Second-Date Deadname Swap

Nora Hikari

Show me what you’ve got.
I’ll show you mine
if you show me yours.
So it’s trading MTG cards. So it’s swapping
old drawings of hard-secret
sonas. It’s the embarrassed, half-proud
half-ashamed sending
of artifacted JPEGs of ourselves
from high school.
It’s clear to everyone
you never expected to make it
this far.
All these escape fantasies are about teenagers.

I feel like a made-up thing,
you confess. I just wish
I could have a transformation sequence
like all the other girls. A flash of light, a coyly placed rose,
an inversion, a sock-puppeting of my body
to a tinkling backdrop of chimes and glitter.
Orgasmic. Euphemistic. Revisionist.

I feel home-built and haphazard. Semi-automatic
death blossom. I feel like six feet of target practice.
I can’t stop turning my shoulder-bones into teeth.

Babe, it’s fine. Babe, there was a paper plate
in the Women’s Resource Center
and it read “we are all works in progress.”
Babe, we were all made-up things, all along.

---

Nora Hikari is an emerging poet and Asian-American trans lesbian based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in perhappened mag, ANMLY, and Ogma Magazine, among others, and her poem ‘Deer-to-Fish Transition Timeline’ has been nominated for the Best of the Net award. She can be found at @norabotbot on Twitter and at her website norahikari.com.

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