☀ Today's Poem: "what do i make of my face / except" Wo Chan

that it is on me

and its physicality )though not me( is how i've been addressed
m y w h o l e b o r i n g l i f e

when i was nine
i watched aladdin and thought, after money
i wish for whiteness

*i didn't even have all my teeth—or vocabulary,
just two birchwood hands trying to catch the basketball

my brother hurled at my face

when
i was nineteen my ( face )

erupted / in nodular cysts
the bleeding jupiter kind

of sulphuric condensates
and an alien registration.

i had it all
a family, some second-hand sweatpants,

a gender
whose every sentence began

wheniwasaboy

i looked like my mother

now, more like Father, Baba, dad

am a full yard of irony
waiting for lightning to lick me back^~

once
i was on a gay date (just once)
and a hunched-over woman slipped me a white note

i thought it said "JESUS"
but instead

"mario badescu"

the skincare brand i would sell months later
when i learned to smother the errata

of hormonal bludgeonings
to the surface—other children saw derm-

atologists at the sight of a curly pube
while my own mother

wheniwasaboy waited until her gallbladder exploded

to get her gallstones removed.
i watched her dimpled ass

blow in the wind of the hospital hallway
as she learned to walk again

and i slept in her bed and fed
her plain contraband congee

i am still talking about faces

the dented, fraxeled, mole-scarred and trenched ones
i took a pill many times that induced apoptosis

"cell death"
i could barely afford 4 months of

my lips peeling like WWII wallpaper
the sex i was not supposed to have
did not happen anyways

as a nude-myself i am cratered irreversibly

so why
must i explain the thoughts i've had

on the things i never got to decide

they happened to me ) happen all the time
& i changed i learned i could keep changing

i must to keep myself