all this red dust

for Tahrah.

While you listen, notice your hands. They have been waving others away for how many years. They have been been stealing money out of your pocket. They have been rummaging around in the playground of your body in search of in search of what.

“Sometimes my hands, they don’t feel like my own.”

On a day that can only be called employment of understanding, you remove your hands from your pocket. They are dry and cracked from hibernation. Spend a moment comparing them to elephants and deserts, cracked open. Call them sand dunes. Turn yourself into a hunch. Call it bridge pose. Climb your hands inside you because on this day you are mountain. You are venturing toward the genders cohabiting in every tunnel of your self.

Understand that this may be painful. This is more than just labeling. This is more than just recognition of what you are. Sometimes it takes a road trip over someone else’s body to acknowledge something not right on your own.

Call this red dust. The tiny particles of earth making sense of itself as it takes on new shapes. This matter flattens and folds parts away. This invisible soil has no preference for pronoun, rather prefers that you see it as an entity called other.

“Dear body/I’ve been trying to/rub you away like a rash/forcing you away from my bones/And I waited for you to arrive…