Cloud Delfina Cardona

Gender Shape lately my gender is overthinking / my labels dangle like loose teeth: / Girl Boy / Nonbinary Dyke Lesbian Bisexual / I wait for certainty to crawl out of me / Athena leaping out of my forehead / instead my articulation grows like hair / lately my gender is a fountain of blood / in the shape of people I love and people / I will never know my gender fountains all over myself / I find stains in the sheets I scrub them out / their scraggly outlines remain sun -shaped pennies / lately my gender is fear- / what will happen if i relinquish the power that I find in your eyes? / outside white bears asphyxiate in plastic boxes across San Fernando Cemetery / while pickup trucks drive by tattooed with names / of dead cousins, car clubs and some that say tengo novia toxica / at night I cut paper to create new shapes / fragments of flora and faces are scattered against / the dining room table I am trying to invent a new context / I am trying to create a gender with what is given to me: / the dyke couple by the oranges the sage bush blooming purple / after the storm / the Little Flower basilica steeple that slits the sky open / Yes, it's the steeple / oh God, I want to be the steeple.

Cloud Delfina Cardona is a poet and visual artist from San Anto, Tejas. Cardona is the author of What Remains, winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize. They are the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit dedicated to publishing Texan writers. Her poems can be found in Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review, Occulum, Tinderbox, and more.