Oli

This piece explores my own thoughts and feelings of being stared, or looked at, by cis/het people in public as a masculine presenting person.

Incipience

I take comfort in a cigarette, its thin, amorphous vapour pooling around my nostrils. Watchful eyes in raised brows and whispers so crushing I turn and face the wall. A hitch in my ribs startles a cough, eyes burning wide like sight into the sun. One hand pressing against my diaphragm, the other nursing whatever's left.

When the ash flickers, curling and dropping, the smoke, circular, traces the outline of the cig before turning upwards into a veil of grey. Never shaped, or named, or declared as a thing, any thing. Taken by a slight breeze that smells of salt.

I take comfort in knowing things do not wish to be any thing. In the shapelessness of the brewing smoke I kill myself with, or the smoke from a chimney, or a mist drawn from a cold mouth, or the exhaust that sits on the tarmac, stifled. Each colourless shade meeting a cloud and sinking into their nothing nature.

In turn, I am formed of vapour, a nothingness carrying everythingness. I billow, and peel a hangnail from my finger. My eyes on my hands, feeling eyes on my neck, waist, chest, hair, like I was a smog risen from some factory. Some lean forward, unashamed in their glances, peer at me through the looking glass. I catch steel glances, pocket them, I know they have made their opinion.

I am a transmasculine poet from Cardiff, currently writing a poetry collection! I enjoy writing about my experiences as transmasc, nature and land (sometimes all of this intertwined) and Wales!