by Remi Recchia
I call my doctor and tell him, I don’t want to be a man
today. Detransitioning? No. I mean I don’t want to be alive
in a place that thinks my heart strings are puppeteered, that I am
a marionette genetically modified for road rage, sex drive, alcoholic
tendencies. That I don’t want the pharmacy tech to stare extra
hard at my driver license on a routine prescription pickup.
That I don’t want to blush when drunk friends ask:
tampon or jockstrap? Because they’re not asking, are they?
The dive-bar dust on their credit cards will remind them later
that yes, it was rude, but they were drunk, and they have a right
to know who their friends are, their dates are, what I
will expect them to suck or fuck.
Greg Abbott isn’t asking why the children want to change,
he’s asking why they’d want to look like that.
Like a man in a dress or a woman who’s been mutilated
from the inside out, breasts carved off by a butcher’s
knife or by a tree when she lurched in the wrong direction
at the shout of “timber,” wearing, presumably, a flannel
button-up under a leather jacket. Like a turtle without its shell
or a ring-tailed lemur without its jewels. But if Greg Abbott
asked me, I’d tell him, what kind of parents agree to HRT
in the first place? What kind of parents say, yes, I trust you
to grow a beard you won’t regret? Maybe our mothers
are lovely and our fathers are brave, but I have always been alone
and I have always made my own choices. I’d tell Greg Abbott
that sometimes a law is just a word and abuse is a red
herring for an onslaught of transphobic legislature, an actual
school of fish with teeth and fish with fins, and who, now,
can win against the slaughter.
Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); his forthcoming chapbook Sober will be published with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022.