He

I still label it “masculinity”

despite the matrilineal anger

it sprung from, or rather –

the man inside me

sprung.

His need to fuck but

be free, naturally therein lies a

fiction and an

adolescence, an attachment

to individuation: dusk-dawn

the first light of differentiation,

yin-yang, the plausibility of the body

we are born into.

It’s controversial to admit that I am

a colonialized woman

I remember

a dialect of tenderness – speaking

was like splitting fruit with my mouth

the idea of freedom did not govern me

I was already free

my limbs were in chorus, seasons of

sympathetic magic with a phenomenal world.

My mother passed along her rage

bred within me an extraverted boy who punched

holes in the drywall, cauterized my womb,

a sovereign masculinity that defines me and enslaves

my anatomy to geometric efficiency, narrower hips

smaller breasts less luster less room

for impressions or shadows.

We are as close to friends as we will ever become,

I know his secret love of fire

the heat of things we

share

sun up sun down in the trenches where I was

told to hide: they’re his night terrors not mine

he brought the war in while I

unlearned my instincts.

So I come here for the fruit –

the lost language

though never all the way forgotten

long past dusk in starry corridors,

unsupervised while he sleeps

I chew slowly

quietly.

original artwork by kaitlin deasy