I watch this on my parents’ DVD player in Ohio & weep neon crucifixed into a reflection,
even though I know that it is not me—because the girl in the show has no needles caught

in her throat, no name other than fixed. my mother let the episode swell in the pocket of her
bruised jowls until it became an island spilling onto my lap. I live among men who consume

my name as if it has not been hollowed out. I have been mistaken for the gender I am not
& responded with what’s that supposed to mean. My diagnosis trapped in a high-definition complete

season one box set: me, standing in-front of a mirror, undressing myself & turning to ash, & sometimes, suddenly, my mouth becomes the beak of a bird & knows how to sing. I have always

wanted a friend to pick me up off the slab of a sidewalk during a glowing Midwest night, tears welling in his eyes, while a Jackson Browne song about cocaine dances out of a car radio—

But I am already the avalanche of white that men have drowned under while trying to fix me.

Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.