Home On The Dangle/Finally Sturdy/Strength
I’ve been more existential than
I usually am, even by my standards
I’ve been wondering
Why it is
That I’ve been so preoccupied with death see
Before I had top surgery I was hanging
On a thread, and
I hung out there
For so long
For decades
I kept
Dangling
I built a home
On the dangle! It’s fucking
Cozy sometimes I even make
Pies and stew and read books aloud
Talking to myself the way I always imagined
Great actors with great voices bellowed and bantered—
All while keeping one fist clenched—
All while holding my whole body’s weight
On a slippery thread.
I fucking loved life, despite the dangle
Not because of it, but rather
As a sort of
“Fuck all y’all I’m dangling and I’m proud”
I’d be like
“10 tips to be genderqueer—
Backbone.”
Now that I’m recovering quickly and
Feeling healthy and loving
Every single step I take in my new, masculinized body
I feel as if
Some buff person came along and
Helped me up, like the time I
Paddle boarded and fell
Or the time I went white water rafting, fell out
And got saved by some other nature saint.
I think —
When you’re dangling
Even when you get saved, you still feel
Endangered. You still feel
The floor fall out you still feel
The rush of life all around you battering you helplessly and
For me, I feel
With each step
As if my top surgeon
Held out a helping hand.
I feel helped by everyone and everything
I am surrounded by a network of love and passion and dedication, not one that I
“Always could’ve had” but because I didn’t
I chose to be who I want to be, not because I wasn’t able to, but because I was imprisoned—
With the help of some nice surgeon lady—
I made myself free
By asking for help, and for receiving it
Sometimes love is sex, sometimes love is
Lust, sometimes love is bullshit,
Sometimes love isn’t patient or kind,
Sometimes love doesn’t rhyme
Sometimes love is health insurance,
sometimes love is a friendship—
Sometimes love is the thing you wish you hadn’t.
Sometimes love moves through you ice cold, a ghost of a habit
For me
I experienced love unconditionally
When I met someone who safely removed
My goddamn beautiful titties.
If I had sex with a woman with
My old pre-transition body I would shed tears of breathless ecstasy and yet
Now when I look in the mirror
And touch my chest
I say what a man what a man what a man.
I have never been more excited
To talk to other people
To go places
To do things, I am excited about
What I’m capable of
Now that I’m on my own two feet, finally
Off the dangle, finally sturdy.
All jokes aside I am
Bizarrely the opposite of suicidal I am
Excited to live—
But no doubt
Now that I’ve made myself at home in this body
I can relax, because when I die
I won’t need to explain much. They’ll see me
As a man, and if they don’t
That’s okay— I’m fucking non-binary you goddamn idiots —
I made a home for myself on the dangle
And all this strength came with it