The Adam’s apple in old photographs,
a hard comma in the throat’s soft sentence.
Shoulders built for a doorway
you never meant to walk through.
The particular wrongness of a swimsuit,
size medium, women’s,
purchased with shaking hands
and worn like a confession.
A binder’s compression at 6 a.m.,
ribs remembering all day
what they were flattened for.
The five-o’clock shadow
rising like evidence
against a face still learning
its own vocabulary.
Voicemail greetings you re-record
four times, five,
hunting the octave
that finally sounds like testimony.
The DMV clerk’s eyes,
flicking twice
between the photo and the face,
deciding which one is lying.
A binder of hormone logs.
Injection sites rotated
like crops in a small, stubborn field—
thigh, thigh, deltoid, thigh.
None of it metaphor.
All of it Tuesday.
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