Welcome to my Regulated Body

Let me tell you about my worms. Sometimes, if you squish them, their flesh crackles and purrs underneath their skin. Sometimes, they leave dust on your fingers.

I wrote you a poem about my worms, though I call it an audio description. I don’t think a poem is necessarily a better way to describe something to somebody who cannot see. I just made you a poem because the worms asked me to, just like how they asked me to make them from your ex-girlfriend’s t-shirt. I surrender as they wrap themselves around the headphones in the gallery. I let the light in from the window so you might see us shift in and out of sight.

I do none of this alone, though I do all of this because I am lonely. I call myself a transsexual because transness, madness, and disability are all similarly medicalized, and the word transsexual gestures at that. Though I hold embodied and cultural knowledge that is traced by connected struggle, my difference can still be bought. I am filling my whole apartment full of worms.

When I first met you, I thought that you looked like you were from the future. Maybe that’s why I believe you when you say that there is something out there imagining us, something always the same distance away. Somehow, you knew I would never believe you if you gave me a guide on how to love you. I yearn for it, that slippery something, and I hope that it still yearns for us too.

— Birdie