{"sf1_id":null,"sf2_id":"mM3j0rD1","title":"Shredding Velvet","author":"wrenquire","words":4952,"posted_at":"2026-07-07T18:58:58.000Z","tags":["poetry"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/mM3j0rD1-shredding-velvet","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/mM3j0rD1","image_url":"https://www.sofurryfiles.com/std/thumb?page=\u0026ext=.jpg","description":"A poetry manuscript written between 2016 and 2017. Something I wanted to save in another place as it was a pretty vital documentation of my experience coming out as transgender and all the work, fighting, and suffering I needed to endure. Going through this crucible made me the woman I am today, and sometimes I like to go back and review what it was like. Many of the more narrative and confessional poems are simply recordings of my life, and rereading something like AMAB actually made me tear up.  \n  \n Idk if anyone will read this, but if you do! I'd like to share this quote from the poet and essayist Mary Karr: \"I like to say poetry has to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.\" Working through this manuscript was a great comfort to me in a time of immense stress, confusion, and desperation.   \n  \n Also fun fact! Carnelian as a fursona would not exist without this manuscript!","content":"Where do this body go?\n\nIt an egg screaming\n\nto get from its shell,\n\na cantaloupe dreaming of slices.\n\nIt cooks a dinner. It pours a tea.\n\nIt do not stare too long at its face.\n\nThat bristling, wet beast in boyskin.\n\nBarbed wire antlers it want\n\nto slice from its temples.\n\nClothes in the closet\n\nin boy sizes, body a bowstring\n\nwanting to draw back, snap\n\nto any other body:\n\nmore hippy, more slender,\n\nless shoulder, less antler.\n\nA kidney’s heart\n\ninstead of an Adam’s apple.\n\nI don’t know this body.\n\nWe meet in a forest.\n\nIt raised its antlered head,\n\nits charge meant only to gore.\n\nWoman watches bacon grease\n\npour into a hole.\n\nWoman watches fire.\n\nWoman tear her skin\n\nlike foil and a sea\n\nof thrashing crows\n\nspills out. Woman\n\ntakes a name from\n\na jar of blades.\n\nWoman severs an artery,\n\ndrinks blood. Woman dreams\n\nof cleaving her cock.\n\nWoman don’t want to be\n\nthe teeth of dogs, the lunge\n\nof police batons, the chants\n\nof blood and soil. Woman\n\nsoul painted over with the shale\n\nand sheets of bloody continents,\n\nbig like the dumping rains\n\nof a hurricane. Woman\n\nburrows so deep in her body,\n\nit fills the deer tick with longing.\n\nI 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.\n\nOur bodies burnt beside the chicken coop.\n\nThree faces wreathed in flames, our faces charred\n\nto blackened bones. Like janitors, they scooped\n\nour ashy remains to trash bags. The scarred\n\nearth showed the cops where to find us and them.\n\nWhen caught, they told their story of how we\n\ngot lured away like moths, pulled by our hem\n\nto dirt, a knife shoved up between our knees\n\nin where our womb would be. They dipped the blade\n\nin eye sockets. They laughed while we thrashed, bled\n\nand soaked the soil till they poured oil and laid\n\na match. Our skin: a dream. This blaze: our bed.\n\nThe chickens clucked. Wind made trees cast their nets.\n\nYour breath there stilled, but we’ll never forget.\u0026nbsp;\n\n1—\n\nI thread marrow to filament\n\nlike orb spiders and my body\n\nunwinds. My body takes\n\nnew shape takes a man\n\ntakes his fingers deep\n\ninto my cunt, and I’m happy\n\nto feel him press in, to thread,\n\nto make me a sickness, a rot,\n\na desire that drips from my lips.\n\n2—\n\nThere are bugs in every tree root,\n\nin your belly. A body carries a city\n\nof living things but what carries\n\na body? What makes me a woman?\n\nThis sense in my chest? This semen\n\ncaught in the back of my throat?\n\nThe bruises constellated on my thighs?\n\n3—\n\nI walk in the open. There are many ways\n\nto feel open, body magnified by stares\n\nwhen you leave a bathroom stall,\n\nwhen you see a dead name on top of yours.\n\nYou see a house open, a house grows\n\nmany floors a house is empty a house\n\nboarded up. There is a postcard: my head\n\nexploding over pavement.\n\n4—\n\nI left the room to walk along\n\na curtain of concrete with\n\nmy bare feet, music blasting out\n\nthe sound of geese, the river,\n\nwings of chatter. I floated.\n\nI erupted in this skin, ready\n\nto peel it off, ready to burst veins,\n\nto set its tendons out in spools\n\nand thread marrow to make\n\njawline slighter, hips broader.\n\nA woman easier to dream than live.\n\nI am not living this dream.\n\nIt’s why I called you at lunch,\n\nlying flat on the office floor,\n\nasking you, If a buck can\n\nshred its antlers, why can’t I?\u0026nbsp;\n\nA street art festival—paintings  \ntattooed to the pavement.  \nMe with this meat  \npulled over my shoulders,  \nfollowing A. to stalls,  \nchecking on jewelry,  \nsquirrel paws dried in jars,  \na man hawking Bowie portraits.  \nMe these nots, fingering my scarf  \nwishing it was noose, wishing  \nto hang this boyskin,  \npinned by stares and thinking  \nwhat name to take  \nas my dead one burned  \nlike crumbling paper.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nMy knees ache. We set ice\n\nand I lay on the couch\n\nwe pushed through a window\n\nto get into this house.\n\nThat was a month ago,\n\nbefore we knew my flesh\n\nwas a set of cawing beaks\n\ntrying to push out their cage.\n\nNow I tell people to call me Jay.\u0026nbsp;\n\nLike my knees, I’m not sure\n\nwhat well my body\n\nhauled these pains from.\n\nThe swelling fists folded in her belly\n\ngot congratulated everywhere her skirt\n\ndrifted. My belly remains bedrock.\n\nNo roots will penetrate, no seeds\n\npushed in. Me nothing but fantasy.\n\nAbstract painting. Flesh rent\n\nby brushes. Portrait of an other\n\nbeyond boyskin, this cock, my flesh\n\nmissing tabs to peel it back.\n\nDo I tell this woman I want to rob\n\nher belly and babe like foxes raiding\n\na chicken coop? No. I compliment her,\n\na barren doll with pebbles\n\nwhere my eyes should be.\n\nName changes. Others unsure why.\n\nOthers ask, “What pronoun?”\n\nWords do not open to answers.\n\nI want to wear a dress\n\nand not be beaten for it,\n\nwant women to not shrink\n\nfrom me as if I’m a predator.\n\nI never wanted the wolf\n\nbut the wide-eyed deer\n\ncharging with her horns.\n\nWhen I teach\n\nwill students listen to someone\n\nprying off their skin?\n\nWill my partners accept me,\n\nreject my boyskin? If I drop\n\nflowers from my mouth, roots,\n\nsoil, bees, if a whole garden\n\nspilled from my body\n\nwill anyone believe these seeds?\n\nWill my crotch be cupped for evidence?\n\nA. wants me to stitch my boyskin on\n\nwhen I teach, not be a woman baring\n\nher body to knives. She does\n\nnot care about the knives, she cares\n\nabout me making her feel bad\n\nfor not kneeling, for not answering\n\nevery expectation built around my cock.\n\nIf I’m too brave, how does that make others look?\n\nListen,\n\nI’m a hollow, not courage but a crave.\n\nI snap my antlers from my skull\n\nand bleed down my face, their growths\n\nfelt like tumors, the sawbone I want\n\nto apply, the sander, these hairs\n\nI want burnt off my face, legs, belly—\n\nthis cock I want split in half.\n\nOuting myself is not a politic.\n\nBeing in boyskin makes me want\n\nto skin this flesh. Safer for me to stand\n\nin front of a class in a skirt,\n\nvoice deep as tumbling stones,\n\nexpecting a fight the way birds\n\nchallenge windows.\u0026nbsp;\n\nNone of this leaps like stags\n\nfrom my throat when I try explaining\n\nto A. We sit on opposite ends of her room,\n\na lamp on and the locusts waxing outside.\n\nI tell her I’ll support whatever she does\n\nin the class she teaches. The silence\n\nthat builds between us, as she doesn’t answer,\n\nfills my vision like a rush of light\n\nthat sweeps in as a hand, and my body\n\nfeels thrown from this crash.\n\nStudent,\n\nI’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.\n\nYes, 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.\n\nIf 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.\n\nWe both have things we must answer for.\n\nThey watch my body\n\nthe way crows see a dime—\n\na stare too long, as if\u0026nbsp;\n\nthey spot my wrongness sleeping\n\nin their life—my starlight thin fingers\n\nworking up their wet throat.\n\nMy body what makes them a question mark,\n\nfallen on me as a scythe.\n\nI don’t want my body to be a confrontation,\n\ncoiled and ready to spring, ready to be\n\nstabbed, kicked, spat on, told\n\nthe bile in my throat is the taste of sin.\n\nAs if they could do worse\n\nthan the punishment I want\n\nfor this body when I see this cock\n\ndangling, these follicles bristling\n\nso much I want to set a knife in one\n\nand lift out my whole skin.\n\nT. says she’s nervous when we wear\n\ndresses out in public. I am, too,\n\nbut I tell her, think how much power\n\na dress holds, when I leave\n\nthe bathroom stall and they flinch, too.\n\nI lie on the floor of my room, phone cupped\n\nto ear like I’m listening for a bird’s\n\nslight, racing heart. My mother answers, “Son?”\n\nI trace my finger over carpet, try\n\nto summon words to say, to joke, to make\n\nher see this boyskin peeled off like a rind.\n\nI remember us in a parking lot,\n\nmy gangly limbs crossed on a curb, she sat\n\nbeside me and told me knots inside\n\nher belly would bloom into a baby\n\nby Thanksgiving, she said then, “Since you were\n\nborn a boy, we need to try again for\n\na girl.” A decade later I tell her\n\nshe was wrong. On the phone she mutters, “What\n\ndo I say?” Say you are the woman who\n\nloves me, that if you wished to keep a boy\n\nyou should have mounted his horned head against\n\nthe wall, should’ve seen this come like headlights\n\nsweeping in, say you plan to pull me through\n\nthe windshield and then cradle my antlered\n\nframe as it bleeds out. As these thoughts burn\n\nlike coals pressed to my tongue, their sizzle hushed\n\nwhen I tell her, “I can give you some time\n\nand talk to you later?” We both agree.\n\nA _beep_, and the bird’s heartbeat flatlines.\n\nBut will other women want me?\n\nWill they let me laugh and speak\n\nas one? Will they hear the hoofed\n\nbeast in my voice and see a predator\n\nthat likes to pin its prey\n\nwith bloody antlers\n\nand watch it thrash?\n\nI’ve seen it. I’ve raised my voice\n\nand seen hands ball to fist, jaws\n\ntighten, a shrink inward that made\n\nme feel like fracturing ice sheets,\n\na slow sadness, an ache depressing\n\nitself into the ocean.\n\nWill they say I was fitted\n\nfor boyskin, raised in, unable\n\nto shed my horns and teeth?\n\nAs if no matter the scowls\n\nand slurs men leave branded\n\non my flesh, their trust falls short\n\nwhen they hear the rocks scraping\n\nin my throat, assuming I’m the ocean\n\nhere to surge, betray, never be land\n\nno matter how much sand\n\nI heap on the shore. No matter\n\nhow much I want this boyskin\n\nobliterated into a spay\n\nthey just barely feel\n\npressing cold and damp\n\nto their throat.\n\nsome see me say\n\ni want to swallow\n\nyou whole toes\n\nto tongue gnashed up\n\nsome see me say\n\nlet me at that cunt\n\nand parts of me want\n\nto be bounced on their lap\n\nfeel her fingers saw\n\nin the gap where\n\ni cut my cock to rose petals\n\nsome see me and want\n\nbig hands to bend them\n\nand fuck them with a dick\n\nheavier than theirs\u0026nbsp;\n\nsome want to stick\n\ntheir head beneath my skirt\n\nand suck my balls\n\nsome see me and feel no bile\n\nbut heat a wet a pulse\n\nand sometimes i want\n\nto disappear in what they see\n\nembrace the sway\n\nof these antlers in a dress\n\nwant them to bite my collar bone\n\nbut who will stay\n\nafter the cum has dried\n\nwho will hold me when\n\ni shake and scream\n\nbecause my belly won’t\n\ncarry a nest of eggs\n\nbecause my body grows\n\nonly a teratoma\n\nsadness its swollen weight\n\neven when desired\n\ni must figure what sleeves\n\nof boyskin people want\n\nwhat limbs what voice what holes\n\nno one asks\n\nwhere to reach\n\nto find that tumor in me\n\nno one asks if they can\n\nclose their hands around it\n\ntear it out\n\nIn the thrift store I’m beyond words,\n\na floating cloud between clothing racks\n\nrubbing shirt fabrics together,\n\npicking out skirts with A. then\n\nbecoming an animal thrashing on clothes\n\nin the changing room.\u0026nbsp;\n\nI felt later I was a stake\n\nin the ground tied to nothing,\n\na wound in soil,\n\na total catastrophe\n\nthat wanted touch and not touch.\n\nLately I absent from every one,\n\nfeeling safe with no one,\n\nlike every act looked again—\n\nwas the way she sipped coffee proof?\n\nShould we question how she stood in class?\n\nMy words a body of handprints,\n\nloud hands, hands slender—T. is jealous,\n\nsays I put dresses on so much because\n\nI’m making up for lost time, but days\n\nI wear boyskin feels like digging\n\nin my flesh searching for roots to pull.\n\nIt was turning to fall.\n\nI noticed this hollow, the notness\n\nbecoming a face in knotted wood,\n\nit was a buck that watched me.\n\nMouth open and tongue pulled out,\n\nblood bubbling in her throat.\n\nIt was my face. A death I wanted\n\nto wade into like an ocean’s total dark,\n\nand in this notness I felt my antlers,\n\nmy jawline, swollen mound\n\non my throat, and it was wrong.\n\nPeople saw my body as a table, not a desk.\n\nThey placed cuts of meat to tear,\n\nspilt coffee, sugar, crumbs.\n\nWhen they saw my body, its uses,\n\nI emerged a horned creature,\u0026nbsp;\n\nno matter how many blades\n\nI wanted to slice the horns from my temples.\n\nNo words came to speak against what they saw,\n\neven my voice was their signal,\n\neven my voice,\n\nespecially my voice.\n\nTonight 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.\n\n\\*\n\nI 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_.\n\n\\*\n\nThe 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.”\n\n\\*\n\nT. 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.\n\n\\*\n\nI 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.”\n\n\\*\n\nI 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.\n\nTo be stone on a garden path,\n\nnoticed only by the ant’s incisors,\n\nthe snow shovel’s scrape.\n\nTo not be watched, desired.\n\nI want hooks cast into me\n\nand pulled down, degraded,\n\na nothing, a tree without\n\nlimbs. A rot. Were I doe\n\nthings would be different.\n\nDysphoria, is sometimes\n\nholding your body at arms’ reach,\n\nsuspect, not trusting lovers,\n\nyour own touch (a briar\n\nof thorns), not trusting your eyes\n\n(a boy in girl’s dress).\n\nHow do I not just restart?\n\nHow to shape a world in me\n\nwithout reducing it to fantasy?\n\nLike the yelling crow, the sheet\n\nof bleating paper, answers come\n\nin a language I can’t know.\n\nStudents,\n\nI 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:\n\nEveryone 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.\n\nNo 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.\n\nFrom 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.\n\nLast night’s lawn was my lover,\n\nmy teeth bit and scooping in her dirt,\n\nrock and root danced down my throat.\n\nI thought axe, scissors, way a knife\n\nmight sink in a body like its yogurt.\n\nYou sat with me smoking,\n\nchanted everything you thought wrong with me.\n\nI watched the drop between our porch\n\nand door to our basement,\n\nwhether or not landing headfirst\n\nwould snap my antlers, crack skull,\n\nshape my neck in a question mark.\n\nI’m not sure what you even asked,\n\nI woke that morning reaching\n\nto still feel the woman inside me,\n\ninstead my hand found a set of crooked teeth,\n\na jaw that closed slowly on my palm\n\nlike an elevator descending on your head,\n\nfrom the jaw’s throat, a woman’s scream.\n\nIt was my voice. My voice.\n\nI tell them I do not love skirts or dresses that much,\n\nbut there are no breasts to protest, a bulge at my waist\n\nand voice heavy as a box of nails that makes others\n\nassume I’m a beast in boyskin. At least\n\nan antlered thing in a dress tells a different story.\n\nAn. tells me my nose bleeds\n\njust as I leave the office.\n\nEveryone watches a thing\n\nfall out me like a rib tugged\n\noff to cusp a new body.\n\nWhen I rub my nose,\n\nmy fingers return with blood.\n\nBoyskin worn today, hoodie bloodied.\n\nI picture blood a floral pattern\n\nmy body carries, a thing falls\n\nfrom my body like a tongue.\n\nI am without words. I call no one.\n\nI feel the drop in me.\n\nI have not made a bottom or held\n\nin the rush, the scream of pine\n\nneedle pushed back—my feet\n\nwalk me down the hallway—\n\nthe pine is tugged back farther—\n\ndoor to stairwell closes behind me—\n\nthe pine snaps back and wood whips\n\nand needles descend like talons\n\nand I’ve punched myself in the face\n\nso hard I stumble down steps.\n\nI smash the elbow in the wall,\n\nI press the palm to the wall,\n\na thing falls out me\n\nand I slam the head into the wall,\n\nfall back dazed still punching the face\n\ntill the door opens\n\nand I’m in public again.\n\nI do not feel pain from the body,\n\nonly wish to see it, by degrees,\n\ncrumble, I take a lighter and burn\n\nall my fingers, I smash my face\n\nto draw more blood, I bite hands.\n\nI say nothing. I do not cry, feel grief.\n\nThere is an empty, a thing fell\n\nout me. In its place: this perpetual wounding,\n\nconcussions spread like hands\n\npressed to windows of a locked\n\nburning building, this body the building,\n\nand I am the fire, and I am the building\n\nand I am the one watching it, smiling\n\nothers see me say _window_\n\ni say _a horned head \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; smashed_ \u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;_through \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; and\u0026nbsp;_\n\n_\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;hangs there with glass_\n\n_\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;s\u0026nbsp; c\u0026nbsp; r\u0026nbsp; a\u0026nbsp; m\u0026nbsp; b\u0026nbsp; l\u0026nbsp; e\u0026nbsp; d_\n\n_\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;o n \u0026nbsp; t h e\u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; f l o o r_\n\nblood edges to embrace\n\n\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;the \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; carpet\n\nToday through Target I got usual stares,\n\nfelt usual pain at a mannequin’s\n\nswollen belly—barren as me.\n\nIt was a Wednesday afternoon,\n\ntraffic full-throated, we finished\n\nour couple’s counseling\n\nand it was your second birthday.\n\nI sat and listened to you tell me\n\nthe pain of being together might be too much.\n\nAt Target my body felt locked like a mannequin,\n\nunable to shift its plastic\n\nno matter the clothes I put on.\n\nI felt the first of everyone there,\n\nfelt myself as if my skirt was dyed\u0026nbsp;\n\nin dirt and blood while I held\n\na shopping basket, as if I just\u0026nbsp;\n\nleapt from the wild,\n\nteeth gnashing and bleating.\n\nAnd I had no money. Gas and rent,\n\nparking tickets, groceries and birthdays,\n\nbut I still paid T.’s estrogen, her therapy,\n\nher snacks, her drive to the airport,\n\nstill hosting parties on nothing but food\n\nfrom the foodbank, still knocking antlers\n\nwith every buck around me.\n\nAnd this is a good week. The one\n\nwhere my best friend said he cut himself,\n\nthe one where I said aloud,\n\n“I think they love their grudge more than me.”\n\nSaturday night I hung my head\n\nover a small fire and wailed in the yard.\n\nShe heard from her window. She thought\n\nthat figure in the dark was a wounded animal.\n\nI was. I am.\n\n_In order to survive the weather we had to become stone—_Audre Lorde\n\nIn order to survive steel, stares, tickets on glass\n\nthe concussion of pint slathered on cinderblock\n\nlike eels clung to seabed, you pulled your body out.\n\nTo survive the nights slept on a floor\n\nwith its hardness spread like a slap,\n\nto survive bristles tipped to knives\n\ninto your body when touched,\n\nto survive dangling skin you don’t let\n\nlovers touch, the bareness of a belly\n\nthat won’t splinter, bleed, leak or swell,\n\nyou pull your body into a beast’s. A muzzle\n\nthat drips clouds into winter nights,\n\neyes that scan lumbering shadows\n\nin the horizon. You weave through wooden\n\nfaces when they frown, flinch when you\n\nsuggest a baby doesn’t need a pronoun\n\nplaced on it like concrete slabs. You scratch\n\nheavy as dripping water on most people,\n\nthey try to plug you, erase your leak\n\nto their fixed ways. That dress with the antlers\n\nbecomes that thing we pull our children from,\n\na thing, a beast bleating. I am that beast—_I am_\n\nthe warped stone gender’s fist breaks on,\n\nthe water eroding into the earthen bricks they built\n\ntheir house on. I become the fracture. The figure.\n\nThe taste in their mouth, bile their throat\n\nhauls up in buckets from the well in their belly.\n\nI am the darkness looking back, the set of eyes and shape\n\nstaring out from the woods. My call turns\n\ntheir head for the ways my voice renders\n\nme illegible, for those monstrous horns.\n\nI will slip through a horizon of hands\n\nlike muckwater to pull them into terror,\n\nto be what loneliness comes from planting\n\nyour antlers into the earth and turning over\n\ntheir precious futures they planted in the dirt,\n\nto raze what they reproduce—\n\nListen:\n\nthe largeness of our shared discomfort\n\npoints at something, stare deep into that darkness,\n\nand see what stares back up at you,\n\nsee me fall antlers first like it’s a cracked\n\nice-sheet, see the tenderness in my palm\n\nas it presses on the ice, reaching for you.\n\nThe city, an adder's mouth, pulls open.\n\nI wade into the bottom. My hooves\n\non the sidewalk enunciate my stride\n\nwhile drunk boys in sports Jersey's\n\nslipped out the bars, clumps of rat kings\n\nwhooping down High Street after the game.\n\nI ducked my antlers in a diner/bar\n\nto meet A. over breakfast tacos.\n\nIt was 3 p.m. and the sun was already hauling\n\na curtain over the sky, the buildings\n\nacross the street cut with rose.\n\nPeople walked their dogs past\n\na couple of homeless men.\n\nAfter eating, we wandered down\n\nthe block. A. told me this part of the adder\n\nwas the nice part, free of venom.\n\nDown a street was a defunct\n\nmechanic's garage turned coffee shop,\n\nits metal slats shut to the winter.\n\nWe talked living here. My vision blurred\n\nto three futures: one where\n\nI got small as a toe bobbing in the ocean,\n\nthe second I spread to an algae bloom\n\nthat sucks the oxygen out and drowns\n\nthe fish beneath me, and in the third\n\na riptide pulls me under,\n\nlike a swallow sucked under a car, I'm\u0026nbsp;\n\ntwisted from one wrecked body into another.\n\nIn all these futures I wonder\n\nif the debt tied to my neck\n\nmight get so heavy it snaps,\n\nand what might happen\n\nto my velvet, sold or mounted?\n\nMy hooves ground to talcum powder?\n\nMy meat carved and salted,\n\nhung for sale in this city. My skin sold\n\nto an aging, rich gay couple? The skyline\n\nof towers push into the night\n\ngentle as fangs into a thigh,\n\ntheir lights spilling up like venom.\n\nAs I stand under it, I feel my body\n\nbeing erased with the sky.\n\nA no gestures. Gestures with thighs\n\nclapped together, hands clenched\n\nlike gator jaws, head pulled back\n\neyes scattering from the no. A mouth—\n\na brick-shaped mouth, the stone\n\nthat tears the lip before it smashes the teeth.\n\nA no gestures, it yells.\n\nI was dog-sitting in December. Rows and rows\n\nof rich houses, snow-sloshed sidewalks\n\nwalked up to panels of canary yellow,\n\nviridian, robin’s egg, bay windows\n\nstrung with Christmas lights.\u0026nbsp;\n\nEach house with a little no my body’s no\n\nresponded to like a magnet greets its iron shavings.\n\nI’d eaten nothing all day,\n\nand the sun climbed down,\n\nand the temperature limped along,\n\ndogs barked, a car passed. I thought\n\nof the doctor who asked me to name\n\nthe last time I was happy. The best\n\nI had was, _suicidal teens grow into suicidal adults_.\n\nChristmas lights took over\n\nthe emptying sunlight. I wandered\n\nbetween houses, my no hung heavy\n\nin my head as it dragged overgrown\n\nantlers behind it, horns swept up then down\n\nbehind me, turning over ice,\n\nleaving trails in the snow.\n\nMy no brayed until my teeth ached.\n\nNothing bad happened in the dark."}