Formerly beloved, I am sitting outside the bodega you recommended, sharp-smelling & small, suddenly aware that I have not the slightest clue what constitutes a bodega & what a café, nor

do I know the anatomy of a roof vs. an awning, though I am aware that this shop or store or eatery could fit many times over in the middle-class suburban Midwestern house of my childhood,

in which I always felt I was Jonah. The blue on the walls of the bodega is not paint, it’s water. The yellow letters aren’t words, they’re teeth, or baleen, or whatever machine from which 

the prophet was running. Isn’t it amazing that, like Jonah, we have both spoken to God. We have both heard His voice & hid from it, your neon sneakers flashing in the closet,

my saltine crackers crumbling against my shrinking waist. Both of us—how should I say this for the sake of the traditional narrative?—in the wrong body, but opposite.

I wonder what would happen if we met now. Your face is softened from years on estrogen.
I’ve grown a beard & a beautiful micro-penis from a decade of injections like bees on a train

track. I think I’m comfortable with myself enough now that we could make love in whatever way you’d like. Yellow oil like mustard seed glistens on my belly hair when I pull out

the needle too soon. The doctor lets you swallow your transformation because you are a woman; mine sends me home with a weapon because I am a man.

As it is, we are both long married to other people. I do not love you in the way I once thought I might, but still I feel a kinship between us, a tether, the weight of the cross, blood-

oathing us together across state lines & gender identities, zip codes & collect calls, 
time zones & emergency-room diagnoses, first rites & last confessions.

We are man & woman without each other, but even more so in the sunlit AIDS Memorial Park, shadows in love over cool stone & marble, me the first to recognize Walt’s anthem & you, perhaps,

letting me.