Mak Kram
Knocked Out Your Teeth
When my mother asks me if I am a man
I ask her if she is a piece of flesh.
She says technically— and I repeat,
technically, technically, technically.
You have been buried
bones & meat & teeth & all,
I try to make a saint out of myself
but I know violence way too well.
Why does it always have to be about words, with you?
I play a game with them, we’re doing catch
the one who catches gets to eat
the one who gets caught gets to be eaten.
My father says love is a dog getting ripped open
you will be ripped open.
& when you ask your father what masculinity feels like
he says it feels like a knife cutting you
in little pieces. Ready to be served.
& when you ask your mother what femininity feels like
she says it doesn’t feel like anything at all.
THE HISTORY OF MY HEART
dedicated to my arteries, my capillaries, and most of all, dedicated to my transsexualism.
There is no peace of mind until your heart stops beating.
The history to my body is short, discontinuous, incongruous. I jump here and there and in the end, I never choose. My girlhood is a dried apricot; bought cheaply; you rip open my girlhood & all you see is the fruit’s flesh.
I say goodbye to her — my non-existing sister, the sister I used to be — and tears make their way out of the ripples in my eye’s cage. I say goodbye to her, though I never left her behind. I say goodbye to her, although I am her & she is me & he is me & and I am him. All I own is my heart, my Aorta, my veins, I don’t have anything else. Lost that on the way.
I greet something that isn’t quite manhood. I don’t know what to call it, after all, there are implications to being your father’s son. I prove to everyone in the room I was born wrong, dipped in melted grit. I love my body, but my guts don’t love me.
give me a chance, brother.
i. bridges beggin' us to jump, nudity was our best friend. never got time for the dead. palms like my mothers and fathers and brothers. rotting from inside, our bodies eatin' themselves, so no-one's got to do the work. every man in here's got a story about chewing on an antler & the one time he met god.
ii. our towns always burning, the reaper rollin' on the floor. fallin' in love with women & men that didn't look out of earth. dreamt of cowboys & mirrors. prayed & begged on our knees, like beasts. got fangs & chewed up nails. grew up happy in parenthesis. always put periods at the end of our sentences.
iii. hungry stomachs, up to no good. called us crazy, bipolar, just speakin' the truth.
if grief
was to be eaten,
we were just preys.
Mak Kram (he/him) is a poet in parenthesis, & a trans, queer, middle eastern writer.