I’ve started to get “misgendered” at the airport again. I put “misgendered” in quotes, because I’m not entirely sure how I want to be gendered (by strangers) anymore. The TSA agent called me “ma’am” before I removed my mask for facial ID, and “sir” afterward. I...
I’m tired of shutting people out. I’m tired of cutting people off. I’m tired of ghosting people. I’m tired of people ghosting me. I want relationships where we work through the hard stuff. Where we are committed to each other even when we fuck up and say hurtful...
“Ugh, Jay left their dishes in the sink again,” my housemate said to me. I am not Jay. I am not, nor have I ever been responsible for Jay’s behavior. Yet the first thing that my brain says to me is, “Wow, you fucked up again. This is all your fault. What’s wrong with...
Poetry has been hugely healing for me as I’ve recovered from horrendous domestic and intimate partner violence. I wrote both the pieces about two different relationships with broken men who broke me. But in retrospect, they shared the same spirit and heart of...
I come from a house of notes. Not structured sentences with eloquent endings, but monosyllabic requests and replies. Need ride to work. Okay. Do dishes. Yes. Grunts on paper and averted eyes in the halls. We lived as strangers, ignoring the blood that deemed us...
Like many survivors of trauma, I have always struggled to see myself reaching old age. Long term plans sit in a swampy fog, the shadowy shapes of them barely visible, hard to conceptualise beyond the academic, bullet point description of: New apartment Get married ...
