways— in unsent messages, in songs played too late, in the desperate inhale as i try to take in the scent of your hair as you pass

*

there is a loneliness that tastes like wine left open on the counter.

sweet at first, then sharp. unbearable. I gag and I drink it anyway. I let it seep into my shirt and drip from my mouth.

my thirst is unquenchable. i imagine it will be for a very long time.

*

if you came to my door tonight i would not ask why it took so long. i would not speak of the nights I folded myself around your absence like a letter never opened.

*

i would only let my aching chest crack wide, let all my trembling spill out, and hope—with the last of my breaking voice—that wanting you this much has not already made me hollow.

*

you will never read these poems. you'd never ask. sometimes i wish you would.

smoke curled upward as a quiet offering, braiding itself with the dusk.

then the crows came— a parliament of black wings— circling, circling, the sky a thought they couldn’t finish.

each pass was a soft thunder, feathers stitching shadows over our faces, their cries sharp enough to nick the silence.

we laughed. not because it was funny, but because we were alive and the air was in our lungs and the dead beneath us had already spent theirs.

crows can remember faces— hold them in the dark archive of their bright minds, carry them for years.

I wondered what they saw when they looked down at ours: figures exhaling ghosts, laughing softly among the dead.

two brief heat signatures

among the long-cooled names.

Would they know us tomorrow?

Would they warn their kin?

the smoke drifted, thinned, disappeared. The crows looped again, tireless. Around and around they flew

like days, like grief, like joy

returning in new feathers.

to be alive is to be seen.

a friend, a bird, the air itself.

not for the hush of what’s finished.

not for the dates etched in stone.

for the brief warmth of our shared breath in the cold, the faces we turn toward the sky, the way we rise, again and again, into the flare of the night.

before I learned the word “wrong.”

It fit in everyone else’s mouth like a hymn they’d always known

but somehow i could never annunciate it quite right

Before I was born the doctors leaned over my mother’s body,

grainy black-and-white flicker on the screen between them

they said, almost certain,

“It looks to be a boy!”

I think they saw my soul form within the static

cursing nature for how wrong she had been.

for what she had done to me.

Later they corrected themselves.

The room rearranged its expectations.

Blue folded back into pink

My name shifted, future ripped from my tiny hands

I came out screaming

I used to wish on quiet things:

birthday candles, 11:11,

the first star brave enough

to show itself.

I borrowed boyhood in secret:

in the mirror’s softened light,

in oversized polo shirts, throwing a fit anytime I was put in a dress,

in the low register of my laugh

when no one was listening.

Each small act a rehearsal

for a life that could've been mine

Puberty came like a negotiation.

My voice: stubborn, secretive

began to sink lower each year,

a small mercy I held

like contraband.

Every crack and drop felt like evidence

that something in me

was telling the truth.

Now in my dorm room I am older, maybe braver.

Shielded by the thin morning light

I pull the binder over my shoulders,

stretch the fabric down my tender ribs,

flatten my mixed feelings.

It presses hard against my chest —

a quiet ache I carry to class,

breathing shallow but steady.

I borrowed boyhood in secret once.

Now I wear it in layers

Each its own costume, a game of pretend

Something that can never be truly mine.

has learned to be patient,

the streetlights surrender

and the night resumes its original shape.

our footsteps echo and reverberate a question

the hill has been asked many times before.

he invites me carelessly

as if desire were not a ritual;

as if a cigarette was not a small vow

spoken sideways through our teeth.

my bones say yes before i even reply

fire blooms in his hands.

cheekbone and a loose strand of hair -

beauty made temporary.

the darkness competes with flickers of light to touch his face, yearning to surround him completely

the smoke comes through my lips

filling the space where words might go,

turning my breath into a confession

I inhale what he has touched and exhale something entirely unnamed.

the hill rises, indifferent.

cigarette turns to ash

"time to turn around"

your flower. your purity. the clean white coat of a lamb

don't let anyone touch you! you'll be rotten.

did you know you were born dirty?

better fix that. save it forever. lock it in a box and give the key to your father.

sweet young girl. little little girl.

devoured by the wolf.

"do you just want to get it over with?"

the darkness of my basement surrounds me. the eyes in the tv stare awaiting my answer.

the audio begins to crackle and distort

get it over with

get it over with

get it over with

static.

The Kife begins to slice it's way through

hell greets me in my own body

fire rips through my stomach, branding my organs with His symbol

my nails dig into the arms above me. they beg for mercy but are pushed away

this is the righteousness of god. this is divine punishment. dirty disgusting girl. what have you done?

white fur matted with my own blood. flowers wilted and rotten inside of my skin. i smell the mold sprouting on my ribs

as quickly as He comes, He has gone. Floral soap washes away his sin. I am left to lick mine alone, a wolf in sheep's clothing.

my mother takes me to the fabric store in the morning. they have nothing to stitch what is broken inside of me. my legs shake as i lean against the wall. I've become possessed with His presence. It never leaves me.

I reek of disgust

I lie in the grave i have dug myself. the maggots are kinder. their mouths gentler on my bones

time heals all wounds.

it cannot give back what was taken.