a giant goose charges towards me

by emet ezell

a giant goose charges towards me hobbling on stiff feet. i peer into its hazy coloring, its expanding and contracting chest, its beady eye throat beak. honk.

the goose dips into the water, dribbles drops and ruffles feathers. 

i wait for the goose to give me a spell to make my mother disappear.

more honking. “lay a golden egg,” i demand. the goose dips and ruffles, 

dips and ruffles.  

i need to make an appointment with the cancer center. in the war between beauty and bureaucracy, i am a ceasefire. 

the dishwasher floods. 

swimming in the murky water is a cockroach. i have lost count of how many creatures scurry through the tabernacle of a gap between closed door and open door. our kitchen, a confessional. our home, an altar. 

i bike 7 miles to frida’s bakery for bread. wear my brand new binder in the sunlight and swallow the freedom of constriction. 

the binder is a spell. a portal. 

polyester. $27.00. hallelujah. back pain. 

my mother’s nightmare. 

discomfort. inheritance. a future. 

it’s covered in bright green dinosaurs, glistening with all the brilliance of the trans childhood denied me. “don’t think too hard,” i tell myself, “just feel.”

frida slips the sourdough into my backpack— $13.00 even— and brings me a turmeric moscow mule. my mouth is neon and ginger. 

“nice dinosaurs!,” she says. 

i smile a lobster. i grin 3 hurricanes and counting. 

my partner takes my old dresses and turns them into shirts. snip, snip the fabric. clomp, clomp the sewing machine. gender the eye of a needle; i prick my mother’s finger. the new garments rest upon my shoulders. flap, flap the birdsong. 

philomela and her sister, procne, turn into two birds: a swallow and a nightingale. tell me, what for the rest of us? what birds will we become?

raised in the Evangelical far-right, emet has spent the past few years uprooting legacies of white silence in order to return to their Jewish ancestry. they are a song-leader, a writer, and a community organizer committed to prioritizing transformation over transaction. emet is also the co-founder of The Barnacle Goose, a radical literary magazine dedicated to blessing that which doesn’t quite yet exist. you can keep up with their work here or follow their catalogue of dead birds on twitter: @baruchdayanemet.