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Where do this body go?

It an egg screaming

to get from its shell,

a cantaloupe dreaming of slices.

It cooks a dinner. It pours a tea.

It do not stare too long at its face.

That bristling, wet beast in boyskin.

Barbed wire antlers it want

to slice from its temples.

Clothes in the closet

in boy sizes, body a bowstring

wanting to draw back, snap

to any other body:

more hippy, more slender,

less shoulder, less antler.

A kidney’s heart

instead of an Adam’s apple.

I don’t know this body.

We meet in a forest.

It raised its antlered head,

its charge meant only to gore.

Woman watches bacon grease

pour into a hole.

Woman watches fire.

Woman tear her skin

like foil and a sea

of thrashing crows

spills out. Woman

takes a name from

a jar of blades.

Woman severs an artery,

drinks blood. Woman dreams

of cleaving her cock.

Woman don’t want to be

the teeth of dogs, the lunge

of police batons, the chants

of blood and soil. Woman

soul painted over with the shale

and sheets of bloody continents,

big like the dumping rains

of a hurricane. Woman

burrows so deep in her body,

it fills the deer tick with longing.

I started calling the boy daddy just to get him to call me a bitch, his baby girl. It was the only way to get him to name me what I felt. His cock stabbed deep in my belly, where its little white roots spilled.

Our bodies burnt beside the chicken coop.

Three faces wreathed in flames, our faces charred

to blackened bones. Like janitors, they scooped

our ashy remains to trash bags. The scarred

earth showed the cops where to find us and them.

When caught, they told their story of how we

got lured away like moths, pulled by our hem

to dirt, a knife shoved up between our knees

in where our womb would be. They dipped the blade

in eye sockets. They laughed while we thrashed, bled

and soaked the soil till they poured oil and laid

a match. Our skin: a dream. This blaze: our bed.

The chickens clucked. Wind made trees cast their nets.

Your breath there stilled, but we’ll never forget.

1—

I thread marrow to filament

like orb spiders and my body

unwinds. My body takes

new shape takes a man

takes his fingers deep

into my cunt, and I’m happy

to feel him press in, to thread,

to make me a sickness, a rot,

a desire that drips from my lips.

2—

There are bugs in every tree root,

in your belly. A body carries a city

of living things but what carries

a body? What makes me a woman?

This sense in my chest? This semen

caught in the back of my throat?

The bruises constellated on my thighs?

3—

I walk in the open. There are many ways

to feel open, body magnified by stares

when you leave a bathroom stall,

when you see a dead name on top of yours.

You see a house open, a house grows

many floors a house is empty a house

boarded up. There is a postcard: my head

exploding over pavement.

4—

I left the room to walk along

a curtain of concrete with

my bare feet, music blasting out

the sound of geese, the river,

wings of chatter. I floated.

I erupted in this skin, ready

to peel it off, ready to burst veins,

to set its tendons out in spools

and thread marrow to make

jawline slighter, hips broader.

A woman easier to dream than live.

I am not living this dream.

It’s why I called you at lunch,

lying flat on the office floor,

asking you, If a buck can

shred its antlers, why can’t I?

A street art festival—paintings

tattooed to the pavement.

Me with this meat

pulled over my shoulders,

following A. to stalls,

checking on jewelry,

squirrel paws dried in jars,

a man hawking Bowie portraits.

Me these nots, fingering my scarf

wishing it was noose, wishing

to hang this boyskin,

pinned by stares and thinking

what name to take

as my dead one burned

like crumbling paper.

When we stepped in the department store, I felt myself fall. Surrounded by women’s clothes, mirrors all around showing me the boyskin I wore here. I dug my nails in my palm to not cry. The thought plain: there’s so much I must collect before they know I’m a river, too.

My knees ache. We set ice

and I lay on the couch

we pushed through a window

to get into this house.

That was a month ago,

before we knew my flesh

was a set of cawing beaks

trying to push out their cage.

Now I tell people to call me Jay.

Like my knees, I’m not sure

what well my body

hauled these pains from.

The swelling fists folded in her belly

got congratulated everywhere her skirt

drifted. My belly remains bedrock.

No roots will penetrate, no seeds

pushed in. Me nothing but fantasy.

Abstract painting. Flesh rent

by brushes. Portrait of an other

beyond boyskin, this cock, my flesh

missing tabs to peel it back.

Do I tell this woman I want to rob

her belly and babe like foxes raiding

a chicken coop? No. I compliment her,

a barren doll with pebbles

where my eyes should be.

Name changes. Others unsure why.

Others ask, “What pronoun?”

Words do not open to answers.

I want to wear a dress

and not be beaten for it,

want women to not shrink

from me as if I’m a predator.

I never wanted the wolf

but the wide-eyed deer

charging with her horns.

When I teach

will students listen to someone

prying off their skin?

Will my partners accept me,

reject my boyskin? If I drop

flowers from my mouth, roots,

soil, bees, if a whole garden

spilled from my body

will anyone believe these seeds?

Will my crotch be cupped for evidence?

A. wants me to stitch my boyskin on

when I teach, not be a woman baring

her body to knives. She does

not care about the knives, she cares

about me making her feel bad

for not kneeling, for not answering

every expectation built around my cock.

If I’m too brave, how does that make others look?

Listen,

I’m a hollow, not courage but a crave.

I snap my antlers from my skull

and bleed down my face, their growths

felt like tumors, the sawbone I want

to apply, the sander, these hairs

I want burnt off my face, legs, belly—

this cock I want split in half.

Outing myself is not a politic.

Being in boyskin makes me want

to skin this flesh. Safer for me to stand

in front of a class in a skirt,

voice deep as tumbling stones,

expecting a fight the way birds

challenge windows.

None of this leaps like stags

from my throat when I try explaining

to A. We sit on opposite ends of her room,

a lamp on and the locusts waxing outside.

I tell her I’ll support whatever she does

in the class she teaches. The silence

that builds between us, as she doesn’t answer,

fills my vision like a rush of light

that sweeps in as a hand, and my body

feels thrown from this crash.

Student,

I’m waiting to see you, feel your apathy like hard concrete cupping my feet. The bags under your eyes at 8 am tell me my body is a hazy dream, warps before you. Boyskin shed. My antlers sliced from my temples. Still a beast, chimera, horrible flesh, teacher/predator, your writing instructor and my body—my body—velvet to touch and tear. Your blood—boom and bloom when it touches my velvet. My name wrong according to your advisor. My hips a narrow you find no hollow in. Your doubts, a trail of barbs wrapped along the voice climbing out my throat.

Yes, I was born a buck. Yes, they insist I remember I was socialized buck. This class is only supposed to show you how to write an essay. I will show you how to shred velvet down to skull. My body will do some things no one can follow. If I’m lucky, you won’t remember me in a year.

If I’m especially lucky, you will take this lesson of peeling back the apple, coring it, slicing out the wedges, as not a bite into sin, but a sin that is methodical, that considers its work. My body is that work, student. So is your body.

We both have things we must answer for.

They watch my body

the way crows see a dime—

a stare too long, as if

they spot my wrongness sleeping

in their life—my starlight thin fingers

working up their wet throat.

My body what makes them a question mark,

fallen on me as a scythe.

I don’t want my body to be a confrontation,

coiled and ready to spring, ready to be

stabbed, kicked, spat on, told

the bile in my throat is the taste of sin.

As if they could do worse

than the punishment I want

for this body when I see this cock

dangling, these follicles bristling

so much I want to set a knife in one

and lift out my whole skin.

T. says she’s nervous when we wear

dresses out in public. I am, too,

but I tell her, think how much power

a dress holds, when I leave

the bathroom stall and they flinch, too.

I lie on the floor of my room, phone cupped

to ear like I’m listening for a bird’s

slight, racing heart. My mother answers, “Son?”

I trace my finger over carpet, try

to summon words to say, to joke, to make

her see this boyskin peeled off like a rind.

I remember us in a parking lot,

my gangly limbs crossed on a curb, she sat

beside me and told me knots inside

her belly would bloom into a baby

by Thanksgiving, she said then, “Since you were

born a boy, we need to try again for

a girl.” A decade later I tell her

she was wrong. On the phone she mutters, “What

do I say?” Say you are the woman who

loves me, that if you wished to keep a boy

you should have mounted his horned head against

the wall, should’ve seen this come like headlights

sweeping in, say you plan to pull me through

the windshield and then cradle my antlered

frame as it bleeds out. As these thoughts burn

like coals pressed to my tongue, their sizzle hushed

when I tell her, “I can give you some time

and talk to you later?” We both agree.

A beep, and the bird’s heartbeat flatlines.

But will other women want me?

Will they let me laugh and speak

as one? Will they hear the hoofed

beast in my voice and see a predator

that likes to pin its prey

with bloody antlers

and watch it thrash?

I’ve seen it. I’ve raised my voice

and seen hands ball to fist, jaws

tighten, a shrink inward that made

me feel like fracturing ice sheets,

a slow sadness, an ache depressing

itself into the ocean.

Will they say I was fitted

for boyskin, raised in, unable

to shed my horns and teeth?

As if no matter the scowls

and slurs men leave branded

on my flesh, their trust falls short

when they hear the rocks scraping

in my throat, assuming I’m the ocean

here to surge, betray, never be land

no matter how much sand

I heap on the shore. No matter

how much I want this boyskin

obliterated into a spay

they just barely feel

pressing cold and damp

to their throat.

some see me say

i want to swallow

you whole toes

to tongue gnashed up

some see me say

let me at that cunt

and parts of me want

to be bounced on their lap

feel her fingers saw

in the gap where

i cut my cock to rose petals

some see me and want

big hands to bend them

and fuck them with a dick

heavier than theirs

some want to stick

their head beneath my skirt

and suck my balls

some see me and feel no bile

but heat a wet a pulse

and sometimes i want

to disappear in what they see

embrace the sway

of these antlers in a dress

want them to bite my collar bone

but who will stay

after the cum has dried

who will hold me when

i shake and scream

because my belly won’t

carry a nest of eggs

because my body grows

only a teratoma

sadness its swollen weight

even when desired

i must figure what sleeves

of boyskin people want

what limbs what voice what holes

no one asks

where to reach

to find that tumor in me

no one asks if they can

close their hands around it

tear it out

In the thrift store I’m beyond words,

a floating cloud between clothing racks

rubbing shirt fabrics together,

picking out skirts with A. then

becoming an animal thrashing on clothes

in the changing room.

I felt later I was a stake

in the ground tied to nothing,

a wound in soil,

a total catastrophe

that wanted touch and not touch.

Lately I absent from every one,

feeling safe with no one,

like every act looked again—

was the way she sipped coffee proof?

Should we question how she stood in class?

My words a body of handprints,

loud hands, hands slender—T. is jealous,

says I put dresses on so much because

I’m making up for lost time, but days

I wear boyskin feels like digging

in my flesh searching for roots to pull.

It was turning to fall.

I noticed this hollow, the notness

becoming a face in knotted wood,

it was a buck that watched me.

Mouth open and tongue pulled out,

blood bubbling in her throat.

It was my face. A death I wanted

to wade into like an ocean’s total dark,

and in this notness I felt my antlers,

my jawline, swollen mound

on my throat, and it was wrong.

People saw my body as a table, not a desk.

They placed cuts of meat to tear,

spilt coffee, sugar, crumbs.

When they saw my body, its uses,

I emerged a horned creature,

no matter how many blades

I wanted to slice the horns from my temples.

No words came to speak against what they saw,

even my voice was their signal,

even my voice,

especially my voice.

Tonight I dreamt a lighter voice. I spent hours hunched at my desk, laptop whirring and line of an audio recording gliding across the screen. I spun voice after voice, tipping, stretching, like I hopped stone to stone across a river. Each foot fell too heavy. Each voice washed away. I deleted the recordings, and considered the depth of the welt on my throat, how deep my fingers would need to dig to pluck it out.

*

I first considered the depth in a high school math class. Someone sitting behind me heard me spoke and said, “Whoa your voice is real deep.” I slender but with a voice deeper than the men in my family. I did not know what to tell him. He said, “Don’t expect such a deep voice from someone like you.” More people drew their attention to me. I got asked to speak again, and no words came to mind, so I said apple. They drew back as if I said die.

*

The gas station was an orb of light on a darkened Pennsylvania turnpike. I pulled in and decided to get a cup of coffee. It was 2 a.m. The woman at the register had leopard print nails and lips like parrot feathers. She asked if I needed anything else, blinked when she heard me say no— “Boy, you do radio? You should, got one of those voices for it.” She was not the first to tell me this. I smiled and paid for my coffee, lied: “If I knew the first thing about how I would.”

*

T. loved the way I growled into her ear. Now we scramble for things to say in bed. I’m mostly quiet. I ask her not to touch my cock. We focus on her body, and we both feel bad that it seems like I have nothing to share, nothing I wish to offer for her to hold for I’m afraid how that reach will be felt.

*

I do not work radio, but I teach, so I am expected to speak. When I do, students see a buck in dress and makeup. The person at the gas station pauses when I respond to their good day with, “How y’all doing.” They answer with "Is that one of them nonbinary weirdos?" A man approaches me, starts talking about an artist he knows across town. Jeff. Says if I know him. “You’d like him. He’s uh, eccentric, like you.”

*

I think of not speaking, as if my vocal chords were invaders in this body. As unable to hide as antlers. I stand in my room, staring at the clothes I will wear, willing my body to take a similar shape, even when I know it won’t. Slicing off a limb, sanding down my brow or jaw, planting breasts in my chest, will not change what happens when my bark comes tumbling out. I will always be illegible. Like a shadow crossing into the night, my shape leaping into darkness as deer do when scared away from a road you pass at night. A reminder that, beyond the many paths you travel, I am the beast living in darkness. And there are many of us that can jump out at any time. There is only one of you.

To be stone on a garden path,

noticed only by the ant’s incisors,

the snow shovel’s scrape.

To not be watched, desired.

I want hooks cast into me

and pulled down, degraded,

a nothing, a tree without

limbs. A rot. Were I doe

things would be different.

Dysphoria, is sometimes

holding your body at arms’ reach,

suspect, not trusting lovers,

your own touch (a briar

of thorns), not trusting your eyes

(a boy in girl’s dress).

How do I not just restart?

How to shape a world in me

without reducing it to fantasy?

Like the yelling crow, the sheet

of bleating paper, answers come

in a language I can’t know.

Students,

I am the change glued together in your car cup-holder. You’ve not seen my faces yet. I come skirting into class in a woman’s shirt, a man’s jeans. I come to class with my hairy voice—antlers caught on the doorway as I try to go through. I’m all animal. I turn over the garbage and eat the trash. You won’t believe what happened this morning:

Everyone confused me for having boyskin. You did, too. I was crouched on the porch, sipping coffee with A. while she smoked and our neighbor’s ride honked for her to come outside. No one stared like they did at the skirt I wore yesterday. I did not wear one today because a class is not ready for skirts. You have not asked for an illegible instructor, I have not answered. I’ve come in queer and beastly, hung on meat-hooks plunged through my back. I dangle and thrash and teach. Outside you take pictures of a woman cast in bronze and I’m jealous.

No one will question metal’s gender, but a stag and a fag? I am always sprinting into the hunter’s sights. You see the flash of my pink nails, suddenly you take aim, as if, you too, are all illegible instinct. Neither of us composed, but a cause and effect, the lurch in your shoulder from the rifle’s kick, the lurch in mine when I open to the bullet like a mouth.

From that mouth you hear a woman’s distant wailing, and my hand cups it and it is muffled. You ask me how the next assignment will be graded. I am bleeding in the class, and your hands all brush your bags as if you're conjuring a spell. I say dismissed. And the bleeding stops. And the woman in me falls silent.

Last night’s lawn was my lover,

my teeth bit and scooping in her dirt,

rock and root danced down my throat.

I thought axe, scissors, way a knife

might sink in a body like its yogurt.

You sat with me smoking,

chanted everything you thought wrong with me.

I watched the drop between our porch

and door to our basement,

whether or not landing headfirst

would snap my antlers, crack skull,

shape my neck in a question mark.

I’m not sure what you even asked,

I woke that morning reaching

to still feel the woman inside me,

instead my hand found a set of crooked teeth,

a jaw that closed slowly on my palm

like an elevator descending on your head,

from the jaw’s throat, a woman’s scream.

It was my voice. My voice.

I tell them I do not love skirts or dresses that much,

but there are no breasts to protest, a bulge at my waist

and voice heavy as a box of nails that makes others

assume I’m a beast in boyskin. At least

an antlered thing in a dress tells a different story.

An. tells me my nose bleeds

just as I leave the office.

Everyone watches a thing

fall out me like a rib tugged

off to cusp a new body.

When I rub my nose,

my fingers return with blood.

Boyskin worn today, hoodie bloodied.

I picture blood a floral pattern

my body carries, a thing falls

from my body like a tongue.

I am without words. I call no one.

I feel the drop in me.

I have not made a bottom or held

in the rush, the scream of pine

needle pushed back—my feet

walk me down the hallway—

the pine is tugged back farther—

door to stairwell closes behind me—

the pine snaps back and wood whips

and needles descend like talons

and I’ve punched myself in the face

so hard I stumble down steps.

I smash the elbow in the wall,

I press the palm to the wall,

a thing falls out me

and I slam the head into the wall,

fall back dazed still punching the face

till the door opens

and I’m in public again.

I do not feel pain from the body,

only wish to see it, by degrees,

crumble, I take a lighter and burn

all my fingers, I smash my face

to draw more blood, I bite hands.

I say nothing. I do not cry, feel grief.

There is an empty, a thing fell

out me. In its place: this perpetual wounding,

concussions spread like hands

pressed to windows of a locked

burning building, this body the building,

and I am the fire, and I am the building

and I am the one watching it, smiling

others see me say window

i say a horned head smashed _through and _

_ hangs there with glass_

_ s c r a m b l e d_

_ o n t h e f l o o r_

blood edges to embrace

the carpet

Today through Target I got usual stares,

felt usual pain at a mannequin’s

swollen belly—barren as me.

It was a Wednesday afternoon,

traffic full-throated, we finished

our couple’s counseling

and it was your second birthday.

I sat and listened to you tell me

the pain of being together might be too much.

At Target my body felt locked like a mannequin,

unable to shift its plastic

no matter the clothes I put on.

I felt the first of everyone there,

felt myself as if my skirt was dyed

in dirt and blood while I held

a shopping basket, as if I just

leapt from the wild,

teeth gnashing and bleating.

And I had no money. Gas and rent,

parking tickets, groceries and birthdays,

but I still paid T.’s estrogen, her therapy,

her snacks, her drive to the airport,

still hosting parties on nothing but food

from the foodbank, still knocking antlers

with every buck around me.

And this is a good week. The one

where my best friend said he cut himself,

the one where I said aloud,

“I think they love their grudge more than me.”

Saturday night I hung my head

over a small fire and wailed in the yard.

She heard from her window. She thought

that figure in the dark was a wounded animal.

I was. I am.

_In order to survive the weather we had to become stone—_Audre Lorde

In order to survive steel, stares, tickets on glass

the concussion of pint slathered on cinderblock

like eels clung to seabed, you pulled your body out.

To survive the nights slept on a floor

with its hardness spread like a slap,

to survive bristles tipped to knives

into your body when touched,

to survive dangling skin you don’t let

lovers touch, the bareness of a belly

that won’t splinter, bleed, leak or swell,

you pull your body into a beast’s. A muzzle

that drips clouds into winter nights,

eyes that scan lumbering shadows

in the horizon. You weave through wooden

faces when they frown, flinch when you

suggest a baby doesn’t need a pronoun

placed on it like concrete slabs. You scratch

heavy as dripping water on most people,

they try to plug you, erase your leak

to their fixed ways. That dress with the antlers

becomes that thing we pull our children from,

a thing, a beast bleating. I am that beast—I am

the warped stone gender’s fist breaks on,

the water eroding into the earthen bricks they built

their house on. I become the fracture. The figure.

The taste in their mouth, bile their throat

hauls up in buckets from the well in their belly.

I am the darkness looking back, the set of eyes and shape

staring out from the woods. My call turns

their head for the ways my voice renders

me illegible, for those monstrous horns.

I will slip through a horizon of hands

like muckwater to pull them into terror,

to be what loneliness comes from planting

your antlers into the earth and turning over

their precious futures they planted in the dirt,

to raze what they reproduce—

Listen:

the largeness of our shared discomfort

points at something, stare deep into that darkness,

and see what stares back up at you,

see me fall antlers first like it’s a cracked

ice-sheet, see the tenderness in my palm

as it presses on the ice, reaching for you.

The city, an adder's mouth, pulls open.

I wade into the bottom. My hooves

on the sidewalk enunciate my stride

while drunk boys in sports Jersey's

slipped out the bars, clumps of rat kings

whooping down High Street after the game.

I ducked my antlers in a diner/bar

to meet A. over breakfast tacos.

It was 3 p.m. and the sun was already hauling

a curtain over the sky, the buildings

across the street cut with rose.

People walked their dogs past

a couple of homeless men.

After eating, we wandered down

the block. A. told me this part of the adder

was the nice part, free of venom.

Down a street was a defunct

mechanic's garage turned coffee shop,

its metal slats shut to the winter.

We talked living here. My vision blurred

to three futures: one where

I got small as a toe bobbing in the ocean,

the second I spread to an algae bloom

that sucks the oxygen out and drowns

the fish beneath me, and in the third

a riptide pulls me under,

like a swallow sucked under a car, I'm

twisted from one wrecked body into another.

In all these futures I wonder

if the debt tied to my neck

might get so heavy it snaps,

and what might happen

to my velvet, sold or mounted?

My hooves ground to talcum powder?

My meat carved and salted,

hung for sale in this city. My skin sold

to an aging, rich gay couple? The skyline

of towers push into the night

gentle as fangs into a thigh,

their lights spilling up like venom.

As I stand under it, I feel my body

being erased with the sky.

A no gestures. Gestures with thighs

clapped together, hands clenched

like gator jaws, head pulled back

eyes scattering from the no. A mouth—

a brick-shaped mouth, the stone

that tears the lip before it smashes the teeth.

A no gestures, it yells.

I was dog-sitting in December. Rows and rows

of rich houses, snow-sloshed sidewalks

walked up to panels of canary yellow,

viridian, robin’s egg, bay windows

strung with Christmas lights.

Each house with a little no my body’s no

responded to like a magnet greets its iron shavings.

I’d eaten nothing all day,

and the sun climbed down,

and the temperature limped along,

dogs barked, a car passed. I thought

of the doctor who asked me to name

the last time I was happy. The best

I had was, suicidal teens grow into suicidal adults.

Christmas lights took over

the emptying sunlight. I wandered

between houses, my no hung heavy

in my head as it dragged overgrown

antlers behind it, horns swept up then down

behind me, turning over ice,

leaving trails in the snow.

My no brayed until my teeth ached.

Nothing bad happened in the dark.