Angel Rosen

TO BECOME UNWILD

there was a time where you would’ve been
embarrassed to be seen with me in public.
malicious friends curating a stare,
thinking how pointless it was to walk me leashed
because my bitespan was still half a mile
and my laugh traveled faster than any gentle creature

i did this & other rabid gestures with the same innocence
but we still couldn’t be side-by-side
no room for alignment 
clearly because of the shapes of sidewalks
not my language or its severity 

i hurry through my missteps
staying wild
meeting you at cursed intersections, unmarked

ten years later, i am finally tall enough to see 
consequence and stop howling just for disrupt
make my mandatory noises into music, 
invite you to play along

we cross the street together, this time, both upright,
both singing.

First Surgery

Doctor, I’ve come here with
an unbelievable testimony.
They are going to fill me
with a hot liquid that I begged for,
wash me out. Sanitize me. I will
pay for this freedom with an ordeal
and a moment of sleep. How frightful
it will be to be positioned between
gratitude and anesthesia.  Someone will
be filling me up with a radiofrequency.
I will not be able to change the station.
I am going to be submissive to their exploration.
They will cauterize me and plug my seepage 
with an expense. I will make the payments,
I will know the entirety of the debt.

The show does not end here.
I will be so swollen.  Everything will
leak out of me, my cyclical torment
trickling down my legs for days,
to eventually cease. If this doesn’t work,
I will be sorted through a precious extraction. 
A token of my womanhood
will be so graciously given a much better home
on the outside of me.  A proud divorcee, 
I will want daffodils for the ceremony.
They have offered me a trimming now,
but I have all my bets on the full severance package.
I can’t wait to be a real girl, not my
ovaries’ obedient marionette.
I will scream for my home.  I will
visit Heaven and recite everything I know
all at once, a clamor for the angels
to prove that I will be able to still
recognize myself without my most
obvious wound.

Angel Rosen (she/her) is a lesbian, poet, grief expert, a chronically online millennial and neurodivergent human being.  She loves lemonade, The Dresden Dolls and sharing anecdotes.  Her work can be found at angelrosen.com. You can find her on Twitter.