& then im wearing a packer and mini skirt
at my Arab family dinner
explaining as we bow that even my sins are devotional
except we don’t speak the same language
so they can only read my body as
Western propaganda, im sure,
flabbergasted at its own experimental cruelty
and yea this is my american cousin,
he’s in the ‘movement’, he only fears ‘Allah’,
et cetera.
Fabrications of my imagination because
Nobody seems bothered enough
& im wasting time on imprecision
& you lack conviction
& it bores me but i still want to love you
if only for how wrong it is
like my desire to watch straight white people fuck
it just helps me come quickly,
im explaining to the girl at the bar
that summer i started passing before i had claimed myself
I understand, she responds, stroking my arm, I’m lesbian but you know I love trans people
and i flinch at that word too close to my lungs to feel its breath on my ear by
another moment passes spent asking forgiveness for the last.
The carpenter’s house will always be the last to be built,
my father says when I come out to him
& whatever beauty in that i’ve found
must have festered for me to write it here now—
Sometimes a mind is ready to leave this world
before its body Sometimes a body before
its mind Somehow im both
Somehow ill always be
anonymous 2/13/25