King Krule & Mexican Street Sounds & Medicine Tea

Aaron El Sabrout

Leaves barely shivering in the thickening stillness,just to show that they’re alive & they drink too.The tree with the knobbly spiked flower dickdoesn’t question its embodiment--it just bodies.It is just a body. What if my body was just a body?A motorcycle revving in the alleyway/a masculinity built on gasoline.Who does gender serve?Not me, on the toilet at 4 AMin the blue moonlight. Not a bodywracked with sweat shivers, notthe chub rub that welts slicklybetween sticky thighs.A hudhud cries midday, that danker morning,calls me back to dusty Maadi lunch-as-breakfastbisilla & bouftek & cucumber spears. “I was bornin seconds, do you feel me?” Somehow I cobblethis identity together in objects: this mug fromthe grand canyon, this bathrobe from Winners.But they fall apart, rotate in & out.I too rotate in & out of bodies, out of selves,first Pokémon t-shirt, sombrero & banana,now notebook & paint jeans & glasses,and then?On the beach the wannabe Maya headand the somewhere-maybe pyramidare still sand, sloughing into the sea.

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Aaron El Sabrout is a transgender Egyptian writer, artist & activist currently living on unceded Stz’uminus territory (“BC, Canada”). He is a 2020 Obsidian Foundation Fellow

Cover of We Want it All

New York, New York

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