NVN Wednesday... Affirmations: 2 Poems

"We Love Gender-Affirming Care" by Cecil Morris and "Girly Boy" by Jean Voneman Mikhail

WE LOVE GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

by Cecil Morris

Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors. —NPR, December 4, 2024

*

Here’s gender-affirming care in my hometown: 

We give our boys some guns—long guns like ARs 
and shotguns and semi-auto handguns—
which, at first, are really just pointer fingers
and sticks and trigger-controlled hose nozzles
and, really, anything vaguely phallic.

We give our girls baby dolls and plush toys
and encourage them to hug and comfort,
to placate and coo, and, later, aprons
and play kitchens with miniature pots and pans.

We give our boys hammers and nails (of course)
and drills and fucking big four-wheel drive trucks
and dump trucks and fire trucks with screaming sirens
and teach them privilege and damage control
and the righteousness of conquest and noise.

We give our girls sixty watts of light and need
and teach them the virtues of silence and grace
and a thousand and one ways to cook a chicken,
to make repairs, and to turn tears on and off.

We teach them all manifest destiny.

*

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025. He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

*

GIRLY-BOY

by Jean Voneman Mikhail

AI-generated graphic by NightCafe for The New Verse News.

*

My little boy blue, 
as a child you wore 
girl-pink, not the browns 
of circus bears and puppies. 
Not the beiges of office walls. 
Who cares about colors now?
Wear what you like. 
As a girl child, my boy snakes hung 
down in braids past my fingertips.
They had a sweaty life all their own. 
They flicked ribbon tongues at me,
struck me on the back when I ran 
away, so I cut them off one day.
I stored them in a box of magic tricks,
decorated the lid with sequins, 
like moon disks sparkling in the light.
Who would see them in a dark closet? 
I eventually got my girl groove back. 
I liked the boys, their hawk heads, 
hooded. They blinked in astonishment
that I had actually caught up to them.
Eventually, I grew my braids back,
gave up the girl I used to love. 
I opened my legs to the bedposts. 
I had you on my favorite night of all.
You were born blue and little. 
I think of you now as a girly boy. 
A ghost of a boy-girl in a mirror.
Don’t rub off your eyeshadows
with the back of your hand,  
with your desert skin, so dry and soft. 
Your eyes are the valleys you’ve left 
behind in the rearview mirror, 
where the hills float away. 
The morning moves you, 
slides a mountain aside, as you 
drive through, around the twists 
and turns of your desires. 
The mountains widen, deepen 
their despair then disappear, 
the further into this self-love thing you go.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail has published in One Art: a Journal of Poetry, Sheila Na Gig Online, The New Verse News, The Northern Appalachian Review, and other journals and anthologies. She was recently nominated for “best of the net” by Eucalyptus Lit.