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Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis
I: My beloved is called an inconceivable beast, a spectacle diagnosed with teratoid genitalia, a chaos of pronouns, a body breaking the rules. Hair & suture & unexpected timbre, outside the map. My beloved is first in the firing line. In the active shooter drill, given no refuge. We are expunged from curricula, disallowed the toilet’s relief. Fascistic tendencies festering. National evangelism of binaries taken as daily bread. A congressman in Florida jokes about putting us all to death, a pastor in Texas gives Sunday Sermon saying every gay person in America should be executed—lined up & shot in the head. The Supreme Court stuffs its mouth with theories of religion. Police steel our kin down to concrete & coffin. A brass & parabellum cessation of breath. Interlude: It is telling that Western science has a term for animal behavior called “deceptive sex signaling.” (See marsh harriers & hummingbirds, for example.) All malleability a criminal betrayal for panic defense. No opera for perpetual metamorphosis. II: Neither Man, nor Woman, I am water & shorebird. Over tea, we ask the hard questions. How to reach beyond this periphery. Reverse the enclosures of mind. All bodies in theatre. All theatre, life. III: My beloved says we are cosmic faggots, making new & better pleasures. Generations of illegible & exquisite. Extending possibility to the youngers. We are years of chrysalides, wild longings & wing. Among the immortelles: again, then again, & again. My beloved wields the syringe, a chemical & intramuscular intimacy. I kiss his pectoral scars, lick the summer beaded up in his clavicle. He carries me to the bedroom where we make an ambient weather, hold each other to the bone. My beloved suffocates in the bind. Passing: a difficult joy & sorrow. In the laboratory of our bodies, experiment cobbles glimpses of freedom. We tape our chests, we punk & drag. Leave norms in the gutter. Herald us a wreckage of genders. Name ourselves extraordinary monsters. I take inventory in the holy hours & find: we are a transgression everywhere, beautiful & alive.