o transgender spirit, lift your hands to my face and weep, eyes shining with aurora borealis. meld your flesh into mine, an amalgamation of the joy that beams from my fingertips & the dull pain of other people’s grief. give me the courage to laugh when my faltering breath catches under the seams of my chest and refuses to release. root yourself underneath my fingernails, bloom there like blood, like there is no equivalent to the immense wonder & suffering we claim. if you know, you know. give me the courage to write something other than prayers. they will not save us, but it is the only way i have been taught to forgive myself. i forgive myself because i am transcendant, transformative, transgenerational. i engender my gender as the grass underneath your fingertips, the halos bouncing in vision as an afterimage, the moment when my computer reaches the image search for oxbow lakes and will go no further. i am self-referential, a closed and curving circuit left to its own devices.  i spin gender from nothing—thought’s unknowable absence. it is subconscious, mindless out of ever-practiced performance. o transgender spirit of mine, give me the strength to pray to myself when things get hard.  i promise to look for the cracks of age and use in my hands when my time is done. what a blessing it is to live and be loved. oh, my hands. my hands. may we have many such cases.