My body has never been the camouflaging type, so I chose to roll with it.

I grew up rotated and brown and with a taste for glitz and roses. Looking at a photo of me from when I’m seventeen, plunging neckline Jessica Simpson hot chartreuse dress, purple circles painted on my cheeks, behind the ears wet with some Night Queen oil, my mom tries to find humor in her own anxiety at my outlandishness. “They’re going to remember you for 50 years in this town!” It’s a small postcard town in New Jersey, a mill town, but also not really surviving off the mill part anymore, other than its red face in paintings sold in novelty shops. A bit Gilmore Girlsy, and though my mom hates the fast quippy way the Loreleis speak, we are a single mother and an only daughter. We do drink a lot of coffee, and crawl headfirst into the nest or cavern or corn maze of one another. We were always teetering on this sweet hysterical edge of laughing and crying, heads thrown back or held tight on our necks, trying to decide how we really felt about something before it was too late.

There is a tale of a woman who could take off her head and make soup from one grain of rice. Sometimes she is an old woman in rags and sometimes she is a haughty princess. You must serve her aims no matter what.
She tested girls’ generosity, humility, modesty, obedience, and faith.
How the good girl chose the plain eggs and not the ones covered in jewels. Or she brought the pitcher of water to the woman’s lips. Or she did not laugh or make a sound at all. Good girls are tactful, subtle, obedient, quiet, agreeable, and pretty.
Girls who advocate for themselves, say no, shine it on, make noise, or react are bad. The bad girls get frogs falling from their mouths.
I guess I wonder if it is possible to do what you want- disobeying orders respectfully, lovingly even. Breaking rules is always seen as a sort of violence, but never their existence in the first place. Circumstance doesn’t matter. If you break code, slippery amphibians follow you all your life like a cursed reminder of your boundary-crossing ways.

Before Femme, I took myself
for granted. And I took you for granted too.
I asked my girlfriend fucked up things like,
“Why you wanna dress like a boy?”
And she asked me fucked up things like,
“Why, aren't you really straight anyway?”
She lived, hot sad planets away
on Long Island, and I lived,
zipped in a cocoon of my own spinning,
in New Jersey, with my mom.
Who knew only, that I liked girls,
I slept with men, and she had tried to tell me
that whatever it was was ok.
I didn't touch myself.
I didn't touch myself.
I didn't touch myself.

Before Femme I was a girl.
And there was nothing sexy about the way
I crawled through clothes hangers,
and brambles, in the wooded places,
behind all of us, or at the body
and gender menacing mall.
I folded into and out of danced embraces,
flung my purse over my shoulder as I gritted my teeth,
marched back home with my crutches
when my power chair died in the middle
of my white skinned red eyed packed brick strong river antique town.
And everyone stared, not saying what they saw.

There is some amount of velvet blackout
curtain rub on the old stage,
ascent out of time,
Before Femme.
I don’t remember my sense
of self falling asleep under
heavy sleeping bags and lover’s hands,
maybe I just worried less.
Found a silver bullet to transform
my private snowbeasts
back into human drifts and mounds.

I wake up and I am on some porch steps
further North, this girl, no mama,
new words for you now, this Femme
has just told me that I am Femme!
Has brown ponytail
round ass off-black dress on-black line eyes
gold ears and moonlight voice.
Is handing me these red lipstick stained cigarettes to share
and I have never felt so warm all over my body.
Is this the beginning of the world?
When the fir trees whisper to low hanging sky,
the smoke signals curl, and it occurs to you
why you have had a body?
Is this what the First Femme knew?
That warmth is as much
a circumstantial behavior as a temperature?
After femme, I looked around,
and slunk towards my path in daylight,
kissing everyone I liked with lipstick on,
touching myself in the afternoon curve of my bed.