Liquid Lipstick Massacre

 

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Work From Home

For Cyn

 

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Nonfiction, New Year’s Eve 2020, Blood

 

–And honestly, the last thing I expected
before the year was done was this whole
crisis.

Damaged and damaging, y’know?
Even, like, two weeks later, I’m undone.
Fuck me, this memory slips near, it

garrotes, it
hemorrhages, it leaves
incisions against my own sense of-

Just like always I made myself what she wanted,
kindly used parts gifted this body at birth, so she
lay there as I pull out and after, after, after afterafterafterafter

Maybe I’m still after,
New Year’s Eve,
openly shedding my eye’s blood.

Perhaps this is a good thing, there’s no longer the
question
regarding what surgery I need, anymore.

Single memories don’t add up to dysphoric drama, but
take seven, eight of them, seven, eight days
until there’s been at least one day like New Year’s Eve

(variations on the same pattern) each month

where I’m close, about to take one of those
‘xacto knives
y’know?

Zero it out, make me right.

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Biography

 

Nonah Cagney Palmer is a PhD student pursuing creative writing, poetry, and queer+trans studies at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She never really wrote about sex before, but things are a-changin’.