This is just to say

Here are two things I’ve been struggling to say, in no particular order:

• I am a trans woman.

• I am a Christian.

There’s a lot of nuance that I’d love to add to both of these statements. But when I’m struggling to say things, it can help to just put them in their cleanest possible version, and this is it.

I feel a lot of pressure from multiple directions to not let these two things co-exist, but the truth of my experience is that, for me, they do.

When I was a kid, my pastor told a sermon where he likened God to someone washing dishes, scrubbing coffee stains and old grounds from deep in our coffee cup souls. I think I am done letting other people decide what the coffee stains represent. I have a personal relationship with God, and we talk about it, and that is enough for me.

Anyway, here is a William Carlos Williams-inspired poem about it:

This is just to say

My trans body
is not coffee
staining a bespeckled
diner cup.

It is
finally sitting
in the back
corner booth

after all night
on the crisis
line, laying down
in a roundabout.