Becoming

Mickey Turner

Awarded Literary Submission: First Place

“It’s difficult for me to describe this poem. It exists in pieces that fade into each other unexpectedly. It’s about religion, about spirituality, about self-image, about gender transition.It’s about trying to be authentically myself without knowing, yet, what that will look like in the end. It’s about self-love and the discomforting wholeness of being.”

i look at the little girl in the photographs and i don’t know how to think of her. i was her, but she wasn’t me. is she a friend? my oldest ally, sharing space in this body, carrying me until i was ready to walk. is she a memory? does she still exist somewhere? it doesn’t feel as though she’s died, but i wonder how i would know.

i look at the figure in the mirror and i see a person taking shape. not quite fully-formed, but so close, standing with toes curled over the edge of a cliff, leaning against the wind waiting for the breeze to fall, the fall to start, the moment where my stomach will flip and my breath will catch, as i see myself for the first time. i wonder how long it will take.

“before i formed you in the womb, i knew you,” smoke in the altar bowl, full moon like a single silver eye, and i wonder how? how could you have known me when i do not yet know me? are you waiting, too? to see how long it takes me to Become? are you waiting with this same bated breath, this same stuttering pulse, heart-in-throat apprehension, anticipation?

what would make this skin feel like mine? these bones so brittle, immutable, these hands, these legs, hair and scars and bitten-down nails hundreds of pieces disconnected shocked into wholeness by presence of breath, heartbeat, touch.

i decorate myself costume in the form of clothing, pins and jewelry like weights to hold myself together at the seams, color in my hair and holes in my skin-- painting the walls of a new room to try and make it feel like home faster. and i look again. for a moment, i can almost focus on the Entirety, before a detail rings out louder than the rest, shatters me once more where i stand before the uncracked glass.

i am blood and flesh, soft and strange, cradled safely in ribcage and skull, constrained by skin not made to be opened. but, gods, how i wish it would; how many times have i sat and simply Looked at myself and wished that i was not my body? but that isn’t how it works, these vessels, full of life and love and light, created for creation and for the Terror of being part of something.

i am not a soul in a birdcage of sinew. i am not a brain pulling puppet strings. “my body,” we say, “my body,” like we are not Bodies, like we do not exist in muscle and marrow and keratin, in the jolt of nerves, the salt of sweat. in the taste of sugar on a tongue and the squish of earth between toes. in hug and kiss and pet and run and rest and dream and breathe. how can you tell me i do not exist in every piece of this-- in every piece of me?

i don’t tend to see myself as beautiful, but i shouldn’t have to be. this acne-scarred skin still feels warm in the sun. these uneven teeth still smile, still bite. dead skin peels from the spaces along the fingernails, but these hands are still able to work, to hold, to create. there is no value, in shallow perfection, that can’t be found elsewhere.

i’m sure others see me differently, evaluating with kinder eyes. it’s so much easier, looking at someone else, to see the things we like and to forgive the things we don’t. we forget: there’s nothing that Needs forgiven. hearts are ugly things, too, but we don’t begrudge them beating.