Lace Up Their Boots

You cry out with the pressing of gender against the print of a wish. The match begins, with the walk-out only. [[Pace in Gorilla. ->3]] [[Let them see the stretching of your arms in their awkward suit.->2]]

There are no fireworks for you, no upward-spiraling smoke, no menacing splatter of water as you reveal yourself to the crowd. With you instead is the power of your chosen mother, winding up your wrestling boots to your knee pads. [[Bend into your signature pose.->4]]

"Nobody, no matter who you are, should be afraid to stand up in front of the whole world and bare it all, everything that makes you the person that you are." (text-style:"italic")[--Jon Moxley]

It's not much, your weaving, but as you walk to the ring to the choir’s crescendo, your chosen song, know there is no other like you, your body as it is, and this is rapturous, a mouth, muscles, your toes in your socks, though there is pain too, and the kind of loneliness you cannot string out into sense. [[But you try.->5]]

You believe in many gods at the surface of your whispers, a flap you can hear above the crowd blending into its own singular noise, but your loneliness is long. You have lost your partner, who you could not tag in to call you by your chosen heart. [[Envoke a transformation. ->6]]

You’ve gone by more than one name, even during this walk to the ring, and make yourself again, to go by a new one. You’re so close to deciding, and so far from this still. You love others’ chosen names, but can’t take them for yourself, because those names belong to them. [[Go on. ->7]] [[Move toward the ring. ->8]]

You chose a name for yourself before, the first time you were a fresh draft. The idea of a new match isn’t far-fetched. [[But it is, isn't it. ->9]]

Your music repeats. Your opponent stares from inside the ring. Do you pray? [[Yes.->10]] [[No. ->11]]

Because who would love someone born in a body between Valhalla and The Halls. When your old partner couldn’t, what skeleton could. [[Move toward the ring. ->8]]

There was a moment, near Samhain, where you reached for your ancestors and reinvented where you’d go when you died. You may die here, of the grief that follows your loss. [[Follow your loss.->13]]

A Goddess lifts you into your form, up the steps. The fanfare is emptier as you meet your opponent’s face. Your hands are on the ropes. [[Your boots meet the ring. ->12]]

The rings that led you to this moment wind around you like a singular snake. You think of the wrestlers that came before you, that carried snakes to the ring, and how that’s gone wrong. You think of the wrestlers before you that have gone wrong. The rings that have gone wrong. [[Climb between the ropes top and middle.->14]]

You are neither man nor woman, but fighting--perhaps Valhalla will make an exception for you-- --That music again, and your steps-- The ascension--You-- [[You’ve taken too long to get here. The audience tires of the setup, but for you, the fighting started long before you stepped inside the squared circle. So you get in.->14]]

At your last procedure, the nurse repeated, //follow the ribs//. Here, ring ring, you follow the bones, a strike, one for each rejection, swinging, literal, to the middle. Ring, ring. One for each time you’ve been left for being //not a woman//, [[but something else. ->15]]

Nonbinary is a cloud that fills the skin, they, they, and now a new turn, he, heaving what you can because ring, ring, like music. [[//I’m not in a relationship with a man.//->16]] [["I’m not in a relationship with a man."->16]]

A bell opens every conversation, every love that might be they, they, //you are not enough// in the form most //you//. And you’re suplexed, not into the center of the ring, clean, but against the turnbuckle. That’s legal now, you remember, part of last year’s rules, like the buckle bomb and before that, the stomp, which you take, one after the other, and at that moment where your opponent’s foot presses your face into the mat, even more comes. [["You're too fat to be androgynous."->17]] [[//They does not fit like a thundershirt should.//->18]]

[You’re right, based on the definition you hold so tight your nails dig into your palm. Let’s not romanticize it—my body is heavy, and the space I take up is more than the multiple rounds of my belly and the inconvenient width of my arms. Let’s talk about buying a suit. How, eyes wet with want, there’s a symbol of androgyny orbiting just outside, and I can feel it in my hands, the material that won’t rest just right. Yes, we can discuss symbols more. I own so many ties, none of which I wear. My hands shake too much to work the knots. I stopped shaving the sides of my head because sitting in the barber’s chair, so often and so public, was a coming out as regular as the period I can’t carve out. You’re right, in the way that this is not a conversation, that my width makes me more. My body is haunted by the ghost of a young girl, the boy who almost was, yes, and the frame we see with our own eyes. [[And then the finisher.->19]]]

I have written at length about the pronouns wolf/wulf— trust that I am better suited to gnaw at the raw flesh of another animal than to wear the femme (yes, this is a whole other language). He, no, and not for lack of trying. I have slipped in and out of pronouns as if this body was a fitting room. The lighting isn’t right here, and each curve of my body is a segment that, deep down, I’d like to carve out, but she is all I’m left with—not because the sound is right, but because that’s all my ears have heard for over thirty years: She is this, She is that. My hair is too long. The body I inhabit is neither here nor —not the right body; I am missing so much— there. This binary is a rotten egg we are too afraid to crack open for fear of what is inside churning. [[And then the finisher. ->19]]

The truth. You struck out at your partner, not in the ring, but in spite of both, and all that’s left is one, two, and [[the rope where you now rest your foot.->20]] [[one more burn. ->21]]

You knew beforehand it was meant to be a quick squash. But ring, ring, and there’s your knee strike, unplanned. [[It is not the first time.->22]]

A friend, five years younger, calls himself an //elder gay// in the car and you see it in front of you, unfolding, the idea that this might have been your last match, and it guts. [[More about the ring?->22]]

The ropes connect to the posts that make you you, at each corner intersecting. You want someone like you, and you know you are not a woman, but would trace the shape of woman with an honest leap from the top. Were you ever a woman, what a debate, yelling from outside the ring. [[What to tell your first mother. ->23]] [[What to tell your first father. ->24]]

You told your mother you were gay, once, because that was so much easier to digest than not your daughter. [[And for your father too--->24]]

//our daughter isn’t well// my mother says to him, as if each part of the phrase wasn’t a separate cutting, because let’s parse this, i haven’t been their daughter for years, but can live with being their child; can live with being they, but to live with being their child, really, is a cutting, like the bleeding of the tree in our backyard when i whipped at it with a jump rope, over and over to see the white running down, each mark a wet line, and what else, really, because there’s no sense to be made of speaking, because// our [...]// //isn’t well//, and am i really theirs, or the product of their cutting, because our daughter isn’t [...], born instead from generations of smoke and snakes, all the generations at once, all lying, every iteration of //[...] [...] isn’t well//, and what is well, and can we store the wet there in a bucket not a basket; the contents of well rot from cutting, all dying, but what //[...] [...] isn’t [...]// . [[...->25]]

You want to be called by another name, but a new name continuous, over and over fresh and fresh, ring ring, like two curves gone from a new body that wants the ropes so bad. [[But instead. ->26]]

You have been called //medically complex//, and know becoming new has limits. So reinventing the body happens in different ways, with attachments and cutaways that don’t require pills and blood— [[Like this match. ->27]]

You went rogue. You pretend your weekly shots to the thighs, left and then right and back to left again, are something else, your shade, your ice, what could be other than these shots to the face, punishment for the shoot strike earlier, punishment for your body being too soft. [[But what of your stiff heart.->28]]

You know you are about to lose, the way it was planned at the start. You told your best friend you wished your boyfriend was the river, and three years later he reminded you that to be true, you’d have to go //to// the river. [[//To. //->29]]

//To// be alone, you decided, but you’re not alone now, the //ring ring //again, and then you’ll be new, you decided you’ll be they/he who hasn’t stirred for ages, but will maybe stir again in the shape of some polished want of another like you, whose heart is not in the fight [[but whose boots are laced anyway.->30]]

A cover. One. Two. Three.