Author’s Note: This is a trilogy about recognising, coming to terms with and embracing a trans identity. I wanted to celebrate the creative nature of trans expression and how a journey of acceptance is one of nurturing, art and a rejection of all that pins you down.

Braced

There are rafters above me,
vaulted,
holding the ceiling aloft.
All that space for prayer.
They are engraved,
I know, with roses
but are beyond reach.
No more than potential.

There are rafters above,
they soar and when I sing
they cradle every note
close,
among them, amidst them
within them.
When I cannot find the right note
the rafters still embrace with echo.

There are planks behind me,
hewn wood, raw and sharp.
Their stain glues to my skin,
it is sticky in the back of my throat
I cannot speak, let alone sing.
Their splinters and nails drive into my spine;
the red of my lips made brighter
by the blood I know falls from my back
as I am braced.

There are planks behind me:
they hold me in position
I am posed, I am constrained.
I would figure them wings,
the way the wood digs where
on my back, feathers could sprout.
My arms are open
framed to dance
I would figure them wings,
yet they brace me still

I look to rafters.
How they vault and dance.
It is a death either way,
held in the rules of wood and nail
or flaunting them, above.
One death is slow, braced, elegant
the only gore to my back,
that well hidden
and I beautiful.

But I do not want a slow death.
Braced.
I cannot allow myself
to be made, still.

I look to the rafters.
I choose the unknown death.
That which rises, undeniable,
Like bile in my throat, purging.

I set the wings alight
burn, phoenix
all that I have ever
lent upon collapses.

The fire consumes
where I was Madonna, beauty
I am ignition and fuel
and I feel a freedom
that is concomitant with terror.

But I can fly.
I can sing
I feel the chance
Of discovery

I unbrace,
to seek what was out of reach
to define myself
past wood and moulding.

Embrace

I have never known touch.
I have never known tenderness.
I have never known embrace. 

This is not to say I have never been touched
but if you do not recognise your hand
then reaching out to pluck
a blackberry
lands you amidst brambles.
How can I feel another’s touch
when I do not know the body they grasp? 

This is not to say I have never felt tenderness
but those parts of me that sum to softness
nettle, and prick
thorns to, of my flesh.
How can I feel the tenderness of another
when I sting to my own comprehension?

This is not to say I have never known embrace
but I am like the soil,
dug and emptied
hollow, a grave of a body,
to a body.
How can I feel the wholeness of embrace
when I am gutted by my own wrongness?

I am soil.
I am the plant that nettles.
I am the hand that reaches.
Rather, I am the hand that sows.

I tend to the garden
until I recognise my fingers
by the dirt I have gilded them with.

I tease out new growth
until my stomach is brawny
with roots I have cultivated.

I taste the fruit
from the tree I have grown,
plucked by hands I know.
And I feel your touch.
And I know your tenderness.
And I understand your embrace. 

Embrace me.

EMBRACE ME.
and when you hold my body in your arms
know it as by my hand made, not begotten.
I am bred from my own substance
of chalk on the pavement.
I am an amalgam
of brushstrokes over salvaged wood. 

EMBRACE ME.
run your fingers over my skin
let my flesh, still soft, give way
bone and arteries that bend to grasp.
I am only earth, not yet fired in the blaze of the kiln.
Every sinew moulded from clay,
I have whispered life into my form.

EMBRACE ME.
place your hand against my chest
touch the canvas, yet to scar.
Pull back, your palm greased by oil.
The paint wet, the sketch made.
Begun: I am a project that is not finished
and nor will I ever be.

EMBRACE ME.
Press your lips to my Adam’s apple
feel the hollows in the marble where
the chisel has nicked my skin.
I carved out the figure I saw in hewn stone.
Where for some is cartilage,
I have sculpted an imitation.

EMBRACE ME.
and when you feel my arms around your body
know that I am my own creator
and I hold you now in hands
that I was not born with
that were never given.
Know that I hold you with hands
that are paint-stained, and sun-spotted.

Feel it.
The clay that I dug from the riverside
it still muddies under the shelter of my fingernail.