fiebre de kilig

what’s the procedure for watching you fall in love with yourself?

i’m sitting in the waiting area,  a crackle of ecdysis in your chest 
ready to be cut open

the nurses in white jackets, covering their cis-het bodies
take you away.

as the surgery door closes
i see you opening a secret jar 

(it sat three shelves higher than heaven)
unbottling 2,500 dragonflies.

there’s so many wings,
the parts of you that have always wanted to fly            away. 

i can’t wait to trace where they exited,
a runway to kilig 

fingertips away from 

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEE
EEEEEEEEUUUUUU
UUUUUUuuuuuphoOOOoooriaaaAAAAA
                                                                                         AAAA

descends as a suture soothsaying, “thank you for choosing me.”

euphoria and i wait together to embrace you

i’ll find the surgery by cupping my hands together
                                                       ((palm to palm))

creating a landing place
for dragonflies that need a rest stop

on their departure, they’ll bury 31 years of ocean on the mountain top.
crater’s can cradle a water away from the body
where only intersex angels can visit
the volcano knows itself as a burial ground
the redwood trees will grandfather the perimeter of the playground. 
the dragonflies gift a promise — fluttering at an altitude where freedom can laugh
with you. 

6:06PM, feb 6, waiting room, waiting doom
it’s been almost 2 hours with no update. the helicopter chopper is outside. in a cracked thought, i begin to believe kai is being airlifted to his grave. i know in my fingernails that the white woman killed him.  my feet bounce knowing the anesthesiologist overdosed him.

he’s having a hard time waking up, says a nurse whose face you’ll never see. this is one way kaiser permanente lies to me.

everyone is texting me how kai is. no one sees my hope falling off a cliff. 

post recovery, day 2, high af, high alone, high together, beacon hill

kai is asleep and high as fuck on pharmaceuticals. the procedure of watching your lover fall more into himself is a procedure on falling more in love with him.

4AM, feb 7 2023, what have u done, beacon hill
you find your betrothed unawake, they need to pee. you guide their unoccupied flesh to the bathroom, they shuffle their feet, never losing the ground. his chest is bound still, a final tubed glory. he stares at the bathroom mirror. it’s time for you to measure drainage for the first time. you leave the ocean floating in the bathroom.

TTTTTHHHHHUUUUUUDDDDD

BBBBBBaaaaaa aaaaaabbbbbbyyy
                                                                        babBBBB BBBBY??????

your ocean drop is face down on the ground, hollowed.  unconscious is a body of water that just SPLAT. is a body of water who is finally meeting itself. unresponsive, perhaps you killed the ocean in your nervous misfire. caretaker turned, murderer. I ask the medical hospital why it held the scapula, why it followed me home, why it took my love away even for a second. or perhaps an over sedated ocean took one look at everything it never saw before and fainted through the clouds.

morning after procedure, beacon hill, going going gone home.

nurse calls, kai does not want to talk. nurse doesn’t want to talk to me. kai cannot talk for himself. he is still at his vigil. i try to explain. i try to forgive myself. i sob. 

3PM, day of procedure, waiting room.

there are babies everywhere. infant care piddles at my inner child and my inner child guards my seahorse belly. two feet away sit seven pairs of parents with fruiting bodies: mangoes without their golden meat, mushrooms stalking their chest. the gaggles of straights can’t keep their thoughts to themselves. i hear them under their breaths wondering what would keep me alone in a place like this. they think about their precious duplications inside their body first,  then they argue with their nuclear families if i’m pregnant, getting an abortion, or in a crisis.

i keep getting asked if i’ve been helped. my heart swallows my throat – i am bejeweled like a hummingbird neck.

how to say that you’re here for your spouse’s surgery and your spouse is trans and finally being birthed another way. my lip quivers behind my mask. i forget the lies and mishandled care. 

it’s okay it’s not my turn yet…oh i’m still waiting… i reply with lies. scandals. future seeing. the baskets of fruiting wives are corralled back with their husbands (i’d say something more gender-open, like beloveds but i’m certain none of them are queer) their families, their smiling doctors. i fruit with a realization: there was no reason i wasn’t allowed back with my spouse. when i come back to a room like this, hopefully with a seeded body, hopefully with my own gender tremors,  i wonder if my body will be forcibly abandoned like my lovers. 

waiting room, 11AM, February 6th,
i cross my fingers with my heart, hoping a ring’d ring finger counts for something in a surgery waiting room. surely, i am allowed to hold my lover’s hand into the surgery waiting room. kai means ocean. the ocean is my lover who gets swept away by a white latex glove that covers cis skin. the ocean is irresistible. the ocean is trans. the ocean gets top surgery, me, a siren, skinned of my fins, not allowed to clasp webbed grief in the empty v’s of our fingers. not allowed to swim to the operating table, together.

legal or not
love does not count here.
another illusion:
love is kept out

operation day, february 6th,  12PM 
i am in a zoom call because pto doesn’t exist for beggars who can’t be choosers and i know the latex gloves here have benefits i try not to dream too hard about, or else, suffering. i’m a sin-eater,  which means deadlines are the only way institutions “care” about me. what exactly will die if i wasn’t captured by a zoom screen? nothing, but i can’t say that outloud. deadlines can swim through walls. kai sends me a picture of them in the blue hospital gown, a black mask and a huge nemo mural behind them. i try to be nemo. i try to swim.

i can’t, so i sit like a sin-eater and wonder if the ocean could die. 

operation day, february 6, 4PM.
waiting rooms have a harsh way of reminding you how much you love someone. it comes with a river of paranoia: will those cis white doctors cut into kai and kill him? do those white doctors enjoy touching his body, getting under his skin?  is kai still breathing? i pray the river forks through those forbidden doors, a forked tongue in threat to the medical provider team i never met. if only they could see me now.

the most trans thing i could ever do is be a birthing parent.  i want to walk into the infant and family room. say yes, to the attendant who is asking me if i’m waiting on a doctor. say YES to the doctor who asks me if i’m pregnant. confess YES to my assigned sex of birth on my drivers license. say YES, when actually i mean i wish i didn’t have to be this way, isn’t there a different way? to insemination. say YES, when actually i mean you give me no choice, to searching for a donor. say YES, when actually i know there is enough science for anybody to be a birthing body if they want. say YES when actually i know there is enough science for my dna to meet my lover’s dna to choose to birth both our faces, our hair, our eyes. say YES, when actually i wish i could just do it all myself, all the research, all the skill, to be my own guinea pig in duplicating my body and my lover’s body. say YES, because cis women can clone cis husband sperm to have cloned children and not be monsters. say YES, i am a monster. say YES when the public asks if it’s kai’s.

i wish it was as simple as a yes answer. but i don’t really believe that Kaiser Permanente Tacoma Washington wants me to add any more typhoon haired babies. i don’t believe the world wants more of us. it’s easy to think that when your gender is illegal. baby blooming, too, illegal. 

when the river runs its hot mouth into the ocean, it chokes up on salt. i choke up at the notion of an ocean’s hacked flesh and see doctors tightening the umbilical cord around the neck of our future.

2:45am rolls around for the 11th time.  

the metamorph finally has its moment in an obsidian sunlight. i hear a panther’s purr.  when I roll over,  time sneers in a stormy way. if I listen close enough I can hear the lightning before the thunder.  and the tale sounds out a god-fearing story about the birth of the next multiplicities. It cart wheels down the side of your jawline exactly how a bored starfish would in an estuary next to a sleeping volcano. 

there’s a warning in the air. it cautions towards a peace I’m still gestating. I sink deeper into a single teardrop, who’s shaped like the hourglass fear. To the left,  a naughty chaos molds the bridge we walk on. the naughty chaos will ask us to sandwich them in eight limbs by hand holding. 

WEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeUUUeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEERIAAAA-

so, we did as we were asked. swinging our lil orange starfish, traversing this bridge,  so that they’ll know what it’s like to be held in flight. 

–EEEEEeEEEEEEEEE
eeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEeeEEEusEEE

the coo’ing squeals subside. then lil starfish is tagged by the quietest storm. this storm synapse strikes the sky and touches down to circumnavigate the bermuda triangle. it triangulates our happiness. we’re so new to it we don’t know They’re looking for us. we’re called out. read to a red clay filth and the walking trees will need to escort our way back down until we find them back again and again. 

i crumble willingly to the enormity of it all. even through the music blasting. when i dreamt of my lover’s eyes staring back at me, i saw my face peeled against a thunderbeings’ cheekbones. hush hush. shhh. don’t cry little seed. i promise that when i give birth at sea, mayari, you can thunder too. 

lightning is plasma. i know we will teach each of you about the electricity suspended between each bone; how the tectonic plates of you fused together from 300 pieces of coral grief. here they call them bones. 

everytime i hear the thunder, i hold my breath and count until the miracle of lightning shatters the sky and playfully pokes the earth like a game of tag. like a game of sneaky pensiveness awaiting a strategy of giggling. so when you’re only half a breath away, i’ll sketch a compass of you just under my belly button and tell you about how you gave yourself away each time you dared a star to not be a little bitch. 

sometimes i catch the star and put it in my eye so that kai remembers why i hide. maybe i went a little too hard asking twilight mystery to protect us – what i mean is,

i think i lost you in the velvet cloak. oops! i forget you hide in plain sight too. the mangosteen doesn’t fall far from the mirror. 

the only thing exposed is hidden behind the feather fan in our doorway. (you’ll live here too) pressed against the nape of my neck is an armful of miniature creators, stewed in another tropical undertaking of  existentialism.  realizing the disturbing sensation of need. i wonder, will they like my peacock chair? i reign here, for now. until the milk runs dry. until our queer parenting is remembered. 

i asked you in a deep teal midnight if  he could let the peacocks roam free because the evil eye in me grows weary and i’m afraid of your assassination.  envy likes to knock at the door and asks if there’s a masquerade ball, when they enter we’re already dancing, faces melted because tantra is everything. in everything i see everything, even you reading this after the lightning catches us off guard when we swim in the ocean. 

when i arise again, 11:27am erupts out of my nothingness looking for all of us: the lightning’s fizzle, the thunder howls, the volcano’s dream, and the ocean’s first rain drop. i don’t mind that totality.  my brain grooves deeper, like lemon groves soiled with all the next first experiences queued.  with the edge we tow. i know one things for sure: we’re not of here and the second things for certain: we’re of now.

phone rrrrringrriiinggz in waiting room, 7PM, february 6th 2023

kai’s surgeon finally called me around 6:45pm, 3 hours after the time they estimated. i’m sitting 5 steps away, alone, haunting the waiting room. my heart odors like garlic, the kind that is burnt from being forgotten. 

when i pick up my phone i put on a sweet voice to make sure i can get some answers. i ask why it took longer than what was estimated. “he’s stable. he’s just a little sleepy.” she says. she doesn’t share when they ended surgery, just that kai’s top surgery is complete. 

this is the only information that anyone is willing to share with me after waiting  7 hours since we first arrived at Kaiser Permanente. 

the info parakeets back to me over and over again. “he’s just waking up!” a doctor who scurries away like a serial killer in the night, and the receptionist who greeted me is nowhere to be found. in fact i’ve never met any of them. we are faceless to each other. i wouldn’t even know who i’m looking for. 

the medical team must’ve escaped through a rabbit hole. more likely they put themselves in my lover’s chest and walked out with his skin and body through  secret hallways.   they wouldn’t get far. kai means ocean. and oceans are known to drown.

operation day turned night, 8pm
still, no one has spoken to me face to face. maybe my face melted off under the sanitized ugly of fluorescent lights.

my phone rings for the last time.   i wonder if the doctor is calling me from home while they’re feeding their families or if they decided to masturbate before remembering to contact me. oh wait, it’s the nurse. in my rage, my spirit exits and possesses the yellow saltwater fish stuck in the fishtank. the nurse runs me in circles, filling my ears with empty. i am a stoic catastrophe, over-steeped.  ready to turn my nails into scalpels. 

it took kai three times the amount of time to get out of their top surgery than most patients. i’ve read on forums, talked to friends, and complete strangers. all of them had woken up to someone in the room if they so chose. even during this pandemic family members were allowed to be in the recovery room. friends could’ve been there!  

i was barred from existing in the recovery rooms, i wasn’t ever allowed to exist even in the pre-surgery appointments. i wasn’t ever allowed to exist. i wasn’t allowed. i. 

i am married and locked out of those heavens. i’m a sin eater who couldn’t be a wifey, maybe that’s why the doctors are bypassing me. maybe they cut me out of kai’s chest because in their heads they were making kai more cis, less trans and i was ruining their procedure. 

it’s obvious something went wrong. but no one is telling me the truth.  

“when can i see him?” the nurse on the other line,  on the other side of the wall  says not yet. i hear them from where i’m standing without the phone. 

end-exit-escape, 9PM 
a nurse takes us down the elevator after i’ve been briefed. 

i never thought i’d learn about how my lover could die in an elevator. the nurse turns to me: “wanna hear a fun fact?”

i exhale, still hopeful, still excited for some relief. “yes.”

but then he starts talking about a famous musician, about how he died from anesthesia, and my excitement flatlines into a 24-hour time lapse video of mold. i stammer, “uhh, i don’t think so.” to be honest, i didn’t even know that’s how the musician died.

the difference haunts me: that musician requested this drug from his private doctor, mostly to help him sleep. kai never got to choose.

“yeah, propofol,” the nurse continues, cheerful as a mortician. “it’s an anesthesia that stops your body from breathing. it shuts down that part of the parasympathetic nervous system and your lungs deflate without assistance. that’s how he died!”

my lungs tighten as he speaks, a strawberry field fruiting wrath underneath my kn95 mask. he’s still going, still chuckling, “they hooked up your boy on a machine that breathed for him. that’s what they put him on. it’s supposed to help with making sure the body doesn’t move at all. so when they do the procedure the…”

the body stills
the lungs deflate
and nothing moves
willingly.

the nurse says goodnight after plopping kai’s waking corpse into the front seat of our chariot home.  i look at my lover who is barely hanging onto the waking world. who was put on a celebrity death drug without his consent. who is being wheeled out from a near death experience. but nobody is calling it that.

blood flies home

kai,

at your top surgery ceremony there’ll be a week of feast. and 8 hours before fasting you’ll speak your alive-wishes from your grave-body. none of which will include Tom Kha, which is what you’ll ask for when we arrive to our Beacon Hill home on the day you are shoved out of time. you don’t like soup, but you don’t remember that.

there’ll be a procession and the vetiver will burn for 12 hours. Your lil sib, trans elder sam will chariot you home from the hospital. he takes a cupids arrow and points love at anyone who dare fuck with you.  you’ll have a year of being with the red wood forest. you’ll meet your Lola’s Lola, who is buried within a balete tree. you’ll fly higher than a red-eye hawk, maintaining distance because you can. we will be in sanctuary, you will have every healer you need even the most far away and impossible. we will spill all that mistouched surgery blood back into the Tongva soil, the place that held you first,  back to the Andes where the elders have told stories of you hundreds of years ago, imagining you even now, and in the orphan homes where the trail of home gets lost.  from there the citrus, the sycamore, the village will erect for your refuge. a refuge you will share with all that are ready to unbecome themselves. you will dig your hands deep with the roots and know what it is to be held back. you will flourish like an ocean’s grief. you will count the impossibilities on your descendants’ cheeks and tell them how they’re miracles because they’re from a starline of miracles. you will bury yourself in the land. we will watch you reclaim the matches of professional tennis you were never afforded, because you are gender impossible.  when you’re ready we will bring you adoration with visibility that protects you. you will be big, swoll, with muscles and with a sex appeal that is revolting. a body that revolts. you are already a revolution. 

bloody heavens,
tu asawa

kai and Moonyeka sitting on a tree 

k-i-s-s-i-n-g!

first comes love.

first love comes. 

kai cleared his calendar and canceled a date because he was going to see me later in the day. or actually, because he didn’t want to. i was busy doing honey jars, turning spirit heads, offering them pili tree resin, smoke, and red thread to be knotted and burned. once i was done he’d call me a lyft, with the offer to make it a two-stopper. ria got in the car with me. kai lives in beacon hill, my favorite place on Duwamish land.  he promised to make me a home cooked meal. it’s been a week since he politely dropped in my dms. no thirst. no trap. 

“yo you are absolutely incredible. your performances tonight literally blew my mind. 

i wanted to reach out to say hi and also ask you if you would be open to sharing about this print again? i’ve been attempting to reconnect to my mother’s culture and it feels very timely that this piece of art has found its way into my home.”

i am a portal, a dragonfly ride to his mother’s land.

being a portal means i’m far enough to make teleportation useful.  being a portal means i don’t know how to kiss without becoming a ghost of wrath. i got good at protection. so when i fell in love, i promised to protect my newfound love from myself.

kai’s accidental spell was putting a print of me on his altar. mine was brushing my teeth in his bathroom with a toothbrush that said “top care” on the handle. i was in between places and trying to not escape new ones.

when the crescent of my mouth met kai’s hot-wet-stone cheeks, terror shone on my face with an unstoppable giggle. i became all sandcastle, gone without a trace. the only thing that did not dissolve was a pearly gate that had nothing to gate anymore.

i can’t make out for longer than 2 minutes. i know for sure i bonked my front teeth against his, as if i had braces. i was looking straight out of an episode of jane the virgin meets ugly betty if it had put on the altar a kaleidoscope image of me as an aswang, adored more than feared.

being a portal means i don’t know how to fold in on myself and get sent back home. good thing home will kiss my mouth, tilt my head, get me lit off of saliva. 

tongue drunk.

happy one month post op.

i can’t imagine the way your chest aches or how the euphoria makes everything hurt a lil more. if i could do anything i’d find every way a crack can be filled with gold. you’re golden. there’s not a single way to eradicate the sun. on a day there’s more bills that tell our people to hide, i know a love letter is not enough. i’m writing one anyway. for everyday you’re scared to go outside,  i hope you remember what it’s like to feel like flying.

Epilogue for being two years old:

TODAY YOU RETURN HOME AFTER RETURNING HOME.
TODAY, YOU PICK UP YOUR FIRST BODY LOVE:
TENNIS RACQUET
GAME, SET, SET MATCH.
TODAY YOU KISS ME  IN A CITY 
THAT THREW YOU OUT

WE ARRIVE IN THE HARD WATER
SKIN THICKENED BY SMOG
SOOT CHILDREN EVERYWHERE

WE ARRIVE WITH A RAINFALL OF  REPRIEVE 
ROLLING GENDER BETWEEN US
THINKING OF MAKING ILLEGAL CHILDREN
GAME.SET.MATCH

LOVE-ALL
IVF, DONORS, SURROGATES
OF ILLEGAL GENDERS
OUT!
OF $10,000 BATHROOM USAGE
OF ILLEGAL AIR BREATHING
FAULT!
HOW FREE WE ARE WITH SCALPELS 
TURNED INTO SHOTGUNS
MADE FROM BILLS BILLS BILLS

US BABIES WANTING BABIES

HOME IS GONE BEHIND THE EQUATOR
HOME TELLS US IT MISSES US 
HOME IS OFF YOUR CHEST