gender-me-not
I lost my gender somewhere.
Somewhere, perhaps, between the “hey grrrl”s and the compulsory formal wear and the long stretches of barefoot solitude, the pronoun I carried slipped between my fingers.
It was like waking up and putting on that pair of jeans – that pair of jeans that you wear because everyone says they look good on you, but they don’t feel quite right – and suddenly you realize that you don’t have to keep wearing them
So what if I am not butch or femme, straight or gay, boy or girl? What if I am queer but not urban, fierce but not loud? What if I am simply mountain, if my bones are filled with birch sap and my lungs stretch to fit every flake of the coming winter; if my strong legs are grown from huckleberries I pluck with the swiftness of an Arctic Tern and I measure time by harvest and sun-cycle instead of deadline and hour?
What if my gender isn’t bowties and oxfords and Judith Butler, but rather rooted in the rural, where I can love a landscape and build a home, and the question isn’t what I am but what I do?
These days I wake up in the morning and want to shed the palimpsests of “she / her / she” like a snakeskin, then slip into the sunlight and the loving arms of those who assume nothing.
I’m done with jeans. I’m done with being who I think you want me to be. I’m done with clothes and words that no longer fit my body. I’m done with lovers who can’t hold my truth. I’m done with saying “yes” when I mean “no”.
Because I don’t want to be wanted, kissed, loved, or fucked, as a girl or riot grrrl, woman or lady, but as a person built of sun and sustenance, as a living love who reaches for the rocky ridges and eases their heart open again each morning, who falls into each poem like surrender. who sweats and strains and crumbles and builds and smells like woodsmoke and tea and wool, who weaves their own peace in nests of silence and sky and glows like a moonlit honeycomb as soon as I leave the highway for the hills that embrace me and water the roots of this wild and tender gender-me-not.
-Madelyn
sexualoutlaws 