The problem is
I still call myself a woman
and every time it drops from my mouth
the word feels like a bar of soap slipping
through my fingers,
fish out of water,
something I wish I could reel back into myself.
I call myself a woman and it feels like an accident:
like a six car pile-up just outside city limits, like
you were so close to home.
You were so close.
You could have been exactly
what they wanted you to be
when they wrapped you in a pink blanket,
when the doctor said girl
and they were so happy.
But how could the word woman
feel like such a stranger
when I have been wearing it my entire life?
The problem is
my gender is language I cannot speak, yet.
I go wide-eyed-jealous, sticky-handed child
reaching for the bodies of the strong-limbed boys
I have always wanted to look like.
I think of how many things I’d be willing to give up
so that I could look so long, so that I could look so flat,
look so sharp and so boy.
But my curves are something I am not ready
to be divorced of, yet.
I look down at my body and think
no, I will not abandon you. Not yet, not again,
not like the rest of them.
I think—Girl.
I think—Girl.
I think,
Girl, you have been unwanted in so many hands.
And I can’t turn traitor to my own powder pink.
I can’t bleed the woman out of my lungs.
I have tried.
She does
not
go
easy.
Instead, I wear woman like a coat two sizes too small.
It doesn’t fit, anymore, but it smells like home.
When I was thirteen, all my daydreams
were technicolor:
taking these heavy, useless things
on the front of my body
and chopping them off with a hacksaw.
I say I want the reduction because my back hurts–
because they have crippled my body into
something unusable.
What I am afraid to admit
is I want the reduction
because I don’t want
them, anymore.
What do you do when you are given the choice
between two costumes
and neither of them has enough elbow room?
What do you do when the word woman
is the only one that shares all the violence
that’s been done to you for daring to look so
sweet?
What do you do when the word woman isn’t
wrong—it’s just not the whole story?
And you don’t have a word for your story.
What do you do when you love that word–
woman. Girl. She. Her. Her’s–
but you don’t like how it looks on you.
But “he” just looks like it’s missing something–
the word man has never belonged to me without
woman in front of it.
Sometimes
all these words feel like an ancient text
that don’t have the degrees to decipher.
They don’t make sense to me.
I don’t want them. But I live in a society that says
I have to be one or the other, that there is no
in-between, just accidentally mismatching
of body parts. At the end of the day, I have no quarrel
with my body—only the things everyone else seems
to assign to it. Only these words that feel useless
up against the person I have worked so hard
to love.
Only woman: ill-fitting as it sometimes is.
What I want to know, is
am I allowed to hold woman at arm’s length
and love it like my favorite dress?
Am I allowed to put it down
when it is too heavy
to carry?
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