tenderly he pulls down
my binder,
my flesh—compressing
an origami fold along
my shadow against the sun,
my serrated spine—
my chest flayed open,
how it splits in two:
the outline of myself & myself—
neither stagnant nor shifting—
my voice is a visitor in my throat,
he kisses down to where i want to say cock
my tongue is too gentle a narrator
& i deadname my body instead.
to serve as a perpetual closet key—
to invent a dialect of our own,
pulling knives from the throat,
like a circus trick,
the tiring and bloody work—
is performative at best
is a death sentence somewhere
to create a name for the seam
where it rips us in two
bennett nieberg (they/them) is a queer Jewish poet living in Boulder, CO. They are a Pushcart Prize nominee and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, Permafrost, Western Humanities Review, Birds Piled Loosely, Lunch Ticket,and The Hunger, among others. They are a co-founding editor of the journal What Are Birds.