Bodega | Lost Field Guide

I should live so at the end I don’t have to repent. I’m nearer the moon than the sun.
As in I could be someone else.
I’m an axe and you’re the stump. You teach me how to be. We buy powder that
Turns flames into multiple colors. We sit by the fire and gaze. I grow
A beard under tough old stars. I shut my eyes. Height: 5’8. Diameter: unsure.

Mostly along streams, canyons, washes, rocky slopes.
Bisexual flowers. Disk-shaped. Waterlike. When I had my breasts removed, I went home
With tubes coming out my newly shaped chest. You pulled the blood out of them.
Thick into a bowl. It hurt, the way the plastic tubes pulled at the holes, the stitches.
Later a nurse pulled the tubes out of my chest, I barely felt it.
I was glad. Woodland zones. NE. Buckeye and goldenrod. I used to want to join the Navy.
But I couldn’t. Stalked and drooping. Wishing to be someone else.

July 9^th—Seem to feel as though all my efforts amount to nothing...
Dull light green, turning yellow, shedding in autumn. Crowded leaf scars.
The water oak from this year is above the earth, full of itself. Leaves shaped like tears.
Feeling a kind of negative holiness, my higher power frowning down upon me.
Notes of birds, frogs, tree-toads, all seem gloomy; the wood-pile, the old house,
The meadow—all sad. Go out and see my father laboring all alone.
The mower mowing. He sprays it off with a hose at the end of the day.
I admire him. How nothing is wasted.

I’ve never been active but I’m always poised for an argument.
Robins, mockingbirds, missing Grandmother.
I thought I’d be beautiful as a boy. When I transitioned, I went from
Hairless to mostly hairy. We buy razors. We take our time. I wished for a long time
To be like my father. But I’m more like my mother. I come back to myself.

July 19^th—have an interesting conversation with a marine sniper.
She doesn’t smile. When I shake her hand, her grip is soft.
I’m running on my own sweet will, answering rings in the woods. Hairy twigs.
Dark purple. Naked seeds. I’m leaning forward, forked, irregular, spreading crown.

Flashing in the early afternoon sun, I hold your hand, buy okra. Nearly transparent.
Bark: gray; thin, scaly, exposing dark red inner bark.
You administered my first shot of testosterone in the doctor’s office. Easily.
A quick jab. And I was full. Your eyes teared at the edges. I felt nothing.
I wondered if that is what it meant to transition. To feel nothing as your body grows.
Fertilized and mature. Raising myself and becoming a body of light.

116 – June 2022

By Elijah Rushing Hayes

Lost Field Guide