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I just. Don't really know. And I haven't known for awhile.

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in my soul you stay

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“A poem begins with a lump in the throat.”

— Robert Frost

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A Reflection

Dad and I mirror each other. Our canines are sharp like fangs, our humor masks anxiety and welcomes strangers, our laughs get quieter as the joke gets funnier. The songs we sing are all made up, and the things we do to entertain always has our audience in mind.

Mom and my sister mirror each other. Their lateral incisors twist slightly into a mild snuggle tooth, their commands sharp and unwavering, their reassurances rare and genuine. Their love as unmoving as the bluffs.

My sister and I mirror each other. Our reflections mirror each other, our birthdays 6 months apart, our mornings both silent and still, loud and musical. Yin and Yang, masks blank, water and ground, stability and motion. We are the communication with no words.

Sometimes, I wonder if my mom only sees the rare things she once liked about my dad in me.

Like a painting of a tragedy. The Joker and The King.

Then I remember the chronic pain in her jaw from clenching, worn bone-on-bone when my own jaw aches.

I remember the explosion of my anger when her short fuse blows.

And I remember her telling me,

"I had to teach myself to be caring and kind. It never came naturally."

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My Father's Leather Jacket

Coffee and peppermint oil,

standing strong, legs shoulder width

apart, from the notion of defamiliarizing the all-too-familiar

is my father.

Because predictability is sometimes a gift, and it is especially when wrapped in coffee and peppermint,

in an old leather jacket, in old jokes, in new songs, in vulnerability and tears, in car rides and The Cities 97.1, in a man's best friend,

in the phrase "it will be okay" because I can speed home in my shitty car and break my exhaust pipe and listen to The Jayhawks and still be home in 2 hours,

and slide into place as if we were all never not apart from this family.

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[Black text on a white background that reads:

my gender is whatever makes me easiest to kill,

my gender is breeding stock, kill all men, can’t you just stay unobtrusive and neutral, the question cut apart in debate chambers, my ragged flesh and bones picked for statistics and arguments by vultures in suits who go home to too-young wives, breathing out my same old screams to useless onlookers sitting in rows, you’re disgusted by my blood on the floor but unwilling to shoot down what’s killing me slowly, what are the magic words i need to say to get you to care that i’m dying, 

my gender is polite young woman in a pantsuit long long dead, forward-thinking and modern, isn’t it funny that she lived as a man, she wanted better opportunities, we dug up the body and passed it around the archives and if you look here you’ll see the place where they cut out the most important parts, so sad to see such irreversible damage, so sad she never had children, so sad she was mutilated, but she was such a trailblazer, the first woman to put a bullet in a state senator’s head,

my gender is a bullet in a state senator’s head, shooting down vultures before they break my sibling’s skin, crippled tranny faggot (triple threat) with a score to settle, with a gash down the center of its chest spitting fire through pharmacy phone lines, never fucked someone who wasn’t an enemy of the state, never was your little girl, sticking around till the bitter end and triple dog dare you to come bash me yourself you bloody-beaked coward, come watch me be the monster you all say i am,

my gender is whatever makes me hardest to kill.]

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Poets are the painters of human experience, capturing the colors of their heart in verse.

— agelesslibrary