My Gender (Reprise)

Robin Arble

My gender is a controlled explosion. My gender is a semester in bed. My gender
is a blurry paywall between me and my AI-generated pussy. Depression is a
substance and it’s slick like motor oil. My gender tips 20% with $64.73 in her
bank account. My gender once gazed at the night sky in the bottom of a lake. My
gender obsessively compulses and compulsively obsesses—about what, my
gender can’t explain. My gender learned to swear in the back seats of her K-8
schoolbus. My gender grew mushrooms in her college apartment and traded them
for homemade cyanotypes. My gender is a second chance. My gender’s mom died of liver
failure and it took her ten months to read every Wikipedia page on 9/11. My
gender doesn’t answer her phone anymore. My gender is abstract: all color, no
content. My gender is a flower garden wilting on wallpaper. My gender is too
busy giving back to back campus tours to spend the afternoon watching the
brutalist library fractal on ketamine. My gender will never scrub last year’s
depression out of her fingerprints. My gender is the night we parked by the lake.
You slid your hand up my shirt and honey, I came lit. Are you mad at me?

I turned 22 and realized it’s okay

to cry to my favorite songs. This time last fall
I was listening to nothing
but Purple Mountains’ only album—I outlived

mom a year ago last month. That Thanksgiving
half our apartment stayed home and ate chili from Aldis,
sipped warm beer me and _____ bought at a Pride

the night I got back from my father’s. I went to bed at 7 PM
thinking about the night I visited them at the music shop.
We locked ourselves in a practice room and they squeezed

my pubescent tit through my wool turtleneck.
They fell in love two weeks later. I’m not afraid
of my death but I swear I saw two NYPD Smart Cars barricade a truck

from driving down the Dyke March last summer.
They swerved into the middle of the emptied road
and a voice on a loudspeaker shuddered “Turn. Around.” Last summer

you surprised me with tickets to a Yo La Tengo show. It misted on and off
as they sang “You Can Have It All” a-capella at the end of their encore.
You held me from my back as we swayed to the rain. There is no way

not to make this sound crazy: the mist hid my tears
as I cried in the crowd. That Sunday, the morning of the Dyke March,
we were smoking in bed and I said, “I’ll love you forever,” and two

voices told me, “Isn’t that the last thing you told your mom?” I got out of bed
and sat in the kitchen. You followed me, clamped your huge headphones on my ears,
ran over to your phone charging on the counter, and pressed play.

“You Can Have It All” filled my head as you ran to the sink
and sprinkled water in my face. And I wept for the first time since.
I wept as you held me.

About the writer