Category: Our Beautiful Reward

Hangs Heavy On Their Head

Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.

“Just the left side,” they say.

The stylist winks. “I hear . . .

Roses in Washington Square Park

I sit with my mother across piles of roses, stems clipped

and lined straight in three rows, intersecting. Some chalked

anarchy symbols, others uterus reclaiming. We don’t know

where the roses come from, but nobody will pick them up,

then a few do. Put them back, a trance over the buds.

A communal understanding not to touch. I look for the artist

as my mother translates . . .

Ghost of a Chance: A Trans Girl Tries to Live

I am a ghost. I don’t know if I was born this way, if I died when I was small, or if it happened later . . . . For a long time, those questions were important to me. But ghosts like me have existed in every culture and in every age. We existed when acknowledging our existence was punishable by death, we existed even when language . . .

A Question of Choice

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Pradip Shankar yelled as five men with sticks burst into his OB/GYN consultation chamber. The receptionist screamed. She ran out the glass doors just seconds before a stick swung and shattered them to fragments. The two patients who were waiting to see him, Mrs Singh and Mrs Malkani, grabbed each other as glass shrapnel flew everywhere. . . .

Charcuterie

Square teeth gummed

with grey filament,

cuspid and bicuspid,

cleave open my clavicle &

peck out the heart like a wet pip

sizzling. A glut, a guttering, head

engorged and swelling like a tick. Santé.

 

It is our own fault, really.

Diligent hands decode our bodies

to a riddle of bone, leave us segmented

in painless pieces.

 

Can you stomach me

now? Stripped and stippled . . .

This is a romantic comedy

On the phone, she didn’t have to call it

danger. We all know how to flirt our way out

if you have to. Watch your drink, park under a light,

walk so you can see between the cars.

 

We held hands to leave, though they hooted

at us to kiss when they saw. But how else to

hide the shaking. Bruises on her ass, her

wrists, her thighs. She called them geography.

 

Bad joke. Lessons they . . .

Terrestrial Bodies

In the grove of trees there is total darkness, shrouded

by the curvature of the hills and concealed by the community

garden, the back of the baseball dugout, the stone wall

around the stone house. Why bother parking the car

when seclusion waits right there out in the open for us?

I teach you the practice before you learn the words.

I have dirt on my knees below the skin; . . .

Wild Winter Rose

Ben and Theo found Eliška’s name funny at first. “Delicious Elisshhhhhka” Ben sang, with a pop diva-style vibrato, using a lightbulb as a microphone. His brother laughed. Eliška did too.

For a while after that, the boys called her Deli. But their mother, Mrs Trevalyn, told them not to. She said the name was undignified. “Our maid is not to be treated as a pet.”

Eliška . . .