/TRANSFORMATIONS

I have a father.

DNA results confirmed it a few weeks ago. In the month since my blood was revealed to me through cheek swabs, charted phenotypes, and insomniac nights--things have been good. Hot and lethargic as Alabama summers dictate, but good is the word. I now have an eight-year old little sister. She collects broken glass and has smart blue eyes. The first night I spent with my new family, I didn't sleep at all. I lay awake in her room, bathed in pink light with plastic stars descending from the ceiling on strings. I wondered what she was dreaming. I wondered: how does one become a sister? How does one become a daughter?

It's been surreal, to say the very least. And awkward and sweet and very--human? Can't say precisely what I mean by that. I'm making haste if not progress I'm racking up all my lost rites at once. My father even caught me smoking and pretended to be disappointed.

Back in Tuscaloosa, I spend a lot of time drinking and night-swimming. How my small town sadness perseveres. In other cities, men fish girls out from the bottoms of their glasses. In other cities, jinn emerge from the ends of lit cigarettes. In other cities I am a sailor I am a crook of the word I am published and oft-quoted. In other cities strangers are dancing to radio static that cannot reach me as I drive in silence through the inky trajectory of another nothing night.

Been sneaking into a local pub for kicks, though I never buy drinks. Being underage in a Tuscaloosa bar does not an outlaw make. Mostly I just watch my friends take on the guises of barflies. Patrick & Bruce arguing absurd hypotheticals: Foucault & Derrida fight for sovereignty of language. What kind of fight? I ask. They look at me and all the light reflects off their eyes, taking nothing in. Curious trick that may or may not be singular to bar light. A cagematch, they answer. As if it were the most obvious thing.

Thinking worlds are made and unmade in these back rooms. Latticework of smoke overhead, churning into primordial soup. Taking on spiral arms. Birds-nest, Horsehead. Progressions and lack thereof: drink, nicotine, denouement-with-hands.

I failed in my summer endeavor to write a poem a day. Not miserably, but notably. Note to self: Ambition and discipline ought to be weighed equally. And I have to write about something other than bodies.

Perhaps I need a new hobby besides all this word-hoarding. Einstein played the violin. Django Reinhardt made flowers out of cellophane. Edward II dug ditches. Peter the Great pulled teeth. Vladimir Lenin sharpened pencils. Poseidon created horses out from seafoam. St. Francis preached to the birds. Cleopatra pricked the breasts of her slave girls with golden pins. Leonardo da Vinci had no hobbies.

But mostly it's too hot to do much. Sun of claiming. Everywhere the sound of dogs panting. Days like this I wish I was a man so I could walk bare-chested through the streets as if to say: my heart is only a fist away. This heat which makes all my hungers feel overfull...everytime I turn to speak to He-who-lingers-in-my-bed-and-breast, the mirage dissolves. Now he's a saguaro now he's a citadel. Old trick, Helios.

Today is my last day as a teenager. Come midnight, I will be two decades old. Thinking I'll spend it in some dark field with hibiscus gin and Lyrids.