gender

June 23, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

my gender is gentle
a little bit fragile:
i’m Stede Bonnet as a child
in fancy, frilly shirts
continuing to pick flowers
and love the earth
as the world shows me
people are cruel
but by myself i may be safe

my gender is compassionate
a little bit foolish:
like a teen girl in love with
her first asshole boyfriend
telling her friends
‘i can fix him’
except for me, the him is humanity
it’s the entire world falling apart
it’s the earth i love that as a species
we’ve
set fire fire to
and destroyed

my gender is a plaything
i’ve pulled apart and fit back together again,
but i was never good at those projects in gifted class–
they’d bring in a rotary phone
and those who wanted could dis-
and re-
assemble as they wanted
but i never did it;
i said i was content memorizing lines for my latest production
or watching silly films about muffins made as a senior thesis
by a person i’d never met
online
(B.T. Before the youTubes),
but really i was terrified–
what if i took an object apart,
destroyed it,
essentially,
and couldn’t ever get it
back to working order,
so i never, ever, ever practiced…

maybe that’s why my gender doesn’t fit back
the way it used to
before i haphazardly took it apart–

but in a way,
though it doesn’t fit the way it did,
(and it sure doesn’t look
like
the box it came in),
it somehow suits me
better.

June 18, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

contemplating
calling out
misgendering

of myself
of my fellow enbies

it can be easier
to correct
an obvious gendered flub–
a she for a he
and a he for a she–
the identity and clues and presentation
are often there;
it should be
obvious.

but with those of us
in-between/
outside-of/
on a whole other
gender-level

clothing/
body hair/
size/
shape/
color/
means little to nothing:
we are sans gender
(or all genders together)
and all we are asking
is that you see us as a person
first
before gender.

and it doesn’t matter how
queer-friendly
or queer
a person is…

i’ve seen binary trans folks
throw ‘she’s around
in place of ‘they’s
‘he’s
for ‘xe’s
and it hurts
like a knife
to the soul

and i know social conditioning
is a struggle to escape,
and i know language barriers
can make it impossibly hard,
but if, in a queer space,
as you set yourself up
as a queer teacher
and imply the safety
for all
but still buy into a binary
[even if it’s solely through language]
you are proving
yourself
wrong.

***the emotion of this poem
is over a year old,
the initial person who prompted
this poem
has done a great job
of reeling in their language
and looking at the person
first.
but i wanted to write
and re-write
for catharsis purposes,
and i wanted to post
not only for a call-in/call-out,
in case you are a person
who sees gender
first,
but also to say
that everyone makes mistakes
even queer folks in queer spaces
and it can always be forgiven,
but know that we always notice
even if we say nothing
we always
always
notice***

May 6, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

when doing something
‘cringe’
as an 18 year old,
i was so stressed out
that i wasn’t acting like an immediate adult
in every way

but when pondering those
‘cringe’
moments now, 10+ years later,
i am struck with how much of a gosh-darn baby
i still was.

[and ‘cringe’ is a social construct anyway]

[like gender]

[and time]

September 21, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i feel as though
the month is almost over
(though there is still plenty of plenty of time)
i feel as though
i’m running out of time
(even though
i’m still young
vibrant
virile[?]
alive)
i feel as though
i’m only half living
(even though
i’m more in tune
with being
a living person
than i have
in years)
i feel as though
i’ll never connect
with other human beings
(even though
the humans i want to connect with
align more with cryptid
than anything else)
and i feel like
i’m not allowed to identify as cryptid,
as anything other than man/woman
boy/girl
alive/dead
artist/not
driven/giving up
even though
the world
is filled
with
shades of
neither/and

~~~

maybe
some creepy/Disparition/music
will calm my spooky soul
and make me feel more like myself

~~~

my brain isn’t fully functional
fully awake
and i already feel i have
enough poems for two today
so will i write a third?
[everything in threes]
when the ultimate goal is not, necessarily, posting
the goal is to exercise my writing
each morning
every morning
every day
write at least one full poem
that i’m proud of
(or, at least, that i can look at and call a ‘full poem’)
so when i’m feeling so out of sorts
when i am uncertain where myself/body/mind/spirit
actually is
i can write and write and write and write
until
i find myself once again.
but what happens
when the more i write
the farther away i feel?
(am i just relying on the house
to fix everything?)
(that’s a lot of pressure
on one building…)
(at least i still have this cat
draped over my arms,
tail flapping without breeze,
purrs echoing in my soul,
claws digging into my skin
as a constant reminder
that she probably loves me,
or at least sees me as comfort
which is
honestly
pretty neat.)

July 24, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

fuck dead names
give me the story of your living name;
the reason you chose it
(or it chose you),
tell me the person you knew with that name
who you always looked up to,
tell me the tv show you stole your new name from.
i don’t care what your parents gave you at birth,
it was a gift/a label/a force that didn’t stick,
(just like gender)
that doesn’t tell me about you,
your choices,
your wants and desires,
what draws you to certain characters/names/stories.
tell me your story,
i don’t care how long and convoluted it is,
i don’t care if you can only tell me half the story
because the other half is too personal,
give me the half you can give;
did someone give you a nickname that stuck?
did you wholly make up your name,
and that felt much more apt than anything pre-prescribed from society?
tell me about your living name,
because i want to know about
the living you.

July 13, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i have been filled
recently
with inspiration
true inspiration
flowing inspiration
from all over
and this morning
i had
*something*
i wanted to write about
to explore in words
to contemplate out loud
[on doc]
but it’s left me
dry
and i’ve hated everything i’ve started so far
so maybe a prompt is the way to go???

~~~

are poems of dreams
really more interesting
than a telling of that same
dream?

a prompt told me to write
out
a dream i remember
in as much detail
as i can remember

but here’s the catch:
my dreams
(like my thoughts)
are conceptual,
abstract
(at least in what i remember,
retain;
the dreams themselves are pretty mundane)

i remember
[maybe]
[possibly]
dreaming of the pants
i decided to wear today
deep pockets
large legs
flowing around
but still split
my nicknamed ‘gender euphoria pants’
because they are technically genderless
and anyone can wear them
it’s just a lot of people don’t
and i think my gender is not aligned
with the male or the female
the man or the woman
but instead
i’d call my gender
Cryptid.
(so anything that sets me
ever so slightly apart,
that makes you go “i think that was a human,
but i’m not entirely sure”
that’s me
that’s my gender
that’s my euphoria)
but i think i dreamed of these pants
reaching into the pocket
not finding the bottom exactly where i expected
and maybe there was something important there
and maybe i did eventually find it
and maybe there were other people/places/things inside this dream
but what i remember
are the pants
and the reach
and that’s it.

was that actually interesting content???

~~~

(i wonder if there are any of our animals
who are trans
and would rather be
“misgendered” by strangers
than have us
continually
“correct” them.
i think this might be why
i so rarely actually correct the stranger.
i’ll use the pronoun i know them as,
but not make a big deal out of it
(unless we’re at the vet
and it might affect the type of care)
but just in case
the animal gets some gender euphoria
every time a stranger
refers to them
by the “opposite gender”
than i know them as
i don’t want to come barreling in
with a correction
that is not
actually
correct.)