In the Midwest, we had lakes

and 80’s dance parties, rolling hips.

We drank like yesterday was a wake

and we needed to make a music

to lead the spirit home.

How we understood rhythm:

wriggling out of our own lonesome

and into each other’s.

Even landlocked, I lapped at coastline.

I have been taken in

by a body’s swell and crest,

pulled and pressed in moonlight.

The dance is an exorcism.

Prince casts out more demons than Jesus,

I swear, sweats the sickness from us,

commands the laying-on of hands.

I was dreaming when I wrote this,

the lake air outside my bedroom

transfigured to salt and speeding

through me like streetlight

streaks on a wet windshield.

I danced so hard in the dream,

my dead dad was there,

and my dead friends. I was nothing

but a haze of wind and bassline.

I was down on my knees.

I was the body’s salt.

Down at the lake, my brother

who was not yet my brother

in the eyes of the world

gave his blood to the bonfire

one night and cut his long hair,

burned his skirts and dresses.

The flames took the feminine

letters from his name, and I

pulled the smoke to my lungs.

I have not bound back my flesh,

but I have wished for it to fade,

to be apparition, to be more or less

beautiful, to be more or less animal,

to be painted as the glass of a church,

to desire and be desired, to change

overnight like a city during autumn

or war, to be rebuilt the same,

to open in sunlight, to unfold.

I was not born in the wrong body,

exactly, but I was given too few of them.

Assuming I just get the one.

In my next life,

I want to be more or less

the same, I tell the ocean.

I want to breathe this air

tinseled with bird and brine

for the first time, again and again,

to sit on sun-warmed stone

until my pulse matches the tide.

I cross over into that other element

like I am made of it.

Light refracts, my body

a blur in the wilds.