Metamorphosis

This poem is about the poet’s grappling with their gender presentation as a non-binary transgender person, particularly their decision to go through hormone replacement therapy or not. While large biological changes can be intimidating and frightening, they’re equally natural, beautiful, and transformative.

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Image credit: Unsplash

All my friends got top surgery this year, and I think I understand

The need to find a permanent kind of remaking: to stretch the clay,

Wield shape in the intention of hands building. I am afraid to be my 

Own Creator, let the masculinity drip off me like water, let my hair sprout 

Beyond its harvest. Maybe the collapse comes before the expanse,

Maybe home is only made known through its absence. What I do know is 

Something is eating me alive from the very guts of my frame and I am 

Still here. I am trying not to build a gender out of mirrors, or belonging

Out of needles, know the seed needs to crack before the bloom. Bursting 

Into becoming is indulgently natural, peacock feathers splayed, lion's 

Mane kind of extravagant. For now, I stare at a magnified reflection,

Tweezers in hand. Shaky fingers pluck at the black roots, exhaling cobwebs 

Out of my ribcage. I do not think belonging is a place, but it took a crash to 

Make a universe, home exploding into being where there was once only void. 

I am still reaching in dark, waiting to sink my teeth into the someone I could 

Become. I think conservation only dreamed in white imaginations, the rest

Of us know the warmth of entropy, of always being undone, the light of tidal 

Shifting, crystal refractions of all the colors we have yet to dream. I am

Threadbare and breaking, cutting loose all that makes me smaller. 

I have been small for long enough.

Tiles

During my undergraduate degree, I completed a semester abroad in South India, where I took Public Health courses through a local university. As part of the programme we went to field visits once a week in the local community. This poem is about one of our visits to a tile factory. I was struck by the state of the factory: a dilapidated building strewn about with broken tiles, bricks, and the like. Dimly lit and dusty, the air was loud with the cranking of machines and the slapping of clay against oiled metal. In the midst of this relative chaos, women decorated by brightly coloured kurtas were working to make bricks on the lower level of the building. I was struck immediately by the contrast between the bright fabric of their clothes, and the dust and dinge that whirled around them. The image of these women, appearing in such stark contrast to their surroundings has stayed with me and from it this poem materialised. 

Image credit: Unsplash

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A girl walks the line, 

Skirt drawn

Hands caked with clay

A grey streak marks her a laborer.

Sweat glistens in the sunlight that has snuck through the thick air 

Her arms carry what will one day be a home 

While her body,

covered by the dust of another man's future, 

Is already home to her own.