after Greyhound
Homesickness is a disease without reason,
I have found cures in the flat Canada Dry,
in the seafood seasoning, in guilt.
I am away and I am homesick for comfort.
Homesick for something to hold me, or to be held.
Homesick for my dysphoria, for my depression.
I crave caves that know my names
because I like to know that I am known of.
Echo myself into existence, eon after Aeon.
When out in the city
I don’t speak unless spoken to, and even then
my mouth is a flood of languages I can’t recognize.
I am homesick for singularity. Singularity at the hand
of being the other. There is a person, and then there
is me, next to them, but not them.
At times when people see me and not my body
as I see it, they make me homesick to be uncomfortable,
because it’s something I know how to be.
I don’t know how to be the agender femme
and also to be believed as one. I don’t know
so much about myself, as no one taught me.
My flatmate sees me sick with grief and
they bring me a plate of strawberries.
“These cure homesickness.”
And they do, and I am grateful,
not for the berries (though they are delicious)
but for the comfort of being held as I am.
To be treated for my Otherness as an Other.
There are languages, and then there is my mouth.
There is my mouth. There is my mouth and it’s
gaping jaw as I swallow what I can of this moment.
There is this depression and this dysphoria,
and there is me, between them,
and I need to learn myself whole as having their hands,
and straying from them. I want to position myself
in my skin, and say my skin is my home.
One day I will be homesick for my body,
for a name that is no longer my name,
and they are parts of me that I own memory of.
Tears for my names as they move from my skin,
tears for my skin as I blot it with ink,
tears for the page and it’s once empty kingdom,
so full of promise and nothing. I used to say
I would never get words tattooed on me,
but well, guess what bitch, I was wrong.
I’ve never been the reliable narrator, but
I have always been on the side of the truth
that keeps going. If you hold the white paper
against the white desk, it becomes the paper as
the paper makes itself the desk. There are no borders
in identity poetics (something I want to say, but can’t).
There are lines that divide us into smaller communities,
and then there is everyone else, who doesn’t fit.
The island of misfit bodies.
In this trans novel a spirit travels to a
seemingly untouched place. An Island that
looks nearly like everywhere at once. Here
is the space needle state empire building.
Here, the spirit will see bodies like our
bodies, and poltergeist withering. It is the
place the dead who have come back in the
form of a body-snatch go when they get into
a body they can’t remove again. Born-again
into the wrong body. This spirit will try to
help, but there is nothing our protagonist
will do. There is a pitch for a sequel that
teases how spirits can switch and land in a
body that is more their idealized identity, but
it is in publishing purgatory. Later the author
will reflect and say, it’s unrealistic. A book
about people being unhappy because of how
the world makes them see themselves just
doesn’t speak to a market where not
everyone examines their gender perception.
I have Gender 20/20 Vision.
I have an acute awareness of how my body moves
without my wanting. This blood travels
when I ask for it to not, it is in a movement
against me. My blood is against my stopping it.
My blood is homesick for the me that moves
when it does, that runs to the problem of my identity.
I dive into dysphoria and I miss the water,
the air is a pool that carries my body – a spirit,
looking for a body that carries it best.
That body is my body though,
and I know this it is the True Comfort.
It isn’t North but True North,
I am homesick for a version of myself in the future,
where the moving continues,
but I have to run to get there, or else
I might miss
myself seeing who I am first.
