Evelyn Bauer
TW: body horror/in depth descriptions, sexual violence/imagery, blood and gore, mild transphobic experiences
Please Saint Sebastian, Remember Me
Why are all symbols of femininity about getting pierced?
It was not enough when my ears were first punctured
(two bright pricks of blood under fluorescent lighting / two quick clicks from the employee’s gun)
Nor the second
(hollowed steel sterilized under a man’s hand / rough like how each piece of wood has its own grain
and steady like yellowed fingers grasping their third cigarette)
Not enough when the ink covered needles pushed into my fragile flesh
(blood / ink / plasma squeezing through a mesh of skin)
Not enough now, arrows tearing through my rib cage
(their wood like the hand of a man / who has held a plow every day for the past thirty years / who
wakes up before dawn just to go hungry)
it didn’t take
For as they interr my body into the Earth it is she who is pierced and not I
(as if the world was saying “born a man, die a man”)
(as if I had not bled again and again / as if I was not pierced again and again)
The Marsh is a Trans Dyke Too
white-knuckled clutch my identity before I become another ghost
a marsh has a heart, arteries, capillaries
water flows through tributaries like blood, gives life to reeds, grass, ducks
I read this on a signpost outside of D.C.
once. how here more than anywhere else we can see how really truly and fully alive she is.
alive like a fuck you for everyone who hates her,
alive like a hug for everyone who loves her.
she’s cold right now, this marsh, and tired.
but water pumps through her just the same.
a marsh has a heart, arteries, capillaries
she holds me in her arms
the only sound the wind in her lungs, and her beating chest, close to my ear
covering me in her mud, I am
reborn, like every other flaming faggot, from earth and clay and love
a mother’s love from earth itself, created by the sages; return to your dust.
I’m tired too, but
a marsh has a heart, arteries, capillaries
and she holds me to her chest
Evelyn Bauer is a writer, bookseller, and wine punk living on stolen land in so called 'New England.' She is often found reviewing books, petting cats, and listening to experimental music. She would love to give you a natural wine recommendation and discuss queer liberatory literature with you! You can find some of her tabletop roleplaying games HERE or on Twitter @neo_cubist