“Drag Nurse” © Robert Fleming
from “we’ll call this everlasting”
3.
saltwater roughens the bedsheets. wake with fire in the wound, blood slicking your limbs. bodies fester beneath life unfurling in the garden. you can’t remember if you dreamt. if you even slept. hope is a salve for the wounded, and for hope you must make room. baby, empty your trauma into the pitiless sky. she won’t ask your name. she won’t look you in the eye. no one blames you for aching with hate for a body you could never call home. they just wish you wouldn’t do it so publicly. me? my gender is a falcon that refuses to tame, stalked by society with its knife raised,
ready to strike down anything with wings.
4.
when the moss spreads, i awaken to wild roots atrophied inside, the damp breath of the forest crying out in mourning within my chest. there’s a dead rabbit in the dumpster behind the church across the street. i know because i left it there. i didn’t pray when i dropped the body in the dumpster behind the church, but the bones cracked loud enough for any god close by to hear. i miss being ten. i understood things then without having to learn them first. i knew i wasn’t a god when i couldn’t change the things i didn’t love. ten year old things: lights out by nine; no gum on the school bus; and soon i would learn, my body. and what is a body but a cage? the only thing in your life you’ll always have and always be. if i stared too long into a mirror, an angry flame tore up the side of my chest. i never could tell if the hives were real or imagined—a mind-made vessel for the unease i could not name.
5.
i really wanted things to turn out differently, but i guess i’ll have to make the best of this mess. if the stem had stood just two days longer, i might have a harvest. something to show for all the muscle i’ve lost this year. i’ve spent the year on my side—i know, i know, you’ve heard it before.
let me just say, regrowth, rebirth, takes time. patience i didn’t have. halfway through the sentence, i stood wobbling atop the stalks of my incomplete limbs. facefirst in the dirt i awoke, months later, dust and shrapnel painted over the pink meat of my lungs, a new scar burning thick and red at the meeting of my ribs.
6.
i’ve adapted to the twinge in my chest with every breath. i’ve warped my spine around the knots you tied before you left. before you lost the last of the youth swimming in your eyes. how do you recognize the thing you’ve only ever prepared for? i’ve learned how to live forward—in the crevices around the histories i’ve outlasted. i’ll carry this weight until i memorize the ritual for mourning all the lives i could have lived. every doorknob left unturned behind me rattles
at once, thunder shooting across the plane i’ve landed in. there is no running from this reckoning. no escape from this reunion. so long as i outlast the bruises and remain upright beneath the scars, i’ll keep my gaze locked on the future, trusting that even as i am unseen, my seeing is enough to get me there. how can you tell if you sound unreasonable? how are believers supposed to feel?
Logan Anthony is an American queer writer and transgender artist from Indiana. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a curriculum developer. Find Logan’s poetry in Thin Air Magazine, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Papers Publishing Literary Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and more. You can read their short stories in Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Write Launch, The Ulu Review, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal.
Robert Fleming is a gay-man, word-artist, and scientist born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who emigrated to Lewes, Delaware, United States. Robert follows his mother as a visual artist and his grandfather as a poet. In 1986 he published the second psychological research study on gay men’s response to AIDS in United States. Then, in the 1990s he was a contributing member of the District of Columbia’s Triangle Artist group. Now Robert is a founding member and contributing editor of Devil’s Party Press’ Old Scratch Press.