In Which My Gender and an Infant with Colic are Indistinguishable
my gender is a greedy child
wanting to hold all this femme and masc
together in the same chest
it demands everything,
demands the he and the she and the they
all at once
my gender cries out in hunger
desperate to consume
all of this body, all of me
it pleads with me, tells me
that it needs all of this flesh
to sustain itself
i do not know how to tell my gender
that i need this body too,
cannot give it all away
that i can’t possibly feed it
everything it needs
with just these two hands
so i keep trying to rein it in, giving it new labels and names,
hoping that someday it will swallow one
and hold it in it’s stomach like a sedative
but my gender, the stubborn, picky thing it is, refuses to be calmed,
keeps spitting up everything i give it (man, woman, nothing in particular)
refuses to become something i can explain away
not understanding that this world does not want it
not understanding that i am only trying to protect it
just thinking i am an overbearing parent trying to rope it in
it throws tantrum after screaming tantrum
shaking all my bones
howling at me to allow it to grow up, into itself
i ask my gender what it wants to be when it grows up
and it shows me a field of daisies
and a church on fire
i ask my gender what it means
and it seals its lips like its holding some great secret,
too unbending to reveal it quite yet
the secret is, my gender
does not know
what it wants to be
just knows that it’s something other than this vessel,
this trap whose bars it has been rattling since i was born,
and can’t think of how to free itself other than caging me in instead
just knows that it is a greedy child
wants this body and her body and his body
but doesn’t know how to live in any of them
Lip Manegio is a queer, trans nonbinary performance poet based in Boston where they are towards a BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Winter Tangerine, Slamchop, voicemail poems, Slamfind, Freezeray Poetry, and the minnesota review. They also work as an organizer for the Emerson Poetry Project and were a member of the 2018 Emerson CUPSI team.