remind me what it sounds like.

Talk about what it means to lose your voice.

Wait.

Talk about what it means to give your voice away and exchange it for a different pitch. To leave your tone behind because it never matched the way you heard yourself.

Talk about this new slope of sound coming from your lungs and lunging off your tongue.

i never knew your voice before it changed, so i cannot imagine it as anything but you

Talk about the sensation of hearing your voice echo against your ribcage. Is it softer now? Deeper? When you speak out your syllables, do you curve your back toward the resonance or are you still hesitant to call it yours?

sometimes i think about what it will be would be like to walk away from the ring tone of my voice

I gave away my voice a few years ago to a couple of strangers who misspelled my name and mangled my limbs into a paint stain. I traveled to nearby bodega, picked up a can of chick peas, an onion, some ginger and a voice. On a Sunday, I biked along a path full of yarrow, red maple, windflowers and picked a pinecone in the shape of my voice. I climbed a bridge and contemplated then executed a jump, felt several boroughs collide in the form of water washing away the trouble in my skin and there I spoke several octaves of breath control.

if only i could pick and choose what changes

 

what to call this: gender.

Imagine body as a tree. It begins as a shape that never remains just that. It hardens and expands. It changes color and thickness. It lets go; it disrobes; it houses other living things inside it; it mourns like a weeping willow; it has many names and occupations.

This treebody drips its sap into mouths and palms. This treebody exists in various ways all over the world. This treebody has no gender and it has many genders and it loves through shots of slurped up sun and rain and is rooted through the rings which wrangle it open.

We’ve got all of these options now of what one can be called and ways to bend and love and present. What happens when we exchange our customary outfit from masculine or feminine garb to something else.

How to harvest the hybrid of genders within us.

It is a Monday. I am suited in tie and vest and button-down shirt. My pants are tight, but could be worn by any human in search of warmth down there. I’ve got boots on with unnecessary laces and a zipper on one side. My hair is messy and unbrushed. It houses several yells inside each knot that are stored up from the ones who cannot seem to understand why I have decided to wash my hair less. I wear no make-up, nor does my skin glow. I might feel comfortable if you called me androgynous or even boundless.

I present a vocabulary of stereo-types in front of a room full of learners. We disrobe what we expect boxes to look like. I ask them to remove their swiss army knives from pockets (for those who carry them). I ask them to cut open the ninety-degree angle squares that force us to choose. I tell them that suddenly, we are no longer expected to choose from just two options or [gasp] other. I said that now we have options that represent the spectrum in which humans have always been but never had the opportunity to announce.

I want to out myself as the type of human some people have a difficult time understanding. I try to explain to my mother later on that day that gender is not something we should wait for people to learn. In order to remove the hate from speech, we must educate each other as to the impact of understanding one another.

As humans we come out many times in our lives. Sometimes it is just our names we change. For some, it is more bodily. Shapes and voices and language of parts change. Some of us change our sexual orientations.

There is not just one closet that we come out from and then IT is over.

I have been closeted by lovers; I have been closeted by myself. I understand the impact and necessity to be as loud as I can in order to pave the roads beside me for others to come out and make noise.

I have intentionally surrounded myself with humans who are gender construction workers. Smart, sexy humans who have taken these boxes into their hands, crumpled them up and turned them into other shapes. I have fallen in love with the ones who celebrate hybridity.

This earth may be over-populated, though it is big enough to hide. But who would want to do that when there are so many ways to seek out the truths and translations of our selves.