Member Poem

when you're trans, you forfeit your right to a body
it belongs to
doctors who diagnose you with gender identity disorder
to endocrinologists who prescribe
an end to the bloody punctuation between its thighs
to the surgeon who
pins it to the operating table,
splits its skin and leaves its ribs aching
and wakes you up, an hour and a half later,
with tubes in its chest and gouges beneath the arms

this is a good thing.

hyperventilating in the men's bathroom with scar tissue beneath your fingertips,
the bright ecliptic of too much oxygen pounding in your skull
is a good thing.

this body does not belong to you.

like an itinerant god you stumbled upon it shivering in the sun,
seeking possession, seeking control,
its bloodstream is caffeine and
lightning
the corpse that should have stayed dead when
the cardiologist said it would
the numbers that you turned it into the
ninety-two pounds shaking with brutality
the offerings from which you excised flesh
because gods subsist on smoke

pledge this body as a sacrifice to thermodynamics
to the endless tread towards entropy
to the iron of dying sun fused down from splintered hydrogen in its bloodstream
to calories because starvation is better than binary
the bitter parody of life you act at the shadows
the bit parity broken by public bathrooms
electron spins stilled and your pulse low as you're kneeling
puking up the split atoms you choked down when you were godlike

the blaze of sun tears through the penumbra of your skin
electrifying the numb terror of the flesh and

and.
and then? and then?

as every doctor learns
repairing a broken body is a lot easier if it doesn't belong to you.

so swear to the highest power you know
when you're trans, you forfeit your right to a body.
and, believe me,
this is a good thing.