Outlaw linguistics
Feminine thinks I belong to them, but I’m not doing it right. Femme seeks to set me free, and knows however I do it is my right way. Feminine is a cog in the system, cut to fit, the slot for the tab. Femme is the wrench in the gears, the dismantling of locks into adornment and armor.
Feminine is to Femme as a neon light is to the aurora borealis. Which is to say, a created sense of garish meant as job security, rather than the natural wonder of the world showing off entirely for their own pleasure. Which is to oversimplify everything, in the pursuit of explaining one thing.
Feminine is has been will be was always divine. The familiar and the mysterious. The object of desire, but no, we keep telling you, not object. Subject. Not meant to be a reflection of the will and the rules and the force of masculine. Femme rejects biological imperative and capitalistic agendas.
Feminine is to phrase as Femme is to verb. The improper noun and an independent clause. Femme diagrams the sentence, turns it into a dress pattern, turns that into a paper airplane, flies it around the world, turns it back into a sentence, and ends in a defiant ellipsis.
Femme is very inclusive, but not of everybody. Femme is a gender. Femme is not found in breasts or cunts or high heels or pantyhose or conventional gender markers or endless youth or homogeneous beauty. Femme is not found at all, it is created. Femme is an art form.
Femme is the vessel of clay, shaped between palms seeking to love under pressure, burnished into being through testing flames and chemical reactions, bearing up through feasts and fear and famines and fury. Chipped and seamed and run through with precious metals and shoplifted glue.
Femme is not for the taking. Not the bodies, not the word. Femme is to feminine like essay question is to multiple choice. Like all you can eat is to calorie counting. Like the big box of crayons is to a piece of chalk. You can create beauty with that chalk, but in limited ways.
Femme is tools for dismantling, down to the bones, and fibers for building back up again. Each piece considered, chosen, or discarded. Building a new framework to hang a life upon. To weave through with community and connection, with art and activism, with the treasure that is self.
Feminine can be has been will become many of these things. Can challenge and change and choose. Can be the verb and the subject and the art form. Feminine can make of itself something like Femme, but if it is not queer, or if it is not trans, it is not Femme. It is some other beautiful thing.
Of moonlight and roses and mammals
brow furrowed
you delve inside me
for stories of coral
and kelp
the slippery grasp
of forever
of your own
desire, deep
set and hard
thrusting tectonic
quaking, but
I’m not talking
about science
I am sweat wet
mammal
climbing your arm
I am howling
your face is the moon
your face is the moon
your smile a burst of stars
through the thin skin
of my eyelids
hot washed and
half mast
seeking you
a watery moon
an ocean
I open to
my cunt grown
to the size of
your heart
I am a drum ba
drum brum brum come
come coming
again words like:
vibration
yowl
salt
wet meat wide open
you stroll you skip you jog you run
you pause you pause
you dash in lead boots then slow
my cunt is a cave
a grove around that cave
the sky above that grove
my cunt is home
your hands are the wind
late night lock picking
breezes
rustling my shades
to rolling, over
slapping sounds
and flashes of
streetlight
wide open
and again, metaphor
when what I mean is
fucking
what I mean is
on your arm
I am a bouquet
of thorny rose
I am storm cloud
whistle and whirl
I am sobbing
your name
Sossity Chiricuzio is a queer femme outlaw poet, a working class crip storyteller. What her friends parents often referred to as a bad influence, and possibly still do. A 2015 Lambda Fellow, she writes as activism, connection, and survival, and is found in places like Adrienne, NANO fiction, and Lunch Ticket. visit sossitywrites.com.