Fenwig Beatty

Grade: 11

Bay Village High School

Instructor: Kristen Srsen Kenney

Everything:

Poetry

Everything:

I hate everything.
I hate how thin the walls are and my inability to hide,
I hate how every laugh I hear is an insult to who I am inside,
I hate that I am the mirror of my mom's insecurities;

Mom, I hate you.
I hate your constant humanity and your indomitable kindness,
I hate finding out how much you didn't care about people like me and then did,
I hate how, in all of your victimhood, you still love me;

I hate hating everything.
I hate the emotional predictability of my chemical brain,
I hate the name and body and voice that you birthed me with,
I hate how you've made everything: black and white;

I hate how I see everything: red.

Top Surgery

Poetry

Top Surgery

When it's finally done,
And I wake up with carefully sown scars
And my lungs find themselves in a new cocoon
I will be awkward and worn and so so monumentally emerged

When it's been long enough to see,
And my emergence gains a more habitual, sprout-ish form
And time has gone on and on in careful movement
I will be imaginative and the same and radiant with living breath

And when we're ready,
My lungs and my flowering scars and I
Will walk into a field of sun and summer
Lying open on Earth for the first time, emerging.