The sun is drifting away again, behind clouds

that look most like the hairs well sprung

 

from my temples. I can’t see the sun setting,

but I know it is. So many things are like this:

 

merely a sensation of truth. I can’t see my body

changing, but I know it already is. Just as I know

 

there’s a woman at the benches on Bainbridge

Street, though I am not there with her.

 

She is thumbing through a stack of photos

of her son, printed on copy paper,

 

kept quarter-folded in her purse. I know

that her son is adored, though I sense

 

he does not. I know that my masculinity

is a fragile and delicate thing. I refuse all

 

glasses with stems. I’ve always been clumsy

with a sense of strength that I may or may

 

not have. My partner says: Your handwriting

looks like you grew up in the forest, like worm-

 

wood, or bark and brambles. I fell a tree

in a suburban New Jersey township

 

and my partner tells me I’ve never looked quieter,

or less furrowed, even as my hands bleed

 

from some gnashing saw teeth. In another

suburb, one hundred miles northwest,

 

my mother keeps my comic book collection,

safe and organized in her closet, even though

 

I am thirty-one with a house of my own. When

I visit, I flip through the covers: Machine Man

 

2020, The Jetsons in their flying hatchbacks.

We are living in the future now and over

 

the weekend I teach AI about trans bodies,

and it learns so much faster than family,

 

or the men at my favorite dive bars. I ask

AI to show me a trans man in a red river

 

of lily pads, and it is impossible not to feel

seen, and in Technicolor at last. When I tell

 

my grandmother that I’ve gone to collect

the vial and syringes that will raise my blood

 

pressure, damage my liver, stubble my face,

she tells me she visited my great-grandmother,

 

who has begun to blink with a distinct and deadly

forgetfulness. She tells me my great-grandmother

 

either knew me as my gender or didn’t know me

at all. Perhaps if the whole world knew me

 

either correctly or not at all, it would feel softer.

Down the street, a neighbor I never met

 

passed in the early morning. He was just 40,

and looking out from my window, I see his son, just 9,

 

and walking home from school. On New Year’s Eve,

confetti rains down around his home, his family.

 

My dog watches the fireworks from the window

with wonder, all of his fear absolved by the exploding

 

colors he may or may not see. What a strange

world of sensations this is: falling asleep

 

to a movie you did not pick, the burn of a button

on your forearm straight out of the dryer,

 

the rustle of scratched lottery tickets mixed

with a few brittle fall leaves. In South Philadelphia,

 

my neighbors use tape to tie their garbage bags:

duct, masking, packing. These are regionalisms,

 

just the same as crayfish or crawfish. Crick

or creek. They look so beautiful and practiced

 

as they toss the ponytailed bags off their stoops,

their free hand waving in a grandchild from

 

the street as the sun we cannot see, sets.

I am so unpracticed at being neighborly. But still

 

I worry after Vicky’s blood pressure without knowing

quite how to show it. I worry about my body changing,

 

and her, and Nancy, and Roe, knowing that I haven’t

been a lady while shoveling three houses’ worth of snow.

 

But winters have been mild, more mild each year,

even if the solstice darkness stays much the same.

 

In the dark, I’ve taken to oil painting, in mainly muddy

reds, rivers of crimson. The cops have taken to killing

 

climate activists. And I have taken to hiding

from my friends for years at a time. David Lynch

 

talks of living in fear during his time in Philadelphia,

and both my partner and I find this funny, not

 

necessarily because it’s untrue but because where

haven’t we lived in true and unadulterated fear?

 

My partner cries when they realize, soon enough,

they won’t be able to protect me in the restroom.

 

And I would cry too if they weren’t already wet

in my arms. Nothing I feel feels new, instead,

 

a raw and constant chafe, an always burning

yearn for the dead. But when my partner

 

and I fuck in the middle of the night, it is so circadian,

so early-human of us. There are no whispers of sonder.

 

No knowledge sans instinct. Really no fear, except

for all the carnivores braying outside our front door.