by Cecil Morris
Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors. —NPR, December 4, 2024
Here’s gender-affirming care in my hometown:
We give our boys some guns—long guns like ARs
and shotguns and semi-auto handguns—
which, at first, are really just pointer fingers
and sticks and trigger-controlled hose nozzles
and, really, anything vaguely phallic.
We give our girls baby dolls and plush toys
and encourage them to hug and comfort,
to placate and coo, and, later, aprons
and play kitchens with miniature pots and pans.
We give our boys hammers and nails (of course)
and drills and fucking big four-wheel drive trucks
and dump trucks and fire trucks with screaming sirens
and teach them privilege and damage control
and the righteousness of conquest and noise.
We give our girls sixty watts of light and need
and teach them the virtues of silence and grace
and a thousand and one ways to cook a chicken,
to make repairs, and to turn tears on and off.
We teach them all manifest destiny.
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025. He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.
