From the passenger seat in the mouth of the big blue whale of a Honda Odyssey
my sister will later name Bertha, I see my mother cast barbed wire at my buzzcut.
Do you want to be a boy? This is an accusation. She wants to know why I’ve done this to her.
Earlier this week my sister kept me downstairs while she tried to soften
the stone of my mother’s shame, the hardness still cratering itself into my body
when I heard her say, What do I tell people? They ask me why—
My hair is a body all on its own, the corpse of the daughter she ironed into existence every morning, and now it is forever beyond her, laid to rest in the dumpster behind the SuperCuts. She goes on drives in the afternoons, either mourning or avoiding me, comes home spitting brine. I start to answer her trial by sea
but Bertha opens her mouth and we are foaming silent pools.
Auden Eagerton (@AudenEagerton) is a nonbinary trans man poet located in middle Georgia, where they pursue an MFA with a focus in poetry at Georgia College & State University.