AJ Rio-Glick
Testimony

i get off the airplane at the connecting airport, and the
first thing i see out the jetbridge is a tv with its silent
babbling news anchor, below him a big banner:
do transgender people have a right to healthcare?
 
when i came out to my butch lesbian mother all those years
ago, me all of fifteen and her holding sixty-seven, my eyes
beseeched her, can’t you see that i carry your torch?
my words could not explain who i was fast enough. I
sped forward and fell over myself. she looked back at
me and the body i was creating and asked, with
every pain in her voice, but, who is going to love you,
as though anyone’s heart could ever stop
me from becoming.
 
i have always been something shaped inside my own
lonely chest, saying come, sit around my fire if you are
creating yourself in your own lonely chest. let our
creations warm us. when i meet others like me, i hold
them as lovingly and gently as i can. we know a
precious secret all the time: you’ve always been
something and something else and soon you will be
something else still.
 
the first time i sleep with a trans woman, we share our
holy secret in silence: here’s what it means to be
present with the unfolding. our lips make a love that carries
us through our becomings. let me be all i’ve ever been
so you can love me in my flowing. let me build a shrine
to your creation before the moment passes through us:
this exact moment will never be held again in our
hands, and when we see each other tomorrow, next
monday, a year from now, we will be delicious and
different and different and different than ever before,
grinning at each other from across the train platform.
 
when trans people dance together, we do so knowing
that so many moments of struggle need to be
released. so many of us need to be bathed in tears and
bathed in lakes and bathed in connection until we are
ready to step out into the world again. we need to be
loved, goddamnit, and we don’t need a pitying love, we
don’t need anything that strives to understand. come
under the surface with me for a moment before we
have to emerge to prying eyes again.
 
sometimes i get separated from my family and lose
myself in one-sided queers who are spinning careful
words. privately resenting my beauty because they
are scared of their own beauty. every time trump runs
for office, some cis person asks me how my trans life
has gotten worse. i would laugh in their small faces if
they weren’t so earnest, if i wasn’t on the verge of
tears at the naivete.
 
i have been raging inside my body since the day i was
born. don’t you know the whole world is scared of
looking at itself the way i have looked at myself? don’t
you know the whole world has taunted me with its
hatred? don’t you know how many times i have
shifted? don’t you know that nothing holds me down?
don’t you know that i know that one day i will die? no
man can take anything from me. for as long as i live, i
will smile across the earth at beautiful trans women
because our lives are a testimony. please, take off your
skin. count your bones from the inside. it’s time to see
what lies underneath.