Elio

"Hi, I’m Elio, a 19 year old trans poet and artist. I love books and anything creative! Since starting my transition and experiencing everything that comes with that, I discovered that writing is something that helps me understand how I’m feeling. I love writing about the euphoria I experience now but also how my younger self felt. Seeing yourself reflected in someone's writing is so important, so we’re never alone."

IG: @luminescentpoet

Divinity under Cindered Wings

To be trans is to grow.

To expand

Your mind and body and explode

With divinity from

Not what you already had, as this was never enough

To please ourselves but grow so harshly

And with such intent that the world

Seems much too closed to ever hold our seraphic selves and please

Strike a match and

Set me alight

Like delicate wings on a moth let me become dust from my own inferno

That coruscates in the sunlight

Collect my ashes after I have burned

And let me create a new being from this

Stomped out flame

I mould myself together with gentle hands

So pure this charcoal glistens white and

From moth to dragonfly I expand into

A different form, wings still beautiful and humane

Now new and boyish and fresh and remade and I realise,

I have always been divine under these cindered wings

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Tattooed with her name

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She still lives within me, my skin hers to touch

To cover with my brothers clothes without shame pouring over my head drowning me

Filling my mouth and lungs with disgust. Breathless and choking, gasping

Uncontrollably, overflowing with urges to plant my feet in his body, steady

and when you squeeze and ring out my organs, liquid shame soaks the bathroom tiles

It gushes out in waterfalls, screaming as it hits the floor

A flood rushes through my house and

My wooden floorboards are sodden and cracked with my heaving humiliation

And I am drowned and shivering with embarrassment

I wonder why I had to be born like this with

My body that was never mine. Did I steal it from her?

I yearn to apologise to that little girl who loved teddy bears and purple and playing outside and riding her bike and

The little girl who wished she was never a little girl in that wrong and lonely body

Did I steal this body from her?

I wonder if you cut me open would my flesh be tattooed with her name

Those letters indented in my brittle bone

If you cut me open would I still be stuffed with everything she was;

Would I still be her, down to my blood and the way I love people

The way I say my words and how I brush my teeth

Does she still live within me?