“You should be Women,
and yet your beards forbid me to interpret
that you are so.”
— Shakespeare, Macbeth
Naked in the garden, I cut celebrities out of People,
collected poems, histories, hid razors, prayed rosaries
to hide what God had made of me: witch hazel, ace
bandage, flannel shirt, haircut, television set, DVD.
Western Civilization 1, 2 & the whole university
system could not, Hollywood would not photograph us
for two or three more decades, they cut away:
the history of bodies like mine was torn out
& swallowed down unnamable, untraceable throats.
People keep asking me if I’m on hormones & I say as
much as anyone—I got my voice like this the old-
fashioned way, with cigarettes, with fire/real traditional.
You have to talk to men in a high register like dogs so
I’ve stopped talking to men. They can still tell.
It’s not that hard to see the reasons why we’re all so
unlovable: my television friends can’t see me back, they
look up just as someone cuts to commercial, see a flicker
of me in the background shadowy corner of a circus tent.
Implicitly asked if I will shave for the wedding, I will not:
my body is not a closet, it’s a testament, a scroll
of psalms, a hand-written holy text, hand-and-god-made icon:
all our bodies are the evidence that we’ve always been here
And I’m telling you, I’m not going: I’m telling you you
don’t have to listen to him just because he says he
knows doesn’t mean he does but the truth is we are not
leaving, we are not giving up this garden.
