from Gender Outlaw
by Kate Bornstein

Sometimes, it's not the fist in your belly that gets to you.
Sometimes, it's when they're quiet, even polite.
Sometimes, it's how they look at you day after day that finally gets to you.
They squint at you, like they can't see.
It's as if by squinting they might get a better make on you.
If they're in a crowd, they shift their eyes so their friends can't tell they're looking at you. Real subtle.
You can read the fear behind the smirk,
The hatred just past the disgust.
You worry it's your paranoia, and you always hope it's only your paranoia.
(Confidence, they've told you, helps you pass.)
But there's always one of them who looks at you with longing.
And that scares you the most.
Because if you let that longing into your heart, you have to accept yourself just the way you are.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner - what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

Readings of July 20, 2008