Poetry Suite by Christina Yoseph
“My friends don’t say the word
"Transgender” aloud”
Poetry by Christina Yoseph
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Night Out
That night
The train was crowded;
We stopped downtown
To wait out the rush
On the platform;
Mascara flecks mingled
With your freckles,
I played with the curls
Growing over the nape
Of your neck;
Someone stopped
To warn us
Of the bad day ahead;
We made it home,
We relished the day,
But everything
Is not fine;
There is just
so much to lose.
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Self-Love
Ants once dispersed gather into small colonies
Across the soft mound of your belly where
Groupthink convinces them that your body
Is a network of tunnels to be excavated,
Your navel, a portal:
A moonbeam patterned after a wooden lattice;
A snapshot of an unrequited love dreamt up
Through the lens of a kaleidoscope;
A pearl of sugar cradled by a cushion of flesh,
Unsuspecting.
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The Baby Shower
You covered one eye,
And I covered one of mine,
And it wasn’t made clear that day
Who could see the other;
We each noted, at least, the trails
We’d side-by-side traveled
Their grooves impressed into
The surrounding foothills
As if by the prongs of a fork—
But, even then, only on one side.
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I Don't Kick or Scream; I Lie in Wait
I like when I see a tall woman
In the grocery store;
I love a woman
With broad shoulders;
I give a fuck about Teddy Geiger’s
Engagement to her girlfriend
And no one else’s;
My friends don’t say the word
“Transgender” aloud;
I gladly let weddings, children,
And canyons come between us,
Tearing to shreds decades of
Intimacy and compassion;
The me with the reptilian brain
Knows nothing makes me feel
The cold of my own blood
Running through my veins
More than fast company does;
If I could wear a ring and
Have a piece of paper with
Two girly names on it,
Would I want to?
Maybe, maybe.
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Header image courtesy of Stephanie Buer. To view her Artist Feature, go here.
Christina Yoseph is a writer whose essays and poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Entropy, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Nailed, Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in California with her illustrator-musician girlfriend.