Sestina for the Trans Girl Watching The Fly
What is more yielding than the flesh?
You, daughter of mad science,
you, who would bubble and rubber skin,
you, who chitin and acid dissolve,
the mirror will never call you a monster
no matter what melts away from your body.
Praise with the genius the changing body,
this miscalculation that makes skin into monster.
Give thanks for your special effect flesh,
you, bride of hormone and science.
To change, we must first dissolve,
teach machines the whole truth of our skin,
rewrite the poem of your skin,
corn syrup baptize the body
before the credits, let the binary dissolve
with the sick gray fear of the flesh,
not bug, or boy, but science,
and its rebellious, six-legged movie monster.
There is beauty hiding monster,
in the buzzing wings of your skin.
Your every morning is a new kind of science.
Your torso is a crackling telepod body.
Long live the new flesh.
Into pixels and light, we dissolve.
We only eat what we can dissolve.
We have to melt the old meanings for monster
in the plasma streams of our flesh
until they raindrop and bead off our skin.
You auteur the film of your body.
You Cronenberg beauty out of science.
You are light years ahead of their science,
watching experts and pundits dissolve
only to toughen your chitinous body
until you’re no longer prey for their monster
who would politic and red tape your skin,
who would claw their bad laws into your flesh.
Girl, you have given your body to your own kind of science,
found the love story of flesh that dissolves
into the beautiful monster of your skin.
Portrait of my breasts upon noticing a stretch mark
The contrast of color
traces across the skin
like a darkened house slivering
through the slits of a cracked bedroom door.
Less like a scar. Less like a wound washed with time.
More like a thin trail of footsteps.
More like an effortful hush in the night.
It is not crime scene,
but confirmation.
I’m not crazy.
Someone has been rearranging the furniture
widening the hallways.
letting in the light
while I sleep.
The Sapphic Prometheus
The gods’ mistake was saying forever
and thinking they wouldn’t have time to fall for each other.
That a titan and an eagle
couldn’t find more in common
than pain and a full belly
if they had forever to figure out.
On a long enough timeline
a liver is as good as a promise,
claws kiss as deeply as a tongue,
and the right kind of pain
is calligraphy.
They were made for each other,
their little hurts and epistles finding hope in hunger
and the will of the gods.
The titan’s stitched over skin a wax seal on a red love letter.
Dear eagle,
Tear the mailbox of my torso
open each day.
Find, purpled and wine drunk,
ripe and sweetly bleeding,
this thing again.
This everyday gift.
This love letter
I made just for you.
The eagle eats,
learns the nuances of flavor
tastes the difference
between meat that is taken
and meat that is given
and learns to push past the liver
past the pink waterfalls of flesh
and, soft as a kiss, hushed as a whisper
closes its beak around the titan’s heart.
Flying away the bird will hope
that its feast will grow back.
Watching the bird, the titan
knows that what was eaten was given
and what was given
will have to be held.
Billie Sainwood is a queer, trans poet and writer from Atlanta. Her work has been featured in The Passionfruit Review, Had Magazine, and en*gendered lit. Her first poetry collection, WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN, is available now from Kith Books. She keeps a diary of her inspirations and neuroses online at https://billiewritespoems.com.
BACK TO ISSUE