shorn ovenbird I let him cut away six months of growth…hair tumbling to the floor like a ritual of transformation. This is how I become new, everything shorn back as far as it will go while still pretending I fit somewhere on the spectrum of my gender. The men in my life do a poor job of hiding their disappointment–my father, my husband. They've learned, somewhere along the line, that long hair is beautiful on women, and everything else bends the feminine out of form. So they mourn the hair swept up and thrown away while I celebrate how light I feel. I might be one of the fae folk, a spritely creature wedded to the woodland. I feel most myself this way, when the uncooperative wave patterns of my hair settle themselves into dunes of textured sand. This morning a butterfly almost alighted on one twig-like lock. If a tiger_swallowtail finds I am a lovely place to land I think I can forget the voices that insist I’ve cut away the silken sepals that make me beautiful. 260614 what's it to you? who go blather from