I don’t know how to explain this to you: when walking into my therapist’s office my lips hook themselves together and I don’t tell him: my gender is like an ocean roiling somewhere between the things I tell myself and the things I tell my mother: when the first man enters my mouth, I imagine clouds as gray as the salty musk spreading over my tongue: when two anglers come together one is always lost: when my therapist asks if I’m not just rejecting masculinity because all the men in my life have been horrible, that manhood lumps inside me like some toxic garbage patch, I don’t scream—remember, I’m hooked shut; that sea of chest between my shoulders rolling a tide of shaky breaths feels good, real good, when a man touches it and kisses it and in the dark I cannot tell where he ends and: when my mother asks where I was over the weekend, I resist the urge to tell her: I was drowning: I don’t know how to explain this to you: I don’t know where I end and: the anglerfish subsumes its mate into itself, there’s no time for: grief is my latest catchall, or maybe everything is grievous, I hope not: grief is me climbing into the anglerfish’s mouth ready to turn the light off.
Aidan Aragon is a poet and student writing and studying in Madison Wisconsin. Their work can be found at The Hellebore, Peach Mag, and Homology Lit among others. You can find them online @aidanaragon.