Tomboy

remembering my dykey, granola gma. we looked exactly alike when we were eleven years old. she loved to tell me this & to call with long, drunken monologues about how she should have been a boy, too.

For Elaine

She told me we’d water what was really just a bald field. I was wandering around chewing my hair. Shirtless rainmaker thrumming her hairpiece. Wet lint in my pocket. Freckle on my neck in just her spot. She pulls hair back from the ear as if to listen, to show me how to draw a line. The desert devours the sound of the middle. Soaks up water with mythos. Spits it out in spite of the rabbit line. They strain in the heat, succinct against chicken wire. My prey eye finds theirs & so there are two, scared glances washed out by a Sunday.

I wish she would have ever just told me not to look. Cold dog water. A horseshoe through the ring back-handed. Arrow through the eye, cherry & Blonde, shock through hay. A thud and her concrete; cocaine and her skull fracture. X-ray bent nails & George on my back. Soak the heat, this dirt & the nothing.

At school I dream in dish soap and hanger, deep desert highway. I lay on asphalt more plastic each breath. My body gives into sun. Bleached, windswept & kept neat. I keep busy counting places the hair was and wasn’t. Finding the spectacle light. I still can’t mirror a body to a T. Just huff it for compare / contrast & buzz off whether the light caught or not. To lick salt or cock my head against skin and shadow. All that girl leg hair. Never knew if the dream landed. Worshipping sugar, flipping through someone’s brother’s porn at the party. Huff the ink so high off the page I forget the door, have to hold my chin up to the kitchen light & press my girl bruise not broken.

I get in her car to listen to Gospel, sweat mahogany & Yahtzee. She tells me that’s her face on my face. A mirror & the hairline. Our mole is one mole. I play pretend and she pretends I’m for real. I am vessel and heat; her mute baby.

Back at school, girls tell me to get in the storm drain for twenty dollars and I wonder what I’m made of. That storm floods into me like I’d do anything for anything, for attention, for a mean girl. Waste of drought. Wet fur. Hyena laugh. I’m flat for heat, for the primrose. Seam ripper, sullied petal so easy. I guess I’d become whatever you want. A girl with a thumb pressed out that damp pink and I said yea sure, take it all. She put one hand over my mouth and made the door feel real. The mesh of night came out the holes like it was sorry. I only wanted to feel it out. Dust mica off suede. I didn’t want to glitter but maybe it could sting so good. Maybe I could sweat it out for fun with the rabbits, poke holes in cork forever and swat her horseflies. Hair gone gold, eye tooth shining. Let it look like her.

She liked to tell me that she had a tomboy heart & an eye for girls. It’s a hymn of repression. Her disappointed father. Pressing the shape of son to wring it through the cord. Slurring on speakerphone that God is trans for me. The road is dark and she comes out radio static. Deer everywhere, drunk scripture. My favorite voicemail is a sharp inhale & a punch of buttons. The shape of my face, her face in the bowl. She didn’t want to watch me; I was screaming about church. I mean, crying in my soy milk. Granola grandma putting chia in rice milk, colloidal silver in honey in sand silt in elderberry porridge. Noah’s ark under my grits & echinacea. Rust & rock, lichen in my stomach, wide open, back here in the old light. The recess. Climbing up out of the empty shape. I could last here this time. Just let me stay. I’ll speak to her koi fish. Keep the fake garden. Be a brick wedged in her cyclone fence. Watch the circus in two’s. The heat. Sand in my hair, making bubbles for no one. Armpit in a ferret’s mouth, head pulled back from the emus, both of them rushing their big, terrible heads at the gate. Palm sweat on the twig bones of hatchlings. The blankets we lay to catch the shit, bodies quaking loud over Mexicali news. It might have been miserable. Craig was drinking even when he was dying. I’ll want nothing but time.

When I scavenge the house to keep her, any piece of her at all, Lindsey tells me over speakerphone what I should want to take. I cut the tin. Trace the walls for the last time. Walking on seashells. Taking shifts of pretending not to see. I’m looking for my snow queen. A silver hair as long as the body.

I heard there were googly eyed chicks and whiskey, whiskey and a shard of glass, a shard of glass and her ditch weed still drying. Her pills, all those tiny Boirons. The tissues and the dust. Her bedroom glowing red. Angry like perfume; drunk like Craig. I heard there was sweat on my end of a receiver. A dark road on my birthday. That I memorized my knees and she burst into her laugh. I said I was sorry and she gripped the frame, one face to bend the whole road. Like that time she could have understood our eyes, each mole, that laugh. Like it could have gone a different way.