THE HOUSE WHERE I LIVE
If this gray house where I live, house
with a white fence and a red door,
where I live on the third floor—
if this house were in a different
country, today I might have watched,
from my third floor, the building
across the street explode, hit
by a bomb, which might in fact
have hit the house where I live, which
if I lived in a different state might
have burst into flames from a wildfire
fed by climate change, which
if I lived in a different country might
today have caused floods that might
have swept my house away—
but as it is I sit on this third floor
in this hottest summer ever recorded
and try to keep the air conditioner
off while bombs explode and fires
and floods surge, far from my gray house
with its white fence and its red door.
EITHER OR
There were others who lived in the halfway house
where the agency sent me that college summer.
But the one I remember best was what we now
call intersexed. There were questions: which and how.
Later my mother told me my friend’s mother
had years before had my friend’s clitoris reduced.
Then I learned of a woman who, as a boy, had her womb
and functioning ovaries removed without her consent.
And the man whose infant penis was damaged and who
at two was declared a girl and had his testes removed.
And the woman runner who can’t compete
unless she resumes testosterone-reduction drugs.
Because there are only two genders.
*
Because there are only two genders,
testosterone-reduction drugs
may be denied to women who, allowed to compete
only with men with testes, may be removed
from women’s bathrooms, bathrooms which men who
may be denied testosterone will have to use, without the consent
of women users, men who can’t be called people with wombs,
while the status of women with wombs will be reduced
to less than the status enjoyed by their mothers,
who did not have to question whether or how
to use their wombs, in a time remembered now
as a time when people had agency, summer
or winter, could live in their own, could be their own houses.
