BODY IMAGE Poem: pretty lady, by Marin/Spencer Madden

My favorite color is pink.
It’s always been pink—
the sweet light pink that my mother wears that makes her even softer in my arms,
the bold hot pink of the long nails I have just learned how to grow without biting,
the deep dark pink on the first flag I wave for pride.
Pink is warmth, pink is safety, pink is home,
but until senior year I said my favorite color was blue then purple then black then red then
rainbow then nothing, I don’t have one.
But the truth is my favorite color is pink.

For the longest time, I lied, because
pink was girl and girl was weak so pink was weak and I wasn’t weak.
I wanted to wear long, flowing dresses that I could spin in until I saw stars but
dress was girl and girl was weak so dress was weak and I wasn’t weak.
I wanted to be a princess who fell in love with a merperson but
princess was girl and girl was weak so princess was weak and I wasn’t weak.
I look at myself now, in a pink princess dress, and I am still not weak.
But I’m not always girl, either.

My dad doesn’t understand what genderfluid is, and I don’t know how to explain to him
that I’m still his little girl, I’m just also
his little boy and his little person,
and sometimes all three at the same time.
I feel like I’ve already pushed him far enough, taking five years
to teach him what “asexual” means and how deeply I embody it,
and I worry that asking him to further expand his mind
might crack it open and leave it spilling all over the pavement.
So I let him say, “That’s my girl!” when he’s proud of me and I
leave my two names up on my dorm room door even when he comes to visit,
my little act of bravery leaving me skittish and fumbling for my keys.

My mother knows me better, correcting herself, looking confused
at the idea but smiling at me all the while, letting me buy whatever
weird shit I want from Hot Topic. She goes from “baby girl” to “baby person”
with an apology, and I love it, but it still hurts inside, the fact that she has never
called me “baby boy.” I want to be her “baby boy.”
She told me once, when we were talking about me and the jumbled mess of colors inside of me,
that I will never look like a boy.
And she sounded so sorry when she said it, and she’s right, okay, I know it, she’s right—
I will never be the kind of person who can pass well enough to be called “sir” at a gas station and
I think about that, every time I read a story where all the nonbinary characters are
androgynous and I’m sitting here in my pink princess dress, wanting to be called
a king.

I’ve been thinking so long about why,
whether it’s the fact that all my favorite characters are boys
or the fact that I hate having a chest and a period but at the end of the day
I’m not sure it matters why, because since when have those born in the right bodies had to
explain why they are who they are;
still, I look at myself in the mirror and I realize that I don’t hate my body.
I just hate the words people default to calling me because of it.

I use all pronouns, I mean that, I do.
But that means I use all pronouns,
so don’t just fall back on girl because it’s easiest,
and don’t grasp onto person because it’s safest,
because people are not made to be easy and life is not made to be safe.
Please, call me boy, just once in awhile, just every now and then, even when
I’m wearing a pink princess dress.
Please, make me
a pretty lord, too.