fill the space with yourselves. define your experience by your own words.
precedent eats [ ] like u / spit out the self like chewing gum / leave the morning unslept / and see matriarchy martyred / temporary tattoos pasted skin-tight and sideways / some form of impermanent rebellion / everything is going faster than belief / god herself trying to stitch emotionality together / instead coming away with stripped trees and red on the ground / crunch leaves beneath ur heel and imagine becoming more than u are / queer and always an omen / leave ur rapunzel locks on the bathroom floor / a friend offers to dye ur hair / sunshine strands stripped of significance / as winter begins to howl / but self-sabotage doesn’t budget for appearances
crack gender open like the earth / and swallow the city whole / come back to the homeland / and feel unrecognized / but unchanged / venus emerging from the salt-slick ocean / shaking the renaissance of understanding from their hair / temporal tourist undone by perceptions / the body colonized / this time / this world / not built for u / and so the Great Work of undoing / begins
rebellion is in ur very existence / learning to become unfeminized / but always seen as effeminate / shrug off the shackles of greatness / instead inherit strangeness / from women unburned / reject girlhood but become sister / [ ] and still categorical / perceive princess perfect / eldest daughter calling home on wednesdays / like the weak willed [ ] u are / unable to open ur mouth / to talk about difficult things / in over ur head / but still searching for more
everyone waiting for u to sing again / a poet at the end of the world / will ur voice sound the same / will change corrode ur vocal chords / will u succumb / to societal ineptitude / and the world spinning ever forward / something dangerous in the rejection / of the self as political warfare / preservation of ur own body / over preservation of the world
mother please forgive me / for the forest fire is across the country / state lines digging into shoulder blades / oil spills slick across centuries / and the shadows of sisterhood cling to expectation
is it selfish to survive? is it radical to ask for more?
oh mother / u are delicate and dying / in the 4 PM sunlight / waiting for the survival of spring / waiting to be reborn / into someone the world can cradle
survival / sometimes just involves singing urself to sleep / and waking up to a rosy-fingered dawn / where newness is allowed.