Lifting of Restriction

Jinete de la Noche by Pat Apt

What if I’m conscious of myself
as a being shining underneath
identifiers? What might it feel like
without the gender
I have so mightily gripped?

Imagining it, I feel
the ground fall away.
Not Lesbian not Poet not Buddhist.
Not Mother or Elder or Traveler.
The practice feels like

losing my tether on a spacewalk.
The practice creates
a taste on my tongue
that rouses me to high alert.
What, what? Unknown!

Unnamed and strange. Unspecified.
A seed, but of what?
And then, practicing
the freedom of transness
softens my grip.

If restriction to a single direction
is the definition of polarization,
then practicing transness can be
the lifting of restriction.
Is this what’s asked of us today?

©Susa Silvermarie 2026

Transness is a conscious activity that can be undertaken by anyone…one way of understanding the work of loosening our grip. Mark Gardett, Feminism and Religion 2-12-26