I like being spread      rough-moaned
paid & happy     & haunted      
all the flies on the walls of this house know—   

What I mean when I say   from dust I come   
I mean my body          has got a bottom      
& they have fucked it   

I am   cunt & throat     & I have been     
counting backwards       since the internet made it public 
that I liked to fuck too   

since the christians went out of style   
& the feminists strung me up     by my blxck clitoris         
To them, I'm never going to be a real              womxn

till I accept                
my codename: victim         
security code: BIG CHOP      

there is     a bounty on my breast   
for all the bullshit       I let slide         
I'm going to hell       for being 	beautiful         & liking it     

for not      applying a razor      to every tongue 
that ever     slapped wind at me
begging for it                             I must be

I put my fingers inside the moon
like a mouth, to see how wide
I can spread it open. Sex is just a series 
of tubes, a friend told me once. 
Is a tube an inside out hole,
or two holes holding hands?

My love and I perched 
on opposite ends of the couch,
toes interlaced. Have you ever
craved someone so desperately, 
you wished God would rend
a new hole in you, just 
to fit their perfect hands
into a place no one else 

has touched? Three decades ago, 
the doctors sliced a hole 
into my mother and yanked 
me out, silent and still, 
while she floated somewhere
above the pain, a curtain
bisecting her body. The first
of many violences
I didn’t mean to inflict, 
but did anyway. I’ve never 
asked to see the scar. 

I used to pay strangers
to puncture holes in me 
and fill them with metal—
eyebrow, nipples, septum—
obsessed with adornment, 
the breakage of skin. I thought
that if I asked for pain, 
nothing could hurt me. Eventually, 
the rings fell out and the body 
refleshed, impenetrable 
once again. Some holes 

are ephemeral; others, I will take 
to the grave. Sinkhole, peephole,
manhole, k-hole, asshole,
blowhole, gloryhole, God-shaped
hole in my heart. I’m no longer looking

to fill or be filled. Let me stay
holy as the world moves through me. 
It’s not the hole that empties me.
It’s the rupture I crave.




Originally published in Split Lip

Yes, there is pain. There is loss and so many
disappointments. And there is decay: the body
breaking down a little more each day, your strength
failing, your youth ghosting the bathroom mirror.  

But there was a time when beautiful men set down 
their beers and parted their lips when you came 
into the bar straight from landscaping all day long:
your brown thighs strong, your calves muscular

above your leather work boots, your smile easy,
your minutes long and your moments languid
in the smoke and darkness, your heartbeat still
audible above the thrumming drum machines,

still heard by those boys who wouldn’t give you
a second glance these days. But listen to me,
old man, you were beautiful to all of them once,
and that is something that still belongs to you. 

You are fading now, gaining the painful gift
of invisibility, and it will be what you choose 
to make of it from here on out. But you should 
know by now that Time doesn’t hate you. Time 

just covets you like they did. Time just loves you 
to death.

I stand at a closet of dad’s work ties 
& ask wire hangers if my gender hides here 
today. I imagine myself     river 
of silvered fish, licking my chest flat. breasts 
biting into new gills. their toothed mouth, a 
keloid constellation healing into 
scales. no one asks the fish their gender. no one 
mispronouns him. they see a school swimming 
in synchrony. my gender, a simple 
shimmering. hard skull. flapping fin. whiskered 
-bullhead. I want to be a fish – that smells 
like my dad’s morning paper. ink lifting 
from the spell of 5AM coffee. my flesh the 
color of his silked collar     blooming.

             for the love of my life 

There’s nothing crueler than leaving
these mountains, the daylilies

pouring morning from their summer-
honeyed throats. At the end of this road

a new life awaits, patient as a scalpel,
but I want these hills 

to bear down, to bury us under white ash, 
sassafras, the daylilies’ flame
 
sparking the highway’s spine. Thank God
some roads wind long enough
 
to carry us back if we let them. 
Four cities, & we learn to shed 

what we thought we needed:
the chipped plates, the microwave,

the unread stack of books, everything 
except each other. My lily, shriveling

behind the wheel—sun-drenched, spinning
the cog that currents cool air, I know you

as the first to ferry us through pleasure’s port,
exalted, your hands guiding 

the pick past tenderheaded 
scalp—I bowed into the crown 

of your ribs, rested to the soft-voiced 
plink of comb coiling through. You taught me

how to worship
my neighbors. After the storms 

washed our roads to ruin, weeks without 
running water, the city installed toilets

along the street, & we used them 
until we couldn’t, until the seats crusted, 

crested emblems, drawn in a calligraphy
of shit, it was you who tended 

to the neighborhood portapotties, wiped 
clean the back splattered stains, without pay 

or fear of what you could not wash away.
I believe in a love perennial,

which means, somewhere along this journey, 
it will come for us. Like the flycatcher 

cuts the mantle of a dagger moth 
mid-flight, or the day-

lilies who ignite for just one sun 
before their lights blots out, what burns between us 

could smolder, or blaze, 
could inferno till there is nothing left but a stretch 

of road outside our windshield, one home 
in the rearview, another blurred somewhere

beyond this brilliant, brilliant light.
I will come back to you.  

On Sunday morning,
Jimm and Celeste and I
go to the Roosevelt Hotel
to see the David Hockney
swimming pool—one of
the things on our Things
to Do in L.A. list.  (We’ve
already done the Griffith
Observatory and the
Hollyhock House and
Musso & Frank.)  I tell
them that I saw the pool
in the late '80s when
it was freshly painted,
invited by Raymond Foye
(my Hanuman publisher)
to view it with him and
curator and art critic
Henry Geldzahler.  I
have no memory of
Geldzahler—I was shy
and not particularly
adept at making small
talk, especially with
famous people.  But
I do remember the dark
blue brushstrokes that
Hockney had painted
all over the pool.  Brush-
strokes described online
as “squiggles, caterpillars,
slugs, commas, apostro-
phes and parentheses.”
To my mind, they look
like blue boomerangs.
Forty-odd years later,
those brushstrokes are
faded, nearly nonexistent,
even though they were
restored, we are told,
as recently as last year.
Hotel guests swim and
sunbathe, oblivious as
Hockney’s “squiggles”
disappear under the
water.  After brunch
at Shirley Brasserie,
the three of us retrace
our steps to the parking
structure.  The Boulevard
is teeming.  Hollywood
has a way of turning
you into a tourist in
your own town, so
we stop to look at the
cement blocks in front
of Grauman’s Chinese
Theatre.  In blinding
sunlight, I read the
names of celebrities
and note that the im-
pressions of their hand-
prints and footprints
and signatures are
wearing away.  And
think, of course, of
Ozymandias: “No
thing beside remains.”
One block is cracked
into so many pieces—
as if Godzilla himself
had stepped on it—it’s
impossible to tell which
celebrity it is.  Side-
stepping tourists, I
locate Jean Harlow
and Gena Rowlands
and the one I really
want to see: Joan
Crawford.  “May this
cement our friendship,”
she wrote.  A movie
star with wit!  I take
a few pictures with
my iPhone and observe
a moment of reverence.
Which is broken by the
voice of an astonished
fellow tourist: Look
what tiny feet she had!

In the 24-hour diner on Baltimore Avenue, 
             we piss off our waitress 
by being the only people there. 

                                                   Forgive me, I want to tell her; I know 
                                                                  you were probably looking for an easy shift,
                                                      not two lesbians discussing their hear-me-out lists, 
                                                                  and now you’re stuck listening to me justify
                                                      why Ms. Potts from Beauty and the Beast 
                                                                  would be a gentle and generous lover, 
                                                   (listen, she’s a woman who knows service 
                                                                  and was built to steam things up) 
                                                   but there's a girl sitting across from me 
                                                                  and I’m terribly in love with her. 

In love in the way that will ruin me, a little bit. 
             The way delight broke into my life 
and refused to leave, claimed squatters rights 
             and everything, and she’s still so new to me. 
Our relationship months old, still wrinkled, 
             still can’t hold its head up, 

                                                        and from the outside, no stranger can see 
                                                                      what went into this moment; how long it 
                                                        took the bruises to fall from my body the last time, 
                                                                      a full harvest that couldn’t survive 
                                                        early frost, the years I spent believing 
                                                                      there was nothing left in me to want. 

So yes, I’m going to let the hours spill one by one 
             across the streaked and barely mopped floors. 
Nurse a Minute Maid Apple Juice another half hour, 
              all while our waitress’ eyes cut daggers 
into the backs of the red pleather booths. 

                                                         Allow me to be unafraid & inconvenient 
                                                                         a little longer. And when, 
                                                         at the end of the night, our waitress 
                                                                     charges us $7.00 a glass— 

Call it even. Call it inflation. Because next to me, 
             my girl bubbling, brimming, poured, 
and I would pay anything just to drink the sound, 
             let her swallow me to the core, 
cold pressed and water droplets 
             bleeding at the edges, 

                                                          anything to taste her cosmic crisp, 
                                                                       her red delicious, 
                                                          her pink lady laugh.

      after Jeffrey Daniel and Raymond Antrobus

Shakeema Fisher was born a Sagittarius 

In the Year of the Metal Horse 

In a hospital in Harlem. 

Formerly of concrete 

Now of black dirt, clay & flood, 

Her imaginary friends have lost their accents. 

Today, she cracks eggs into holes at each corner
 
Of her yard, two acres of land and a trailer 

Its roof being held up by her wits alone. 

Her doctor provides yearly bills of health. 

Her ass is striped. She is a tiger. 

Collectors have found her new number, 

Clutter her voicemail. Nothing is wrong
 
But her potassium is probably low.
 
Her favorite fruits are not apples. 

She will stop dancing if you perceive her. 

She is often asked if she is happy. She is aspirational. 

She has to wash the dishes, clean the fridge. Wishes 

She were her own man. She would take the trash out. 

She is a devoted homemaker. 

She does not cancel subscriptions on time. She demands 

refunds. She has promised herself a good life.

I don’t know what precisely I expected
to encounter in Salt Lake City, maybe
more of the white youth in white shirts
and ties, marching from a big temple, but 
in between visits to the surprising variety
of craft breweries and hipster coffee shops
we found the 2025 pride parade and I wasn’t ready 
for how huge, how hours long, how chock full 
of furries faithfully masked and tailed 
in the blazing heat, how fully throttled 
the Dykes on Bikes, how crisply flown 
the defiant, newly queered official city flags, 
how jolly and many the bears and the sleek
speedo-d queer swim club, how yellow-brick-road 
endless and rainbow-promising the massive, 
blocks-long trans flag, how Mormon-earnest 
the seething, joy-drunk church of the sidewalk 
extravaganza, and how strikingly transcendent 
this one ethereal fairy, rollerblading like a river 
past the ecstatic crowds, past gender shackles, 
past fear, past our sweaty cheers, trailing 
a thrilling excess of taffeta and glitter
down the most unlikely, most necessary avenue, 
the last place, I confess, I’d ever have hoped 
to receive such a benediction. 

Before the body knows breath, it knows war. 
	The way there was a war inside the hands of Abuelo, 
who plucked tomatoes off vines until his hands were 
	 	left purple & red. Who passed down his hands 
to Apá & how his hands smelled of gasoline & oil, no matter 
	how many times he washed. Who passed down his hands to me.

Outside a bar, a drunk man gives me a fireball kiss, heat goes 
	inside of me. Afterwards, he shoves his fist
		into my face. Calls me faggot. 
This man wants to kill me because 
	we breathe the same air. 

War is like that, silent in movement— like my
	Abuela who collects paper towels everywhere she goes 
		because they were a luxury for her growing up. 
She used to stack them in her purse until her bag slipped off her shoulder, 
	the wind blew out every napkin flying
& she jumped for every white piece as if they were dollar bills. 

	A war has edges, like the man at the gym who wears a “guns out” shirt.
Who later tells me: Come to my house, 
	where he kneels on the floor in front of me, 
		licks my fingers until he gags on them. 
He lays on all fours, begs: Put your fist inside me.
	
	There are truths I’ll never know in this body. 
When immigration called out Amá’s name incorrectly, 
	she corrected them, as if to say the border can take everything away 
		but it can’t take away my name.

	Before Abuelo died, my tíos & Abuela said he fought his own body 
to breathe. They said he made his hands into fists. I imagine him 
	telling himself: Todavía no es mi tiempo.

	A man once sat in my bed, his body buzzing. I told him: 
We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. 
	We sat in silence holding hands for an hour. When he turned to kiss me, 
		he said: Do you know God is watching us? 
	
	For more than half of my life, I’ve asked my hands why they wanted to touch 
a man. 		But even a war must have a home
				
				& like this poem before it knew it would even have a line —
					maybe it too clenched its hands & fought for breath.




Appears in How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024)

I let the mosquitos have their way with me.
Late in the soupy heat of a summer afternoon, I’ve covered myself 
in poison and still, they persist. Pulling blood 
from my thighs, knees, back of my neck, and arms. 
I’ve heard when a teenager cuts themselves they just want 
to feel something, anything. I’m oversimplifying things.
But when the news says once again that the world may not
recover, I’m not sure what else to do. Just to know
we’re both still here, I let them eat me alive.




Originally published in COMP: An Interdisciplinary Journal 

I wanted to write the neat little trans poem that fits in & then folds out like a french 
      tuck

I wanted to write epistles to my eight year old self stuffing socks in my jean crotches

I wanted to write how I kept dreaming of a thousand dead seahorses beached &    
      blanched in sand

about being foreign to my own body & walking down the least traveled road back to 
       myself

I wanted to return to the metaphor of the chrysalis

But what I fear of metaphor

is softening my edges in an empire that requires a jagged fist / 

                     a whale jaw / an ever thickening skin / a serrated blade 

to keep me & my beloved breathing

I tried to write it neat

But I cannot even comprehend having a body 

outside of this tortoise shell I hope has grown hard enough against your knives

I cannot defy a category that I did not invent (& neither did your God)

I tried to write it but a scream came forth

I tried to sing sweet birdsong but coughed up barbed wire in place of melody

I tried to say it but I am afraid

I am afraid.

But y’all – y’all don’t want we transgenders to be

half as dangerous as you imagine

You of, “but what about the children?” : we are the children we are the children we       
       are the children we are!

Each morning I pray my son does not become fodder for a bullet’s hungry mouth 
      inside of some elementary school classroom but what about the children?

You fear you will meet us in the bathroom

I fear there is no long or short walk that ends at home

I fear my child selves will keep jumping from bridges

only for you to say “no no not this – this is not what we meant”

State by godawful state introducing bills to deny trans people access to gender 
      affirming care
in a deepened & wild commitment

to eradicate us from existence

And when we are killed you will say “this is not what we meant, violence is not the 
      answer”

The dictionary antonym to existence

is death

So, what is it you meant?

You just mean

un become un become un

become 

Some of y’all have never been reviled and it shows

Some of y’all have never been the prey of prey and it shows

I woke up three times in the night smelling of future blood spilt

Each day I scheme of ways to weaponize this body of mine

A body that belongs to me and a God that you say I do not know

You know nothing of true fear

—

You fear us 

You really keep fearing us

And I swear to you and your [dead] God

We will give you something to be afraid of




Originally published in Muzzle 

Cutting my own hair saves money 
better put toward a bill. I look presentable enough 
in virtual meetings, a genial blur.

Invoices. Empty correspondence. I’m not clever 
wearing this mask of inflexible competence. I live in bed
where I work and eat poorly while I work and dream. 

If I died now in arrears, and here of all places
(mattress, office, psych ward, coffin),

I’ll never have cared for a house cat of my own—
uppity, mercurial, impish, soft, private, unbothered—

so human-like in his affections and strangeness—
a companion named Sargent 

with twitchy, sensitive ears even at rest
who could mourn a little before biting my dead face to survive.





Appears in This Elegance (Boa Editions, 2026)

Today I let my daughter read a news story 
 
about the people who feel no pain, one
               who walked months on a broken pelvis 

before she noticed it 
crunching inside like dry leaves.  

              & I can hear her now 

practicing in the kitchen, holding her hands 
under water hot as she can stand it, 

singing softly: I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.


When asked to define happiness, 
half the room will describe a quality of light, 
              the sky required to feel right.  

For a while we tried 

shooting the wolves from helicopters, the removal 
of each possible attack before it happened, 

but soon enough deer forgot what they were, 
              grew fearless & gnawed the aspen sprouts 

clean to the ground.  


Last night a woman paused on the hollow of my hip 
              & lingered there, 

making me ask for her mouth.

The other half of the room recalls learning something 
             about where to build the fire 

so it doesn’t fill the cave with smoke.  


Down in the city park someone has already tagged 
which trees get to stay.

One night my daughter will want nothing more 
than another’s teeth in her back; 

              in that far city, in the torn booth, 

long after last call she is saying I really like your politics, 

meaning I want to lick your face.  

Little girl, little wolf.  

The blade of the earthmover, how it 
             scrapes & shudders, scrapes & scrapes.   




Originally published in Ilanot Review, appears in the forthcoming collection, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World (Boa Editions, 2026) 

Listen, kid. I’m gonna let you in on a secret
I want you to put in your pocket and carry with you
all your life. 

You are loved.

Before you are even here, you are loved.
This family loves you before we know anything
about you, before we know the color of your hair,
the sound of your voice, or what the weight of you
feels like in our arms. This family loves you.

And this family will love you as much tomorrow
as it does today, in whatever future you arrive in
and exist in. No matter who you become or how
you grow. This family loves you. 

This family loves you no matter the choices you’ll make,
the clothes you put on your body or what that body
can or cannot do. We’ll love you through
wins and losses, good days and bad, mistakes
and disappointments, through every decision
you make, whoever you love or don’t, whatever
you make of this life that is wholly and completely
yours. This family loves you. 

Put this certainty in your pocket, kid,
or bury it like treasure. The map to it is in
your heart, in your memory, in the face you’ll see
in the mirror none of us have seen yet. Return to it
when you need it. Look yourself in the eyes, 
whatever color they are and say it like a magic spell
to summon us around you even when we are not there.
Say these words. Say,

I am loved just as I am.  

In fifth grade, I carried a grape
Scratch ‘n Sniff Sticker in my pants pocket 
wherever I went.

I also carried a copy of a heavy, 
faded book the school librarian
reserved especially for me.

Mrs. Woodward reminded me 
of a mouse being chased
by an owl. 

Someone said something
about her living
with another woman.

We weren’t supposed
to speak of it,
although no one ever told me that directly.

My sticker 
became my bookmark.
By winter, my book smelled like an old vineyard. 

Even now, if I close my eyes, 
the curtained room 
velvets and purples.





From FERSACE (ELJ Editions, 2023) by Nicole Tallman. Originally published in Cultural Daily (August 2023), and forthcoming in The Velvet Room (Unsolicited Press, 2027) by Nicole Tallman.

So, here the story goes: I was eight, right? 
Picture this: three boys, real cool, wet 
heat, grandma’s concrete yard, the bruised 
flesh of June. We did not call it summer 
because we had not yet learned to flatten 
our tongues to hold the weight of an empire. Mother 
lined us up and asked what we wanted to become 
when we grew up. Doctor, said Kazim. Banker, 
said Faizal. Lawyer, said I. But the truth 
was that I wanted to grow up to become 
a love song. I wanted to become Ayinde Barista 
serenading his lover in a jewelry shop in Medina. 
I wanted to become a lock of my mother’s hair 
in my father’s hands. I wanted to trade my flesh 
& bones for a fantasy so small there’s no language 
for it. Two decades later, I am no fantasy. 
I’m a Manhattan suit & overpriced Dr. Martens 
telling the bartender to keep ‘em coming. If this 
is a love song, then it is one in which the lover 
realizes that love was a bedtime story 
that went too far. Who wants to dream of blood 
tests & graveyards? I have walked the length of this 
borrowed country in search of the ultra-magic balm. 
In the meantime I’ve turned this wound into art 
& art into artifice. By this, I mean I’ve tricked 
myself into believing that these poems are worth 
living for, that there’s some value in stringing 
words together in efforts to translate 
the Wolf’s incessant howls through my tortured skull. 
The story goes that I moved continents in search of love 
& shelter & a long breath of uncontaminated air. Instead, 
in six months, it gave me an allergy to water. 
I haven’t felt clean ever since. 




Appears in Ará'lúèbó: The Immigrant Monologues (Acre Books, 2026)