favorite color
he was constantly reprimanded in elementary because his
motor mouth went from 0 to 60 in 2.3 but it was also
in elementary that
he was a she to the public eye
and the thoughts that ricocheted through his skull included
‘hey
it wouldn’t be so bad,
if i held a girl’s hand and told her she was my favorite color’
but that was unheard of in
elementary.
then in middle school he put the brakes on - something
silenced him:
the realization that church made him squirm
put smoke in his stomach
because his sunday best
made him feel like a backwards mannequin.
one day he came home and turned his bed to tears
because he’d told his best friend that he’d give anything for a flatter chest
for an x-acto jawline
and her ridicule was violet
his least favorite color.
he was an unsightly geode of crystalline love
the right thing inside of the wrong thing
appalling his parents when he asked
to cut his hair like justin bieber’s and he
heard the girl on tv tell him that he was anything but alone and the first time
that a word became magic to him
TRANSGENDER
he knew.
dropkicked the ‘e’ off his birth’s first name and
kissed his best friend whose freckles bloomed with the knowledge that
he was he and nothing less
but
freshman year
the unbearable disparity between his mind and people’s eyes
drove him to play with razor blades late at night
in the bathroom as
his reflections melted together
into
a
terrible
abstract
painting
he prayed for the lump
in his arm to be cancer and
sat on the passenger side
pleading
pleading with the universe
to send something hurtling toward
his
pathetic wrong body
he prayed
but he didn’t believe
and now he has no favorite color.