By Agatha Eydenberg
The process is brief, rarely painless. There will be side effects.
It won’t solve your problems, just make them girl problems,
which fold at the creases for compact storage,
and smell faintly of onion, grapefruit, and sea-mist.
Picture permanence—lasting a lifetime,
to finish imbued, eternal copper alloy,
sugar and spice in your body like gingerbread,
no tangible seam, inescapably girl.
Picture impermanence—If doctors recommend reapplication,
will you reread this poem daily to keep your skin this soft?
A laminated emergency copy on the floor of your pantry,
as a card in your wallet: take the metro, get a sixth coffee free, be a girl.
You’ve been a girl before. Everyone has.
You’ve brushed a silk sleeve in a store in secret, you’ve blushed
at a held door. You’ve said, “hello” on the phone with too much poise.
The technician asked, “You the wife?” Right then, you were the wife.
Feel your body resettle, air entering lungs at hair-difference angles.
It is your last chance to leave. It is covering you, like a paste—
no, opening you up, like a sculptor, chipping until what’s left passes
through to the dressing room without snagging.
Caution: You will feel very exposed.
When a wall breaks, it can easily be mistaken for a floor—
When you are numb to your own gravity,
if you’re not used to it, it’s comparable to free-fall.
Agatha Eydenberg is a writer, musician, and set of no-longer-wasted eyelashes living and working in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. She writes often about queerness, transness, womanhood, and the spaces between them. Her work appears in Stone of Madness, Discretionary Love, and Strip Mall Magazine. You can find her music at asmallbird.com. She lives with her wife.
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