Blue and Pink and Then Yellow and Purple

my DNA used to code me as a girl

but now I’m a hermaphrodite to virgin ears

there’s a cold hand measuring my breasts

and marking the shrinkage

saying my holster can be so strong

it floats a revolver

with the help of a weekly needle,

in the same accent Bruce says

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin

but has not yet left his seat

so what can be agreed on about 46XX chromosomes

but their sameness, their ruling class of estrogen

in a country of boy smirk,

textbook absence and all that Mesozoic goneness,

a script for testosterone becomes a subtle way of saying

this will surely kill the girl raging inside of you

thousands of kids are surgically given new names

at birth every year by men

who were once students sewn to the promise of using scalpels,

because junior year in California

someone in pre-med saw my autoinjectors

buoying thru the zipper of my backpack

and said whatever they are will never work

with the knife of his mouth

so now what can be agreed on about XX chromosomes

but their abnormality in a boy body

and their side effects: a fragile wind of designated sex

beating against fluid wet bone

lady-like hands beholden to a lifetime of gossip

as if to say any of this could—and surely will—destroy you

and now I have to tell my kid

that the blood of an intersex army

has long been on the hands

of men who pulled us out of our mothers

and announced our gender to the heavens

only to erase it

because before becoming

what we always thought we were

a doctor first decided to selfishly kill

what we didn’t even know was there to begin with