Tomboy
One summer, I falsely believed my trans had room for poetry. I peeled open Troubling the Line
and used their poems like porn. I remembered that poetry is embarrassing. I remembered how
my mother kindly told me she had read poetry, too, once.
(When. I had asked.
She didn’t reply.
When you were a teenager? Or in college?
She bit her lip. In her years of melodrama she had read her poetry of pies and skies in teeth and
flesh and bodies and salt. Just like everyone, before they grow into their prose.)
I considered the tomboy I had never been. The despite I was. The pink I’d always kept close, like
a muscle, maybe to fight something away.
Was the pink a defensive act?
(No, pink was passive.)
Was I passive?
(No, but I was pink.)
One summer, I falsely believed my trans had room for poetry. I peeled open Troubling the Line
and used their poems like porn. I remembered that poetry is embarrassing. I remembered how
my mother kindly told me she had read poetry, too, once.
(When. I had asked.
She didn’t reply.
When you were a teenager? Or in college?
She bit her lip. In her years of melodrama she had read her poetry of pies and skies in teeth and
flesh and bodies and salt. Just like everyone, before they grow into their prose.)
I considered the tomboy I had never been. The despite I was. The pink I’d always kept close, like
a muscle, maybe to fight something away.
Was the pink a defensive act?
(No, pink was passive.)
Was I passive?
(No, but I was pink.)
[sarah] Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town. They are managing editor at Stone of Madness Press and founding editor of swallow::tale press, and have had work in Bitch Magazine, Disability Studies Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their third chapbook, OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (2022) is available now from Ethel Press. Cavar lives online at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.