TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR SURGERY, HAVE YOU BEEN ON HORMONE THERAPY FOR SEVERAL MONTHS?
1/ No.
2/ There was a certain sequence of events
which became palatable to you
if followed in logical order.
HRT was a repeated practice and surgery was a lightning strike.
3/ Which one couldn’t I take back?
Which was more bearable to you?
4/ Six months after
top surgery, a friend of a friend asked what I was waiting for.
“I’ll get on T eventually,” I told them.
5/ Getting on implied that
testosterone had a seat for me to sit upon,
was a place to rest.
Was possibly a waiting equine
already saddled up—
her brown nose breaking my heart.
6/ “You must change your life,” Rainier Maria Rilke says of cold marble.
7/ One of the few things I hated about cooking
was the acute mincing of alliums.
8/ Onions, shallots, leeks. But especially garlic
in her bashful paper mask.
She yielded under brute force. The flat of the knife.
9/ I used to think there was a proper way to do things.
10/ The truth
was that getting on testosterone was deciding to go on
and my life had never been important enough.
11/ Tired of improper mincing, I looked it up.
A YouTube video instructed me to peel each garlic clove first.
Then cut thin slices, fan them out,
make a rocking motion with my knife
perpendicularly.
12/ I thought the rational sequencing of events was extremely boring.
At this point, my fingers smelled next-to-sex.
13/ Last summer I became enamored
with the idea of getting horses tattooed on my belly.
The heavy line of their necks—
tracing it was a muscular sound.
I had a fantasy that as the needle entered my body, I would finally recognize myself.
14/ I asked my sister, “do you think that tattoos help you feel more
like yourself?”
She texted back quickly, “no.”
15/ When I was a girl, I used to close my too-watering eyes
and think of cool brick walls.
I willed the stone to make me likewise
hard, unyielding.
“Sensitive,” my elementary school teacher called me.
16/ All around me were paper carcasses
of the life I ought to have had.
17/ For a while, I tuned out Rilke’s demand.
Choosing to change my life, get on T—
my future had to be more
than inevitable.
18/ In the middle of each garlic slice, there was a small germ.
19/ Cultivated garlic reproduces asexually.
Wouldn’t that be nice—if I didn’t need you?
20/ There were many things I wanted
but mostly I wanted no one else to have to feel a ripple
as I went through with it.
21/ Yeah. I wanted to push aside
the blinders. Wanted you
to look me in the eyes.
22/ Few things become more potent as they break.
I was glad to be like an allium in this way,
unbridled and smaller and more powerful
even as I cried on the kitchen floor.
23/ Of course, one of life’s greatest pleasures was the pounding
of a stone mortar and pestle. Against painful texture,
rationality lost all meaning.
24/ I understood the terrible confines.
With relief, abandoned perpendicular cuts.
In the mortar, I bruised garlic cells till they moved,
broke, bloomed.
The juices and oils ran together
to be held by the bottom of the bowl.
25/ I felt comforted by this containment
which was not the same as confinement.
26/ This was my transition:
each individual clove became translucent as a moth’s wing,
then became a moth’s wing—
dissolving,
flattening
into a vigorous paste.
27/ Stone usually connotes one-sidedness.
Sometimes, a voluntary absence of feeling.
Stone butch. Stone faced.
Stone cold.
28/ But when I pounded the stone mortar,
I was gripped with feeling—
feeling a sudden loose pleasure.