Metamorphosis
This poem is about the poet’s grappling with their gender presentation as a non-binary transgender person, particularly their decision to go through hormone replacement therapy or not. While large biological changes can be intimidating and frightening, they’re equally natural, beautiful, and transformative.
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All my friends got top surgery this year, and I think I understand
The need to find a permanent kind of remaking: to stretch the clay,
Wield shape in the intention of hands building. I am afraid to be my
Own Creator, let the masculinity drip off me like water, let my hair sprout
Beyond its harvest. Maybe the collapse comes before the expanse,
Maybe home is only made known through its absence. What I do know is
Something is eating me alive from the very guts of my frame and I am
Still here. I am trying not to build a gender out of mirrors, or belonging
Out of needles, know the seed needs to crack before the bloom. Bursting
Into becoming is indulgently natural, peacock feathers splayed, lion's
Mane kind of extravagant. For now, I stare at a magnified reflection,
Tweezers in hand. Shaky fingers pluck at the black roots, exhaling cobwebs
Out of my ribcage. I do not think belonging is a place, but it took a crash to
Make a universe, home exploding into being where there was once only void.
I am still reaching in dark, waiting to sink my teeth into the someone I could
Become. I think conservation only dreamed in white imaginations, the rest
Of us know the warmth of entropy, of always being undone, the light of tidal
Shifting, crystal refractions of all the colors we have yet to dream. I am
Threadbare and breaking, cutting loose all that makes me smaller.
I have been small for long enough.