Soviet Transgender Epic

As repentance, one day, I will be a young transgender woman in the Soviet Union. Living as
unaware of ways and words and meanings to describe myself as I am unaware that in one
year’s time I will be drafted to go to the war in Afghanistan, where I will live and everyone I care
for will not.

The men that exploit my feminine inclinations will live to return with me unlike the ones who
cared for a fellow person in me. Those with a kindred gentleness in the most rugged terrain
carrying out most terrible campaigns of violence against the undeserving.

I return the battered, hollowed out shell of what was already the shell of a man encasing a
woman so soft and meek and undeveloped like the fetal embryo of a chicken in a fertilized egg
cracked into a searing cast iron pan at 7AM on a Sunday for a beautiful free woman released
from her shackles of maledom in some far flung future where I can see through the blinds of life
as I live it in the dark basement peering up at the ground level half window on the street in a mid
sized city in the North Eastern corner of North America. I sit on the stoop leading to my most
cherished subterranean home to smoke and breathe and I think of long, winding, run on
sentences that I think are poetry.

I come home a veteran of a failed war, a failure that feels like it consumes my entire life. I don’t
know if I will ever know more, but I hope to. I hope to see my future, through drug or drink or sex
or vicarity. Maybe I will fall prey to a cult proliferating after the collapse and shock therapy or
codependency and addiction when I fall just a little too deep into living through someone who
doesn’t love me beneath the wax seal. No matter what, I will spend so long thinking of that
woman I hope will exist, that will have my personality, through no direct genetic relation, but
through spirit and will. How she will be free to be herself, to be who, what, and how she really is.
I can so faintly see this image of the future, of myself, through the facade of imagined suffering.
Blending my feelings through the multi-chamber grinder of imagination, insisting upon my
greater and deeper damnation, the only place from which I can look up to see hope, the only
way to appreciate what I already am through fantastical eyes suffering more than myself.