With Annie Muse’s poem “How have the gods,” Bent Alaska is pleased to continue featuring the creative writing of LGBTQA Alaskans.

How have the gods

by Annie Muse

Suspended in hazy dusk, unreadable;
an ineffable sadness
resides in her eyes
and holds a broken World.

Her tears are easy
Her vulnerability the door.

She’s all he’s ever wanted
but her forms conspire

with ambiguities
that confuse him.

Her hair sweeps
a heart that only wants peace.

She smells of lilacs
and lost books.

In her eyes
are every story.

How have the gods contrived
to deliver such a package
of contradictions
and stigmata and brokenness and the blood of saints?

[March 14, 2012]

About this poem

For those who barely know us, our lives are witnessed as medical procedures, struggles with presentation, and perceived outward changes.   Sometimes, and especially early in our transitions, we project the awkward strangeness of newly discovered chimeras.  But the truth of the transgender experience is that these bits of medicine and change fill only a tiny slice of a person’s time on this planet.   Often it seems lost on others that our lives are cut from whole cloth.

Our truths are bigger than hormones, psychiatrists, and medical procedures.

Those of us who have lived it know this, even if we can’t find the words.  And if those of us going through have trouble with a vocabulary, what is it like for those who would love us?

What is it like for them?

Photo credit: Sad Eyed and Blue; photo by Jeremy Brooks. Used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing.