Notes toward Top Surgery and the Impending Death of the Barrier Reef
//
When my breasts are finally removed
I imagine they will be made
into mountains elsewhere.
A popular hiking destination,
the boys will hold
what used to be my body
up, and on a pedestal,
or perhaps
they will climb
until something structural
breaks, and the mountain
plateaus into just
an average, flat,
topography.
\\
//
In this life, fire lives
in the water
rent free and swan
boats are the last
viable mode of transportation.
Romance in the new millennium
is two trans boys kissing
as bird necks wrap
their wrists
too tight.
My partner talks about my top
surgery like I have never
even considered true stillness.
They talk about bed rest
on a salt water raft— floating
with no oars for months.
How thirsty can two boys on a raft
become? They say, you will not
turn crescents into blood
moons with blown stitches.
They say, you will never be the same.
Isn’t that something.
\\
//
As a child I read and reread
the story of a girl who wore a forest
green ribbon round her neck for a lifetime.
And as she lay dying, the ribbon
was untied, her head hit the floor,
the forest was slashed and burned.
At her funeral everyone was talking
about the benefits of deforestation,
and guillotines.
What is a whole life of denying
the truth of your body’s
shape? If I am used to wrapping
my chest in an Ace bandage,
does that mean I’ve always
been bleeding?
\\
//
Everyone in America speaks fluid laceration,
with their diamond studded
tongues. Oral sex
is the new corn field
tilled until death do us part.
God, agriculture is so violent,
and I have lusted toward blood-rust:
the hoe, the scalpel, a sharp rake,
and a rototiller pushed across
my mammary glands. Milk as Miracle-
Gro. God, I wish I could touch
myself with any tenderness, any soft,
human, tool.
\\
//
They say anesthesia
is an ocean
of calm, until
oil hits the water.
Intubation is an anchor
until
it’s snagged
on the ocean floor.
Complications of double
mastectomies include:
clogged coral, burst arteries,
death. But already when pelicans
open their mouths the world
only remembers
how to say
pothole and point
a swollen finger
anywhere but inward.
It is true,
the reef
is almost dead.
But I am almost
not.
\\
