"Barton Creek,” "Bury This Under the Dish Pit," & "Pink Matter 1 & 2:" A Poem and Photographs

Bury This Under the Dish Pit

To write about these three griefs, three memorials in a month. My grandmother, my best friend’s brother, and my coworker. It would be like writing from a ditch. Less a ditch than a plain. A great sweeping plain, is that not what Jewish teachings suggest comes in death? My rabbi told me that once. Let her be at peace in that sleeping field. In that way I feel like them, Renée, Ethan, and Kai. I guess we share a state. I’m not dead, I’m alive, but so are they. Their spirits animate this page. Let us say death is transformation. Let us allow our families the right to feel like we have died in some way when we change names, genders, bodies. I keep transforming so I keep dying, and the rebirth is fabulous, don’t get me wrong, but I’m tired from dying over and over and over again. I am tired from questioning incessantly. I don’t know what I am. I am wishing I was nothing these days. When we say what’s up in the house group text my roommate likes to joke I am bed. I want to be bed. I want to become bed, be bedded, be wrapped up by my sheets, have a nice boy swaddle me. It might help me calm down. After I rest then I might be willing to come forth from the field.