Gender Dysphoria with Breast Self-Exam Pamphlet

You should know
what your breasts feel like.
Lay down, reach across.
My chest is a stranger
I don’t want to know.
Hills mudslide into my armpits.
I can’t reach my arm far enough
across my body. I can only touch
where my heart is.

I hit them on door jams
because my brain
doesn’t know they exist.
They are only good for warning
the rest of me to stop
before I hit my body.
The walls know them
better than I do.

*

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet who earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Trans Love (Jessica Kingsley Publishers), The Comstock Review, Lone Mountain Literary Society, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Red Eft Review, Stories that Need to be Told 2024 (Tulip Tree), and Zoetic Press. In 2023, they won the St. Louis Poetry Center’s James H. Nash Contest. They received a Pushcart nomination and are a co-curator of the “Words Like Blades” reading series.