My Gendered Lion, My Suffocated Sky

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My body is a golden lion deemed beautiful; he is bricks of gold, forest sunsets, whispers of caramel across the horizon. My body is a blue jay, she is delicate summer days for one more week, they are a melancholy cloud juggling responsibilities of rain with promises of open sky.

Cisgender bureaucracy—ever-physicalizing—demands: Which genitals are you? Which toilet are you? You may fly in exactly one half of the sky.

I wish my sky was infinite possibility; freedom, selfhood, genderless.
Yet my reality is captivity. Obfuscation. Despair.
Cisgender skies dribble mocking laughter, slimy as a dog’s saliva on a new pillow, alight

with the vivacity of decay.
Firm as molton lampshades, bars tear daylight from my eyes; I am fragments molded into “acceptable” normality; they morph to every desperate plea of selfhood. What irony gender—body—cannot so easily adapt!

My evolving spherical planet has no air.
The only gravity I know is the banality of my own assimilation.
Does this gendered body—mine—constitute me?
To my past, present, and suffocated-no-more LGBTQIA+ future, I salute you.

My sky is 49 entrance wounds in a gay nightclub on Latin night. My lion is my nonbinary genderqueer humanity,
Erased.

I am nothing. I am all.

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