Green Womxn

I always thought womxn was green

Green like the farm of my sometime childhood

Womxn smells green to me in my memory

I was called a tree many times

Often in ridicule

In the back of the line in school

A bucktoothed willow swaying long over percolating adolescence

An angry stranger once asked if my friends were my sparrows

“Are those your little sparrows? Your leaves? You tree”

Angry she was at my height, I suppose

My body towering without permission

I was afraid then,

Embarrassed by my small sparrow friends

Feeling my length stretch out beyond me

Beyond my soul that I did not yet know to be green

I did not yet know that I was in fact a tree

And trees do not need permission to grow

It takes a long time to let color radiate

Parched and dull from the distance between ourselves and ourselves

It takes a long accept the color of our nature

The undeniable, forgotten electricity that surges in the space between our skin the world.

I can close my eyes in an NYC subway

Far underground where no natural color remains

Where fluorescents rule their peoplemade domain

And smell womxn

Somewhere far above, her roots gripping the earth like a lover

Wet and vibrant

Sweet and changing

Dying, metamorphosing

Hard with black veins that run through her long body

Green distilled into woman

Or woman into green

One and the same

And sometimes if I open my mouth really wide

Open my body really wide, the distillate pours through me

And I meet myself

And I know in this life I am tall and hard and the color of moss