For us to be trans/formative

we must first be trans/formed,

our bodies unspooling from convention so that conviction instead 

becomes the messy, sticky substance that drags our bones together

and gives meaning to being whole. 

The process is often messy

when undertaken by the inexperienced. Everyone misplaces something 

the first time they deconstruct the body they’ve grown accustomed to: 

a membrane that snags beneath a floorboard, a neuron 

that unravels when a breath of air

disturbs its preconceptions. We learn

to weave bridges from the dangling strings abandoned when we break 

apart, to conjure anti-normative dreams from the seams of our post-

constitutive facsimiles, and so what

if, when we reassemble our vibrant bodies,

our eyes are crooked, or our hair

has turned to scales? We are trans/formative, we say, trans/formed, 

and only through our reshaped realities and improbable epidermises 

can our physical forms become vessels inside of which we reinvent

what it means to imagine.