I cannot see myself in the mirror,

Waves of wildflowers bloom in fever. 

But at the vanity, vanity becomes me

Head ‘cross the meadow, heads down defiantly.

Gladly I drink life from stolen moments

Because we play at death to survive.

Ere I leave life behind, would want be cleansed from me?  

Could birds live forever, if baptized they would be?

I touch Death, a promise of love, a touch ingrown.

Come winter, we loons pray, we won’t fly south alone.  

Would that I could choke my deadname in silence

Still they cannot kill us until they kill us. 

So nobody seeks panacea from springtime,

When flowers of all feathers let ourselves go.

Edited by Annika Lee

Artist Statement: I wanted badly to put words to an awful sort of tension that I carry around inside. As a trans person, I am personally invested in the ceaseless battle between my lived name and deadname, and I long for the day when it’ll finally stay dead, so I can really live. So the conversation begins with a reference to undeath that also conveys trans experience, and that rhythm repeats into tense, interrupted couplets, bound by the rhyme scheme, but unnaturally discontinuous, so that each couplet by itself is a kind of a non sequitur. The poem as a whole explores identity, desire, and nature as sources of tension within one individual or an ecosystem, because I wanted to explore how this tension inside me is reflected in my world.