I.
She is too boyish
they say she even pisses like a man
sometimes standing
She indulges in men’s conversations
about politics and
the lasciviousness of a nice tit shape
and motorcycles and football
finds pleasure in obscenity
her womanhood entirely forgotten
by every guy in the room
even herself
as she becomes genderless
They like her rankness
how she appears to be one of them
she who is so invisibly delicate
But when she falls in love with a woman
or a homosexual man
(unlike her, they always
are straight in their desires)
she is forced back into her own sex
female again
and centuries of anonymity
of helplessness of fear are
rewritten into one single body
II.
Untouched by desire
how she loves
her own femininity
that no one sees
the little perversions
of a dislocated body
not bound by any topography
of sexual orientation
is the author of the poetry collection Contrapasso (Cephalopress, 2022). Her work is published in Tears in the Fence, The High Window, Feral, Gyroscope Review, Oyster River Pages, and Tokyo Poetry Journal, among others. She is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the overlooked, the unsaid.
