Two Poems

This is Government Housing, 1990s

Spaceships blast
canker-soar lasers—a Hasidic

jazz fusion—on TV downstairs.
The kids live with their mother, her partner,

and two more couples in their Section
8 apartments.

I remember my sister being quiet,
being in daycare.

Great Grandma says, they’ll cut off
your legs, over Genesis funk.

Wearing her sister’s Pull Up at five,
too old, says Mom.

He can’t jump like the other kids
in gymnastics. She can’t punch

like the boys and girls at Y karate.
Wasps in an apartment-complex thicket,

Kung-Fu bullies in a drainpipe,
belted by monkey wrench in the quarry

at my Super Mario Brothers party.
To Texas, my environmentalist for Ford

career day, layups in a lab coat,
fighting off the kid in Shaq shoes,

his skinny fists and quiet male anger.
I growled like a beast in the closet

and scared off the neighbor boy,
the one who wanted to practice kissing.

We’re gonna kiss a girl one day
he said.

Skin Crawler

When my clothes are either war paint or razorblades,
how can I absorb the same sunbeams?

The grass becomes more of a blanket or a home
than lived in apartments built thirty years ago.

Woke up in my old skin again, which feels so familiar,
I often forget I’m supposed to grow new skin in the first place.

Some people turn to stone getting what they boast as thick skin.
I guess we just grew up this way.

I can’t change my face more than I can imagine,
and I can’t crawl past the idea of crossdresser.

Pin me down to one taxonomy, dysmorphia, transsexual.
If I said I was a woman, it might depend on the time or light.

Maybe you would believe me depending on your mood ring.
Some would strike up a birth chart or Coca-Cola calendar.

I find it hard to pass in closed lesbian bars from the 80s.
I don’t want to wake up a streetwalker, just wanted to be
a pretty woman.

________

Charlee Meiners is a PhD student in creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi where she is a member of the Center for Writers. Her interests include disability and gender studies. She writes lyric narrative and persona poetry that explores identity, place, nostalgia, transition, and memory. Her poems often focus on lost girlhood and transitioning gender. Her poetry has appeared in the Sam Houston State Review, Product, The Equalizer, and Barnhouse Journal.