What if it Never Gets Better

I sprout butterfly weeds and blossom

             sad when I think that these might be the best days of my life.

That I have pruned back

             this little life from underbrush—

             the not so little hours bent like branches of so much weight and rain. That I sit

here in late July and know

             that it might

             never get better than this; this summer of crushes and sweat;

this summer of road trips

             to Eureka Springs, of rivers

             and thunderstorms. That these friends will move away year after

year. That I will look back

             perpetually at the times

             when I was potting mums

on a rotting balcony humming along to cicadas.

             The musk of Arkansas

             summer. Another

life perhaps, before this,

             I knew softness

             and happiness.

Zoos

i.

When I was ten, my dad

told me to wear this and don’t

wear that. To sit like this

and don’t ever sit like that

again. Back then as he

chased me around the rooms

and edges of our home so spitting

angry his screams rumbled

my ribcage. I ran for my life.

You’re wrong, he’d scream. You’re all

goddamn wrong.

ii.

At thirty years old, I went with my parents

to the Portland Zoo,

and they were shocked when I emerged from my bed

room in the rented

Airbnb in an orange Target dress.

I’d been out as trans

over a year and nobody said any

thing. Not my brother.

Not my sister-in-law who grew up with gay

uncles. Not my mom.

Not my dad. Not my niece. Just wordless glances

and no eye contact.

iii.

After a stone-cold quiet drive

into town, we arrived at the Portland Zoo.

And when I was one of a handful

of T girls in pretty dresses,

they could’ve considered

rethinking those years

of parenting, fraternity,

pretending to be close. They didn’t.

Nobody said sorry. They didn’t

care beyond their noses.

They didn’t stop deadnaming me.

Their faces and their backwards needs.

iv.

My mom was the brave one. In that,

she tried. In that she (possibly)

acknowledged that I am in fact

a whole person. That I am in fact

a woman. That who I have been

since birth is in fact not a phase.

After about an hour and

a half, my family sat down

for a chicken finger lunch, all

my mom did for me was comment

on how the flower pattern on

my plain dress was similar

to something she had seen on her

Pinterest, but the colors of mine were all wrong.