to hide and reveal, to cover the moon with
a dime. to tuck, and conceal.

think: ragdoll
think: flesh and clothes
red nails and testosterone

you’re the ghost of a dream
more moon than a set sun

and soon: bound, twisting
in satellite.

zoom out: a steady glow
beat to a summer’s night.

Do you want a fucking

                                    meaning nugget?

Here,

Here is your meaning nugget.

Godammit,

G. Stein is a

sweet lady

who kicked the top off that shit

Unexpected items in a list—

that’s poetry!!

I don’t give a shit what it means it’s cool.

Here’s another old one, when I spelled my name like the “e” was just eaten. Clearly a perfectionist and escapist from the start.

The mirror has a reflection

I prefer to play perfection

Mirrors come in small, medium and large

Oh how I love to go on the other side

by Alli Axel, 1997

I just found this poem in my old email. From September, 2007.

The Land of Heartbreak

Dear—

I am writing from a place

Of heart break.

A thousand beats away

I lie to you

Between sheets of golden grass

Wrestling with my heart’s infidelity

As blades bend beneath my weight.

A river runs between (us?)

Separating Routine from

Discovery.

The tumbling waters drown

My apology.

At the bottom, graying with decay,

Waits a young heart.

Watery beats count

One, two, three,

Then—still.

This is the land of heartbreak.

(This heart’s on fire).

every leaving

reminds me

i’ll be coming back.

it’s pain

enough not to go.

This is my love story—the pit of truth I cannot swallow.

Who is she? Something green, something deeply

old in a yawning body.

She stretches to life: reading until her heart bleeds, emptying herself on the page, heartily dreaming,

moments with meaning.

Moments—where the people and street respawn, she sees herself

from above. She hungers for understanding, connection, expression, honesty.

To know and to be known, comfortably, via page.

She is opening: seeing life as so much

without the romance and fancy, and,

anticipating the invite to share it all,

she will. Significance waits inside her: anything that once held meaning is another layer of her loveliness.

She is lovely. Lovely. Wise and wonderful.

She is a creator: thought, love, stories, relationships,

of creations real and imagined. She rises to the challenge:

passion, loyalty, dedication, motivation, grace.

I will sleep well tonight simply knowing who she is.

How To Make Love to a Trans Person

by Gabe Moses

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet itLet her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.

Via

Intro

This is a quiet book

with shaking words—

a quivering finger

pressed to lips.

This story lies in the spaces

between a newly compounded word—

a silent space

of white walls and grass.

We forget that our story

is bound in the child’s eye—

a life insisted on by

pure and hushed discovery

and a wicked underbelly of dirt.

I.

Simon is no less than a figment of our imagination

An invisible arm.

We imagine him singing because it is

Pleasanter than his cut out tongue.

Simon says nothing but

He tells us it is why he

Not like apples—

The worms.

Earthworms eat dirt

Silkworms spin souls

Appleworms give Simon the wiggins.

Simon we say all creatures is alright.

Non. He shakes his head persistently.

Non.

Pause.

Perhaps.

II.

Today Simon found a mermaid.

He gives us a scale we say it’s a fishes

He gives us a hairs we say thread

He gives us a shell we say pooey clams spit

He stamps and throws fists and steams.

We go a looking for the nudie mermaid.

III.

Simon asked if we are

a family.

We say perhaps.

IV.

Simon asked why bodies drive with heat

We look and holds him

To bring us closer

V.

there be green and brown and empty space

Simon is imagining grasses from bottom to top

Like an ant looks towards tips

All he is seeing is a world of grasses and skies

Looks, us

Tell me what is wrong he asks

He searches us canyoned eyes

Guesses him not find the answer

Tell me

Up us, straddles a pile of bones

Elephant tomb, horseback

Kicks with stirruped feet

heels and waves yeehaw giddyup

He is imagining

He fills

we hollow

We hollowly tear at the grass.

VI.

Simon is covering ears:

IT IS TOO LOUD. S.

Yes yes but without them quotes books is silent.

Secretly: in your head they reads as whispers.

He drops the covers

and kisses a finger shh

VII.

We watch as Simon watches the sand.

He siphons a single grain on his tip and   looks

Yes and humanity is etched upon it we say

We ladle the sand in our main

We want this to be humanity    while weighing it in the hand

We mechanically break our fingers like water the sand slips

We let it

and the grains explode when they land on the ebbing wave some up some out

They sift like debris after the explosion

Humanity is just a try to not go under

we remember saying it proudly

Simon brushes the dry sand off his knees

A fish is heard swimming.

VIII.

What to say about Simon?

We try to say quiet wickedness

We say,

sweet.

like strawberries.

Kindergarten is full of strawberries.

IX.

Simon is rattling like a penny on a train track

His body shakes by the word

Something is cold and electric inside him

On an I-beam he stares down a rushing freedom

And a life of mornings.

XI.

Simon says he is in love

This is how he says it:

I AM IN LOVE. S.

We ask with who?

GREEN. S.

Our eyes meet:

I HEAR THE GRASS GROWING.

S.

XII.

Turning across

Simon raises him head and hands

Sungrazed chin     dirt bumped knees, the horizon

Beneath we hear the metallicness of it all.

It wasn’t a fall per se but a magnet of praise

XIII.

Simon is always forgetting the difference

Between teeth and scars

XIV.

PERHAPS I AM INTERESTED IN FRAGMENTS. S.

We say where you learn teh talk like that boy.

XV.

who believes in souls and characters?

and characters with souls?

I’ve looked and seen

both

bathing in a drawn eye

and in your eye

(us three, we three)

Simon, and me,

and you

three parts to one ratio

clunking like wood

rattling fingers with pens

I’ve found you both

I’ve found you both.

XVI.

God we remember and it shows

Breaths caught in clamped faces

Simon knocks on our head

Asking us.

The memory is tasting like rice.

Simon is wrapped by the guitar

His faces noting brightness

And the chords warm us cheekses

Like sundropped petals in raise

We’re the lonely face that looks away

From the music

To the past while

Simon is warming on.

XVII.

Dem eyes playing guitar

Pluck and raise Simon’s strings

Us, and we are noted

and rising forward

Them notes sound

of southern roses

Tune us

Prune us

us is blooming

by Alexandra Axel