I Can’t Find My Gender by Abby E. Murray

I Can’t Find My Gender

I must have set my gender down on the bus
and left it there for anyone to find.

Somewhere, a stranger turns my gender over
in his hands, holds it up to his ear, hears nothing.

I never thought to write my name on my gender,
or my phone number. For months, I thought

that I had swallowed my gender, somehow
absorbed it into my bones or my beautiful fat,

but I’ve had x-rays, MRIs, and mammograms
and the results showed no sign of my gender—

just dense breast tissue, an ulcer, some arthritis.
A colleague told me he assumed I was a woman

because of my earrings, the gold hoops, a gift
I was sad to smash in search of my gender:

Nothing. Just busted swirls of metal, genderless.
I’ve been told I talk like a man, so I recorded

my voice, played it backward and forward,
slowed down and sped up, and all I heard

was sound and language any human could use,
no matter their gender. Sometimes I wonder

if there are organizations with facilities where
my gender can find shelter, where it can be safe

until I come to claim it, and my gender
will know me when I walk in, will run to me

before the string of tin bells above the door
have stopped jingling their one-of-a-kind jingle,

so many ways for new songs to be sung
by the same instruments each day, each hour,

and my gender will jump into my arms
and a volunteer will say no doubt about it,

that’s your gender. But I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be, because sometimes I can’t find

my gender and yet I know it is there,
unable to be parted from me, its soft tongue

licking and licking the palm of my hand.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, recently won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.