They / Them / Theirarchy
I
It didn’t matter that my daughter turned into a son
and then back again into a ame and cut their hair
o and ew up into the sky with a burst of feathers
I’d use to dust away the cobwebs. Or that I’d taken
to dressing as the battered women’s hotline, that
my stalker was trying to pretend we’d never stood
before that judge in Essex County who stated There
is no reason you ever need to talk to her again, instead
writing me an email as if we’d remained friends. Or
that the woman who ran the session on domestic
abuse said it only takes a minute of stopping oxygen from
getting to the brain to cause brain damage (gestures,
her hands grabbing at her throat on the Zoom screen).
I, too, have been strangled. Women’s faces collect in
rows of chocolate-box squares on my laptop. Each
one may as well be me. We look back at one another.
II
I was curled up inside my own daughter waiting for
her to ask for a razor. She was getting to be that age.
Her .ngernails were long and elegant as spoons, not
gnawed like mine. Her teeth I love a lot, yellow ivory
tablets behind plush lips. She’d inherited the nostrils
of my grandmother: they were tiny and imperious as
those of a hippopotamus. In fact the one prayer I’d
made was for her not to end up with this particular
nose. But when I saw it on her, I saw she pulled it
off. It was bitterly, cruelly cute, a challenge because
if her nose was stu y folks could see right up it. She
was not a feminine daughter either, which suited me
better; she’d sliced the ice skates right off her ankles
and refused to dance. Her hands, however,
were almost unnaturally feminine, the digits slender,
nails tapered. It’s the hands that will give them away.
III
My daughter is gone. She snu ed her name. It meant
light. I spent months thinking it up. When they were
four, the man I was with told me he thought my kid
had a bad streak. This coming from a blackout drunk
who spent his days looking out from his second-story
window, chain-smoking, casting terrible stares down
at me whenever I pulled into the driveway. .ey can’t
remember any of this, nor the day I scooped them up
into my arms, put them in the car, and we drove away.
Perhaps it feels this way to them, like they are driving
away from something dangerous, their name. A name
becomes one’s face. Sliding the wand, the nurse said
I think it’s a girl. Now women’s faces collect like tears
in a spoon. Who in their right mind wants to be poured
in along with them? We don’t keep enough mirrors in
this house. .ey are more beautiful than they realize.
