In the front seat
of a very normal
Toyota I’m changed:
you're driving.

Later, the sun:
us sitting in it
like I never do,
exceptional light
beside your held
tooth.

That anonymous river
I’m changed to notice
as you, unfastening time,
god need not
help us prophesize.

Not kept but felt
deeply the night of us
photographed
with you on the bass:
the bass being poetry,
music’s your face.

Once I was a saint dancing, small and emptied of choice. Future was a train track spread out before my boxcar body. Empty yourself of doubt and become a vessel for god, they said. Empty your core and control your pirouette, somebody else said. Emptiness was my first job.

As a kid in my leotard, I got to dance class on my own, hair slimbed back in a bun, razor scooter shooting downhill. The ballet studio was tucked inside a mall with shops that didn’t seem to sell things you could buy. Six days a week for twelve years I walked through that early two-thousands compound and the only businesses I can recall are the dollar store and the 711 from which I’d steal chocolate milk, eventually getting caught. There’s a picture of an eleven year old me in ballet gear behind the cash register with the sharpied note: BANNED THIEF WATCH OUT. Eloise called my bounty sign cowboy and I held the second syllable so tight drifting home that night my scooter became a horse. Could being a kind of character override the Rules of gender? I wondered.

All the dancers arrived at Windsor studio from school in different coloured uniforms, the religious ones, like me, in kilts, extra visible. But once we changed into our leotards, nobody was that different at all. And there were no boys yet so we didn’t seem like girls.

From the beginning my body offered much of what ballet demands: elastic joints, concave arch, the turn out of french doors opening. But for core strength I struggled, making all the exciting moves as hard as they are. Still I felt betrayed. But not being the best is its own muscle. My motivation emerged out of humiliation as a real possibility, a condition emphasized by there being something so naked about ballet. The skin tight uniforms. Nothing but bodies mattering. Marlowe would go around the room and adjust our positions. Her palm, my back. I liked the feeling of her touch because then I knew she knew I was there. And because every wall was a mirror, we multiplied. I learned how to control there being many iterations of myself in a single room.

Some nights I’d stay late in the studio, find an empty room and shirtless I’d dance to Chopin. There were no real tits yet so I could be anything alone, moving in front of the mirror to an emotive violin solo.

As soon as she could sign me up for ballet, my mother did. She didn’t want me spending so much time with my brother, his friends, cut those boyish urges out my mother said.

Funny how ballet is where I first learned to bind my chest.

When tits arrived, under a kilt I’d wear my tightest leotard to school, not knowing why it felt so good, not yet needing to know. It felt like what prayer felt like. Not penance.

And even though I quit when I couldn’t handle who I had to be in a leotard anymore, faking an injury to do it, dance is not an art that requires anything but my body, it can happen anywhere. The best part is you can’t take it from me.

This fool proof system for posterity against my own tendency to lose physical things constantly comforts me the way religious faith once did. In my grade seven confirmation ceremony, I stood beside my best friend Rachel. The archbishop blessed her as St. Teresa of Ávila, patron saint of the sick, her chosen catholic name. Next it was me: St. Zita, patron saint of lost keys. Rachel is a nurse now. I lose my keys still. So I got a set tattooed to my wrist. I’ll never be locked out again I said to the artist, laughing.

I like the feeling of being tattooed, the attention of it, physicality shifting with a pain reminiscent of deep stretching. Flexibility being a different kind of strength than holding planque. You lose it quick, but what you could do just hibernates below the surface, can come back with a little focus.

And I recycled that catholic tradition to expand the transness of me, chose a new first name. The final syllable clicks instead of sings. Key is the name’s last three letters, but it’s not why I chose it.

For the first time in half a decade, I bought ballet shoes. Even found a leotard that has these shorts on the bottom and feels pretty good on me. I see these pieces in my closet each morning.

Interrupting my friends I ask is this anybody’s rock.
And everyone laughs harder when they see I’m serious.
That was the beginning.

Maroons, speckled pinks, nearly a whole theory of deep orange:
the stones Flynn and George collected for me,
a dirty sunset story from Colorado
to New Mexico.
Daily hikes. A road trip
with their dad: the promise
since childhood. Selecting the best
stones at each day’s end,
each day found purpose, Flynn said,
and was something
to talk about with their Dad.
At someone else’s birthday party, they beamed
tossing me this dirty sock full of rocks.

An hour long bike ride, flat, from the city
through bog to beach, lakeside. A shore of old bricks,
broken cement, construction trash: the Spit.
Time has broken
down the discarded materials
into something beautiful, not quite
sand. It's hard to make it sound
beautiful but the birds chose it
as sanctuary, and foxes mate there,
as proof of its beauty. There was one summer
we rode the Spit weekly, M and I. My bag
always heavier on the way back, full of
rocks. After I told M we couldn’t be
anything anymore, at my door they left
a note held still by a rock from the Spit:
the perfect hole pierced its center. I still have it.

Californian granite, blue pectolite from the Atlantic,
natural chalk found in Bristol’s beach,
slim heavy shadows carried from Portugal:
I feel oracle
as friends arrive at my door with their findings.
It’s no longer personal
but communal, this archive of touch.

I moved out of my ex’s carrying the archive
in a doc martin’s shoe box, feeling pathetic
because I had cheated
and the shoe box suddenly emphasized
that it matters how you carry things.

100 meters out to sea a sign protrudes: ROCKS.
Sipping clam chowder, misty P-town afternoon,
the scene’s so David Lynch I snap a pic, throw it
up for my world to see. L sees
and for the first time in four years,
she messages me.
She was in P-town last week
staring at the ROCKS sign
from the exact same spot as me.
Even had an eerie feeling sitting there
she would see someone in the streets,
but didn’t.
Got her message this morning,
5am, sun not yet risen,
L’s text ends with: I forgive you.

Grade one. My first detention. A whole month.
I was turned in as creator of the recess game
called war. We split into boys vs girls
and threw rocks at each other.

This ex-ring fighter friend of mine spent an hour in a cave
choosing a striped taupe stone, its countershine ruby-wet.
from the Isle of Skye, where fairies are known to have been,
and he felt them there still. I never had imaginary friends
but my sixth summer alive I saw a fairy
in my dead grandmother’s rock garden.

After I moved out as soon as I possibly could,
my father moved to Volcano: a town run by reclusive artists
and anarchists. Most of them, settlers on stolen land,
like my family, on a run down flower farm, ten years inactive.
My father’s plans to renovate the warehouse into
a home, never realized in those five years.
Instead we slept in canvas tents inside a former greenhouse.
Before leaving the sheep farm of his childhood
to work in cities with cement,
my father dreamed
of being a geologist. The active volcano,
in the town Volcano, often takes land back, lava streams the streets.
My last visit before they packed up, every evening
my father and I sat in the small plot of garden he had tamed
within the larger wild he had not managed to.
I never thought I would see a volcano in my life
when I was a kid, he said to me as I was going to bed.
The garden glowed around him then, maybe volcanic nutrients
pulsing the moment. There’s a curse for visitors who take
volcanic rocks off island. I told my father this. But
I don't know if my father listened.

Last month the archive of touch lived on my broken heater.
Not much better than the shoebox I realized writing this.
Today they watch me from a shelf, the rock garden floating.
Some find it funny but others stop and nod, this looks right they say.
By accident, I made a shrine still growing.

Our first night in P-town, my girlfriend and I foraged handfuls of stones
in the pink seacove sunset. We gasped with increasing drama,
egging each other on, trading our favorites, briefly feeling
what it’s like to be rich. It’s a little game we play.
You can have that one if you like it so much,
what if I trade you this for that,
oh well go on take this one then,
no, no, I want you to have it.