Free poem for you today (Outlaw Cento)
Bonus poem for you, faithful newsletter reader - I hope you enjoy 💖
Outlaw Cento
“my gender contains multitudes”
(Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World)
When I was a little girl and watched,
still being a virgin forest
& we were promised love—
I get very confused.
My parents never told me—
what is happening to me?!
The frame becomes unstable and rebellious.
Now the bones feel nothing.
The guys take off their shirts
and the room falls away
I get down on all fours,
fall desperately in love,
saying little prayers
even before we speak. Rage stretches the
smiles like eclipsing planets
all the way down in their bellies.
I keep trying to figure out what it means:
she began entering my fantasies,
creeping through body.
From this distance I couldn’t tell—
a woman, of course…an ordinary woman.
They were excellent, soft and—
after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms,
I have just realized that the stakes are myself.
I am afraid to follow my flesh over those narrow
into the wet
so after a while
I am not me.
I try not to think about
when people inquired—
no, I am not anything I am not.
I’ve folded suicide in four,
but I held back my racing heart
and the smoky outline of a woman’s face
I never was
& I touch her arms—
these things take their own sweet time.
Now the bones yearn to break through the flesh;
I want to sleep in the ruin,
such a crumbling beauty, ah.
I sit here writing, not daring to stop,
that girl in the white shirt—
but you’d never have looked good
in the bars of my ribcage.
I used to live there myself.
She is collecting the years like dust.
As night falls like a blade we are
transfigured—
About this poem:
This is a cento, which is a poem collaged from (usually) other authors’ verses or passages. In this specific poem I’ve used lines from poems published in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Bookshop). It was originally a candidate for my forthcoming collection, This Body, This Fruit (out in February 2027 with TrioHousePress) but didn’t make the final cut.
