The Wrong Walls

It is not merely the flesh they are after, though the flesh—this body I carved out from the lie they handed me at birth—is where the battle is waged and cataloged into statute. You carry it in the marrow: the quiet, ceaseless terror of stepping into a world that legislates your right to breathe, the perpetual humming along the nerves like heat lightning behind August dust.

It is the dread that wakes before you do, knowing that to exist as a transgender woman, to have unfastened the moldering livery of a boy's coat cast upon you by the state, is an affront to men who sit in county courthouses striking out lines of living ink to erase your name.

​They call it law or propriety, drawing brittle lines across schoolhouses and clinic doors, denying the gender-affirming medicine that keeps the mind tethered to the bone. Survival is priced in coin you do not possess; your very right to transition, to walk safely, to hold a job, is taxed by hostility.

​The hunger—the hollow ache of the paycheck withheld because an employer saw right through your identity papers, the landlord’s shuttered eyes closing a door in your face—is heaped up like cotton left in a November rain. And it falls heaviest upon those of us who carry both the stigma of womanhood and the old, ancestral inheritance of a darker skin, hunted through neon-streaked gutters where transphobia and racism meet like an iron pipe in the damp dark.

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​You walk this world not as a protected citizen, but as a fugitive from a gendered judgment rendered before birth. Yet the pulse goes on—stubborn, unvanquished, outlasting the courthouse, the constable, and the long, fearful sleep of a country that has not yet learned how to let its transgender children live.

The skin is a room I was locked inside

without my consent, the wrong walls

fitted to my bones before I could scream.

I wake in the dark, the small of my back

twitching like a wire pulled too tight,

the panic living right under the ribs,

tasting like copper and cold sweat.

​They hand you a name like an iron key

that doesn't fit the lock.

Every mirror is a judge, every glance

a thumb pressing down on the bruise

of being mis-made, forced to wear

the heavy, clumsy coat of a body

that belongs to a stranger.

​It lives in the marrow, that raw, animal terror

of walking through the world un-anchored,

exposed, waiting for the blow or the stare,

the nervous system humming with cortisol,

stuck in perpetual, shuddering defense

while the true self beats its fists

against the cage of the wrong biology.

​And yet—the blood remembers.

Underneath the software, under the skin,

it traces its own secret, stubborn map,

turning home through the dark labyrinth,

shredding the false suit they sewed you into,

until you are finally naked, finally breathing,

tearing open the chest to let the real soul out.