Stay

I was twelve the fourth time I tried to kiss God.

Malpractice, thankfully, never makes perfect.

But while I watched the bath turn pink

I realized my heart, too, was a traitor;

the very thing responsible for pushing

this life through my teal roots

in the blink of an eye turned its allegiance,

and pushed life out—just kept pushing, pushing,

but isn’t that what the heart does?

Pulls in the worst storms and turns

its back, pushing the gentlest tides away?

I learned from it, how to push everyone away

even myself. Especially myself. I didn’t find him

for another fifteen years

and at first, when I pulled him in

I convulsed and tried countless times

to push him back out. But unlike blood

he stayed. Having learned from the willful heart,

the body holds no loyalty to gender

like a hook to an eye, he fit into me

and, by God, he stayed.

This poem won an honorable mention in Common Ground Review's 2020 Poetry Contest and was published in their 2020 issue