Chin Hairs
If some god wanted women to be hairless
Women would not have hair.
Instead, they have shame over
small follicles bursting
out of their
Legs
Lips
Tits
Arms
Armpits and toes
Backs and
Chins
like xenomorphs.
I am not a Woman. Not a girl
but people seem to decide
I cannot be
Nothing at all.
A lifetime of loathing pink walls and
slouching to hide my chest,
a craving to amputate exposed legs under dress skirts,
having boys act like ‘tomboy’ was a disease,
and being someone else
in all the photographs my mother frames
on the living room walls.
I was never her.
She smiled in church aisles, white
Communion shoes proudly displaying
a one-inch kitty heel,
knees shaking, already
sacrificing a sense of self
that was to be burned in altar candles.
I cried to my mother later
as her son chanted epithets,
a battle cry of “Goat Legs, Goat Legs!”
All my mother did was buy me a razor,
showing me how to undo puberty
for men waiting ‘til midnight, fingers
tensing to reach my eighteenth birthday.
For another decade I tried to be the girl on magazine covers,
wondering why my pediatrician asked me
about my bulging ribs. Didn’t she understand
I was beautiful? I was a flesh-and-bones Barbie,
smile painted on and dead blue eyes
promising perfection.
Ten years passed in a constant state of misery
dreaming of taking a kitchen knife
to my ponytail or my throat–
whichever would be easier to cut through.
Ten years of personal pronouns
and learning to write a dissertation on queerness
when I could not accept that it resonated with me,
ten years anonymously whispering hypotheticals,
Cis Heterosexuals screaming above the quiet
that I was, at best, an inconvenience, and
at worst, going to kill my mother
either through grief or disappointment,
never sure I would see senior year
even if nobody laid a hand on me.
All those times too-short jeans betrayed my hairy legs
with screams to kill it, kill it
with fire or butchers knives
promises hurled at me that I would be alone
unless I stripped away my skin
for someone overwhelmingly apathetic:
my own bodily prison warden
with a single shackle on my ring finger.
If marriage would be my prison,
I would never commit the crime.
In secret, I grow out my chin hairs
in quiet defiance of forced femininity.
They catch a glint of the light in the bathroom mirror
and I look down to too-tight shirts and too-tight jeans
in disappointment. I’ve already forgotten myself.
I trade it in for the ugliest button-up I own
And float on the euphoric breeze of being
Nothing at all.
annaxmalina
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
