The Kind Cryptid
"After doing a lot of painful and difficult work on myself and how I feel in my nonbinary-ness, I started to get into poetry as an easily accessible way for me to put down my feels and thoughts.
I was approached by a friend running an exhibition on queer living spaces to contribute some material of any kind that answered a series of questions.
'How do you define your queerness?' was the most difficult to answer because I intentionally never thought about it much.
Usually I would answer this kind of question with 'eh, I'm nonbinary, polyamorous and queer. I am everything and nothing at once. Schrodingers gender!'
But this time I wanted to actually examine how I would describe my queerness and what I would use to define it.
Nonconforming is not the label I would use, but it is what some may think fits best. However, my clothing, my hair, and my manner are not nonconforming to ME. My expression is what I have had the most trouble with in my journey towards a more embodied queerness, however, so I delved a little deeper into that specific aspect of my identity.
While I am not the most visually shocking or exciting person in the room at any event, I will always feel right, correct, comfortable, embodied, safe. It took a long time to get there, and that process is what this poem captures.
I am the Kind Cryptid Storyteller, and I use they/them pronouns. I am a queer and disabled writer living in Birmingham, UK. I graduated with a First Class Masters degree in Playwriting and Dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow. While I mainly write plays, I also delve into poetry, prose and radio play writing when the fancy takes me."
"I made a vow to never write anything without a main character who is transgender as I am a little sick of the lack of voices we are allowed in the crowd."
Instagram: @kind.cryptid.storyteller
gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria
at the shore of a river out the
back of my house
my body, made up
wearing the beautiful dress i wore
at prom in 2015
i was wearing my loosest t-shirt
slouching forward
to hide them
doc martens treading heavy
cargo shorts
i had once tried to burn the body
to drown the body
again and failed
to rip it apart
legs lying spread on my bathroom floor
i had ripped off the breasts and flesh around the hips my hands
it comes back together
as if i had done nothing
i had crammed it in the walls of my old home
with the dust
and the cat hair
and the blood stained bedsheets
and the small bedroom window
and my never family
it now sits in my living room
watching Strictly on the TV
draining my blood, swallowing my dreams for years
quietly in corners of vision
it tells me i need it
that since it was left behind
it always found its way back
i asked for the dress
to make it into something
a new shawl for my friend
a lining for my jacket
a table cloth
the body decomposes, leaving
behind “remember me, love me”
i remember, i love, learn to
forgive it for existing
i finally ink my skin, make myself a home, dream again, remember with compassion, dye my hair green, let my girlfriend hold my ass, stop trying to justify “him”, become just “they”, find others like me, wear eyeliner, start liking my voice, love my body, and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and gender euphoria and
and and
and and
and and and and
gender euphoria