i practice leaving in a mirror with no borders,

sliding the mouth off words like the husk of a sunseed.

it is this: i want to be alive and allowed.

i say it again, softer, as if the soft will let me.

 

today the street leans its shoulder against my ribs

and i accept the push, the way some accept devotions,

knees red, palms salted, a small note of pain

pinned under the tongue so it hums when i breathe.

 

someone calls me by the wrong name and the air thins.

i try on the syllables, they wilt in my throat,

a garland tired of its own perfume.

i have learned that survival is a verb with a limp,

it drags its bright foot through dust and still

looks at the horizon like a door it can unhinge.

 

i loved someone once the way nettles love a fence:

fiercely, because the world provided an edge.

we kissed and the night made a low bell inside us,

not holy, just honest, an animal heat

that refused the leash of a prayer.

we did not say forever.

we said: until the sparrows shrug off their rain.

 

in the background, the grown world arranges itself

into tidy squares of grievance.

it wants me orderly, a straight seam, a flag cornered

and obedient to wind. i answer by learning

the names of the weeds that crack concrete:

mallow, sowthistle, shepherd’s purse—

how they rise out of what should not let them,

how their green insists like a pulse no one approved.

 

some afternoons a stranger’s stare

is a stone tossed into the well of me.

the splash takes minutes to arrive.

when it does, i drink anyway.

the water tastes like metal.

i call that taste mine, i call it morning’s second light

that slips under blinds and refuses to apologize.

 

some nights i bring my shadow to the sink

and wash it carefully, the way grief

washes a small stone found in the mouth of a river,

until it remembers how to be held without cutting.

i ask it, will you come with me if i don’t come back

as the person the world labeled in pencil?

it answers by lengthening, long as a promise,

and i take that as yes.

 

i am a throat with a skylight.

i am the smudge a comet leaves on the heart

when it forgets not to return.

 

this is the part where i tell the truth straight:

i am here,

unbuttoned to the weather,

queer as a path that refuses to be a road,

tender as the bruise that chooses its own color,

angry the way sap is angry in spring—

not to harm, only to rise.

 

and if the world asks for proof,

i will give my breath back to the trees

and the trees will hand it to the sparrows,

and the sparrows will thread it into their nests,

and in the morning, if the light is kind,

i will hear my name pronounced by feathers,

correctly,

as if it always was.