Trans-sexual education
My home state names my body sexually explicit.
But when my father warned me against top surgery,
his voice ached in fear of my pending undesirability.
The gap between my scars feels thicker
than the distance between their two kinds of terror.
The night I forgot protection & let the tourist, anyway,
because of his shoulders & smile & the way he didn’t refer,
even once, to my lady's plumbing like the other men on grindr,
I stood under the showerhead & watched suds
run between the thick pink welts.
At work a customer asks where I’m from & I tell her & thank god
you got out, a little gay boy like you & I just laugh,
the mud & Mississippi of his tongue in my throat.
His lust felt impossible so I stored it in my ribcage,
a festering kind of marrow.
Query for the gym teacher who talked often about the pull-out method:
will these hands, which chop broccoli
for my friends & scoop up
all 19 pounds of my mother’s dog,
always taste a little of every man I touch?
Open letter for that video about my pubescing self:
can you inhabit a body without desire?
I do so many sexless things in a day,
but when the tourist touched me I think
he was giving my bones their proper names.
I wish I could visit my old classrooms, admit the mutilated & joyous truth of myself,
stuff our backpacks with condoms & chocolates,
promise the coming stains are nothing to be forgiven.
Eli Shaw is a queer, trans poet from North Florida currently based in Yosemite National Park. He spends his time writing, looking up at trees & rocks, and convincing tourists to fear bears the right amount..