The Chronology of Red

I. Birthright

Before I was a boy, I knew I had biology.

I was glossy, slick-skinned, pickled pink in the glass jar

that is my mother. She is endless, a woman

made of water and venom. I thought I was my mother— another one

of her golden organs: liver, lung, a pollock of slime and tissue

metabolizing the wind into chemicals. I was a woman’s

bloodstone. I was the teeth and mean of her, secret

cruelty coagulated into a packet of meat. These are the ingredients

for a boy-thing: the grease and stink of a woman,

the burnt bits in her belly, knotted together with thread and sinew.

Like all boys, I started my life with violence: Thirteen hours,

my mother was broken open so I could begin. She is endless,

she is where everything begins. A woman made of water.

II. Breaking

As a child, I whittled myself

into a weapon. Brewed in the sour stink

of boyhood, I tried to be a violence, a razor-

kissed wind, sloppy and sinister as the storms

that took our first home.

I spliced the knees of other boys, gnarled

my mouthful of extra teeth. I tried to break

their mouths with my mouth, to taste

the poison all boys bubble underneath their tongues,

to press our reds together.

My face is hot and mangled when a beautiful bully calls me

that word thick with thorns. That word,

the one other boys run and shudder from as it beckons them

to learn of sweat and softness. Mannnnn are you gay or something?

He spits it on the ground, a thick wad of a word, slick with snot.

He stomps its blue, thread-thin pulse, and I wonder

if he thinks I’m beautiful too, if he asks secrets of himself

in the dark, like what if I’m [ ] and if I am, is that bad?

I imagine his face flushed stupid pink while he fights

me in the dreams he can’t believe.

All boys are made of want and water.

We go red together.

III. Beauty

In an attempt to remember where

I come from, I peel my boy-suit back,

slip into my mother’s endless waves of silk,

her dollar store skirts, red sequined stars

burning me down to her. I steal her lips,

her lashes, I ice myself in all her drug store beauty.

Make me red, again, a blossom

in the body, a woman in the right light.

This is nothing new, this attempts at remembering.

We pretend boys who wear their mothers

are rare, confused, as if we are not

made from women. Every mirror

is also a memory. I am her. I enter

the right light, and look at that boy/girl

in the glass. I see water,

water waving forever.