she/they.villanelles

I.

She wished and prayed for forgiveness

and worked towards clarity through grey

one-way glass; she was caught in and

caught up with learning the ropes when

it came to who she built herself to become

but the stars, like always, have other plans

beneath the surfaces of her blue reality she’s fluid,

like the rivers she was raised by and like always,

something to erode out her path tries to slow

her pressure down just as she begins to understand

the ways she bends and the course she runs with.

The stars are always above— even in the indigo New York City

sky, listening to our dreams when we were small, following

our journeys growing into the shoes we each aim to fill

She grew up between cheese buses and ivy crawling

up brick brownstones, and I don’t know where you’re

from but, all the people from concrete always have

something bubbling deep beneath, like a volcano a

waiting their arrival to the ocean’s surface

to spread its ashes and be reborn; still, solid.

II.

Who is she to prevent being lost in oneself’s spectrum?

To try and mute the colors emitting from behind

her eyes? To experiment with expression, which switches

on her walls to turn on and off? Why should she be

limited to confining her greatest gift to the way

her vessel entered the earth? Why should she only be

she? As her love deviates from society

so does her representation of femininity—

when she doesn’t align with the ballet pink

feminine she shifted into understanding

how futile it is to spend life always knowing who

you are so every piece of her worked together, and

she became they, complete with the unapologetic

expression of every shade from cinnamon red to wisteria

They love women inside and out to send who’s she’s always

been to exile, but they also believe that accepting

evolution of one’s core is the greatest feat to accomplish.