essa may ranapiri
Holding Rights To
the politics of the body moving from one stage to another is precipitated with the request of change from close biological characters; the one that did the making followed by the one that did the leaving and the one that did the caring / all involved in the body’s permission to shift from masculine through to androgynous to feminized / it is happening quietly on the tip of the tongue the body taking turns to shuffle tit and teat and clit and beak to a further end / just touch the site where it no longer gets up as high in the morning / won’t miss a thing / feel dreadful in the heat of family / the xy component of offspring genes makes a sound: that they were truly a part of him / the xx component makes a sound: that it started inside her stomach – point at belly / put white teeth between red lips / the body is fully condoned in this instant made accessible/ made autonomous/ an estranged contradiction within the politics of its choices/ wakes up one morning with the imagination of a thing less indoctrinated in heteronormative social mores / already changed and utterly panicking / happens in the chest and flutters through pinches in the grey matter that secretly wants this maybe i’ve grown used to boyhood too late it thinks to itself as if the thought will do anything to alter the course / describes a certain fuck up to its lover who asks if fucked up was how it feels / it is quiet / the body does not need lessons on how to be okay with sex / the imperialist establishment of certain bodies as male and certain bodies as female / due to the imperialist establishment of the white sleeved God / its love is many lovers add hate-is or hate-does to the myth of forgiveness / social wrong does a social turn / the body is trying its best to survive under certain historically predated conditions / the precedent is two / revisionists tying norms to a tower of spikes / God pricked / it thinks about the months ahead / it thinks about the different ways things show up on the body / it is a static holding breath before the plunge / its blood pressure is no reason to fret / melting down to a thought how wonderful it could all be fucking different / it swallows / it spits up / power / removes a finger from its mouth / turns to the external paradigm of world slowly conceding its tight grip on the Boolean of natural sex and gender / and lets out breath it held too long
Vessels
The dew danced at your neck
and
pulled a lace girdle of hot breath
down over the small of your back,
my hands or my mouth or my hopes were pressed there,
in the outline of a snowflake
photocopied from the star of David.
You’re a lightbulb of soft flesh.
Took turns feigning cannibalism
working mouths over fingers
molars grazing nails and knuckles sliding
full length
over tongues,
it wasn’t a kiss, it was
holding you with my lips,
from ear
to nose
to mouth.
It was not wanting to let go
from navel to hip to
thigh even though
I could never fit all of you inside me.
Your paddle board posture,
your voice croaking from exertion,
your eyes wild moving in lazy circles.
I tried because
rounded edges go down easy
and you were as safe as
blunt force trauma
and as
soft as a blood clot.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
essa may ranapiri /// trans po-et /// they-them-theirs
“whale & harpoon” as metaphor for the ?self? no certainty like un certainty they will write until they are dead
[has words in Mayhem, Brief, Geometry, Poetry NZ, Starling, Them]