Kelsey Smoot is the 1st place prize winner of the Spring 2021 Sad Girls Club Poetry Contest
It’s taken me over twenty years
to embrace this encasement,
manifest of all things queer
grotesque
deviant
handsome
lovely
still
Crooked Sternum is seeking one
Surgical Steel Scalpel
like manic monarch screeching
‘off with their heads!’
call it
crown shyness
I avoid touching
entire regions of my body
like they aren’t there
like I’m not there
Don’t see myself in all reflections
only the kind ones
with hands and tongues
try to ignore that
something vampiric
in my dysphoria
a shameful bloodlust
Call to memory
a time before
the great betrayal
assigned fragile at birth
freakshow
f*g in two acts
fair-weather d*ke
finding something elsewhere under the sky under my skin between my legs between my lungs think that I’d rather be bereft of such unimportant flesh and all the things we call ourselves in waking hours savoring only the taut and tender peel only the remnants only the bandage only what is left behind
Kelsey L. Smoot (They/Them/Theirs) is a full-time PhD student in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities. They are also a poet, advocate, and frequent writer of critical analysis.
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