Transwomen Have Periods

Remember when everything was heavy?

When candy was sweet and a stare could get you hot?

Remember when music could make you cry

Without a glass of wine to soften your heart?

I woke up hungover without drinking,

Aching, soreness, and strangely giddy feelings,

Sensations in my heart not unlike what’s in my chest,

And stomach pains like little smiles teething.

Transformation entails some rearranging,

Hormones pushing, pulling, and changing.

My moods are growing and almost glowing,

And I’ve never felt more like a woman in the making.

If You Go Into The Cold

At 6 P.M, Christmas night,

When there’s no shadow on the frozen ground,

It’s better to stay inside with coffee and cream

Than to risk being seen out of doors in this town.

The weather alone is enough to have caution,

The first things we find are often their winter clothes

Followed, not far away, by whatever else they wore,

And finally, the body, often half buried in snow.

It happens every year, but we couldn’t tell you why,

Only that it’s irrelevant where one’s supposed to be,

It’s 20 below freezing just an hour after dusk

And there are hours more waiting before anything can be seen.

They stagger, it seems, to the woods from the roads,

The thickets leave cuts, which make them easy to find

Following the broken twigs stained with blood

To the places where the victims inevitably lay

An old tree, bent and rotting, where we find them reposed,

Or by the bridge, in the stream, where their skins turn pale blue.

Sometimes they seem to drop somewhere randomly,

And only rarely are there signs a struggle ensued.

What we mean, is you’re welcome to stay if you must,

We’re aloud to be festive, if we don’t leave our homes,

But Winter is the master of the elements tonight

And if you care to see another year, you’ll stay out of the cold.

Radient Ideation

Allow me to indulge my radient ideation,

A spectacle of bittersweet sunbeams breaking through gray skies,

Eeking their way into my ugliest days

Like transcended smiles projected from the purest celestial lights.

They reach me bedecked in wilting blue flowers,

Exposed to the heavens in a gown of silk white,

Seduced into a dream that lasts for an eternity

Between the fragility of a body and the soft sting of twilight.

It’s wearying to be deranged for the sake of beautiful things,

And as they dull, to come to know, that madness still remains.

A song I knew grew up to be a different kind of tune,

It plays the notes that made me up and broke away from me.

Intoning prose for my own health prolongs the point of breaking,

And sharing them from mind to mind is life that’s worth the saving,

To make a scene of who I’ve been to stimulate your feelings

Is all I need to brighten up this dream I can’t stop dreaming.

Burn me with the autumn leaves, with cardamom and honey,

Leave a house to my mother on the shores of a lake that’s crystal clear and foggy.

Find me there in ashes, free from poverty and wealth,

Dead to all the world, but not dead to herself.

When The Old Die

I imagine that every generation experiences death in their own way.

In our old age, when that stop is more than ever certain,

I imagine every generation leaving behind a legacy

And giving scope to life in how they feel their last days.

As Grandpa was dying, I imagined the kind of mind

A man born in the fifties would carry while he survived,

And the sum of all experiences before he met the end,

How they measured up to what he saw and all the things he’d been.

A man who worked machines, watched tv, and prayed

Died hooked to a machine, with the television on, praying.

The same shows he always saw were the last ones he watched,

And the cigarette in his fingers was the last thing he touched.

Will I die surrounded by the things I see today?

Will I understand the world as I do now, the same way?

When my generation finally slips into the grave,

I wonder what the others will think of how we passed away..

Why It Eats Them

If it exists

It can be eaten.

A body that needs and a mind that percieves

Never ceases to breed new cravings,

From bitter seeds to fields of weeds

And entire populations.

For pleasure and the fear of death

A war for peace against distress

And harvests passed through mouths and chests

To pacify those needings.

Where emptiness meets the scent of flesh,

The freshness of unspoiled aeons,

The yawning consciousness of ever-dark

Yearns endlessly for freedom.

Its shadow veils the infinite stars,

Collapses galaxies and consumes their dust,

And for everything it cannot have

It holds a knawing, grating lust.

The dry and brittle bones of worlds

Stripped of their luscious, inebriating fruit

Fall from looking out with awe

To pits of their self too deep to see through.

A space-less shape beyond these dimensions,

A mind with too much trouble unseen,

The common core of all creation,

A child with candy on Halloween.

I Love October

Dark chocolate, melted,

Mixed with coffee and cream.

Grey skies, cold wind,

And blankets of orange leaves.

Jazzy lo-fi with my morning tea,

Earth & spice in the air I breathe

Death of summer, sweet relief

Apple cider and marshmallow treats

Afternoon walks in long dark sleeves

Reaquaintences with the old silver screen

Gothic novels and scary dreams

A celebration for all macabre things.

October is the month I like to savor;

Its bitterness, sweetness, strength, and mystery.

It reminds me what makes me feel alive,

Being sensitive enough to take pleasure in little things.

It’s like kisses under a thick comforter

And shivers from a well placed touch,

A chill that sweeps over your entire body.

A gentle shock that opens you to your reality.

Dear October, I love you,

Sincerely, Sanya Elswyth Walma

Grandfather

You had a lot to say,

A lot locked behind all the walls of your losses,

Heavy half-truths, unexhumed feelings, and prejudices.

A doomsday prophet, razor-focused on the end.

So absorbed with abstract death, present miseries eluded you,

That was, until they burdened you, and wore you down.

The last eight years of your life were some of the strangest of mine.

We needed each other, but I couldn’t always depend on you.

You were the last person I would trust with anything personal,

And in my lowest moments, I hate to say, your words only hurt.

I couldn’t be your grandson, though I pretended to the end,

Hiding everything about myself as I tended to your needs.

And when you were afraid to die, I stayed beside you,

Comforting you with the same love you had for me,

The unconditional, but seperated from real empathy.

The truth is that we could never accept each other

For who I am and what you believed.

For all the years we spent together, just ourselves,

Every day was a little painful, with all the tension I concealed.

It was all for you, and now you’re finally burned and buried.

It hit me hard, knowing our interactions are done.

Your voice is embedded in my mind, your words and persona.

I miss you, and it’s bitter, even though I’m glad you’re gone.

Goodbye Grandfather, I’ll remember all you taught me.

I’ll remember because I’m unable to forget.

You taught so much and still learned so little.

The end of the world is surely coming, even though you missed it.

Goodbye.

Sixteen Hours

It’s over and begun again

Before I was awake to contemplate my place therein

And now there’s decisions to make before another day is wasted;

Time to get out of bed and make the most of who I am.

Sixteen hours to occupy.

There’s money I need to make,

Feelings I need to hold at bay,

Friends I ought to engage with

Dreams of mine to explain;

I know I should write another poem,

I know I should do more for myself,

I should work harder to realize my potential,

To help others and bring more beauty into the world,

Oppose oppression and lift up the beaten down,

Make new memories and new connections into love,

Write meaningful stories as impactful as I am able,

Speak truth to power and lead others to something more.

Sixteen hours.

A day’s weight to carry and divide

With all the urgency of our dwindling time.

My God, I need a release and space to hide,

Some poison to feel temporarily satisfied,

A window to the make believe, to live a life that isn’t mine,

Immediate pleasure, to be ok alone and pacified.

A day’s tension and relief , begun again, immobilized,

Consistent as death with all the awareness of being alive.

It needs to end, this state of being that leaves my paralyzed,

Because all the stress within a day hurts less

Than witnessing your life go by unrealized.

Identifying A Woman

Far be it from me to tell you

What a woman is or isn’t

Because even the act of living it

Leaves ambiguities.

 

Do you believe identities

Are something we experience internally

Or something we’re assigned

By nature or how we’re perceived?

 

There are hormones and chromosomes,

Patriarchial structures and feminine superstitions,

Poems and stories devoted to Goddesses,

And those who break away from all traditions.

 

Desire, lust, and expectation,

Something defining or something latent?

A human being entrenched in Image

Or a depth of feeling you simply experience?

 

That which is not man

Or that which is only artificial,

A culture, a gender, a sexual character,

Someone you recognize but can’t quite decipher.

 

Style, substance, intuition,

A history of subversion and subjugation,

A relationship with words like “beautiful” or “pretty,”

The feeling of being prized or hunted.

 

A mystery, a darkness,

A power not delicate but malleable at the edges,

A subject that either fits you or doesn’t

But not a thing that can ever be taken or given.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They’re Not The Same

There are characters and stories I’d always imagined growing old with,

Looking back on forever as formative to my being,

But while growing up changes a person and our worldly understanding,

Stories often remain undeveloped and unchanged.

There are moments in books that once thrilled or astounded me,

That were once profound, insightful, or full of mood,

And while many of those words still make me feel something,

Their meaning seems to change as often as I do.

Themes that represented the concepts I believed so perfectly

Have revealed themselves to be shallower over time,

And writers whose minds seemed so beautifully percipient

Have fallen behind perceiving the experiences of life.

It’s sad to watch something beautiful be diminished

When circumstances change how it reflects in our gaze,

And characters that fell so easily into our hearts

Transform into beings from which we’ve become estranged,

But, if there are stories we’ve grown away from

It means that we’re growing all the same,

And becoming new and better people will always alter

Our understanding of what the past means.

Sentences and ideals that mattered then can still matter

With new understanding settled into the narratives we’re making,

And the stories we’ve left behind can still inspire us

As we renew our loves and troubles into characters worth creating.