severed breasts
2:00 – I track the moon, waxed to a yellow half. Wide tonight, impossibly large, she oranges clouds like a candle to smoke. This, I think, is how I imagined frankincense and myrrh as a child; (noun) a nebulous something, seen through spider thin fabric and warm dream-lights. I am braless under my hoodie and a sleep shirt from the zoo. Night cloaks what little breast I have. One hurts in the wake of a rail-side sprint, an ache introduced to me when they arrived unwelcome at twelve. Two years of testosterone have squared their shape, but I hold them flat in the bathroom mirror.
I want a little / half moon scar / where their shadows used to fall.
I’m out on the grass near my sister’s old high school, estranged mothers, netball courts. In window light from a two storey square, a crouched woman picks at small somethings. Paper clips? Children’s toys? Plot threads for tonight’s dream? Why at 2? Why alone? I notice the pale of her warm-lit skin; the same white as what I thought her singlet. Bare or clothed, I cannot know, but she curls her back and I make out every vertebra; snap my head to the dark road. I will not steal from her as I stand outside her life.
Crouched legs sever / her breasts / from view.
I thought to ask my dad about his family the other day. He told me, ‘My grandad didn’t allow hats at the table.’ He told me, ‘Grandma died when I was young, but I remember her playing with me.’ I have never seen her, yet from these words she is gifted to me, alive behind my eyes. There she is—on a wide grass field—impossibly, my childhood lawn. She offers a toy—a gap I don’t fill, fuzzy and unimagined—to the baby. I see her hand as she animates it. Old skin like draped silk, brown with age and silver with rings, moving side to side. My dad remembered, ‘walking into her room one day, and seeing her double mastectomy scars.’ I reach for life and land in a room blued by curtains—a door and a blue I stole from my own maternal grandmother’s house. It is pressed to my father’s-father’s cottage, unreal and familiar. A small my-father opens the door at the wrong time.
A revelation of pain and survival / wrinkles her chest / in half moon scars.
Ahead of my path the Night ’n Day glows. I am thinking of a book I read on Celtic goddesses and Boudicca. They said she cleaved, in the grove between battles, Roman breasts for Andraste. And, if she did, did it shake her? As much as it would shake me? Even common, did death and violence not bruise them all innately? Was it strategic—did this brutality prepare her to avenge her daughters—spearing through the Roman state as hot tears rolled? I remember how I flicked the library sticker as I sat. Failed to imagine the horror she saw.
A hare crosses / the rail tracks / under the moon.
Dorian Mackle Bayley (he/they) is a trans masc and tangata Tiriti, studying his BA in English and Anthropology. His work has recently appeared in transitive rag and elsewhere. Older work can be found under the deadname ‘Pieta,’ published by the NZ Poetry Society, Young Poets Network, and others. You can see more of such things at https://dorianb.carrd.co/