On the Fluidity of Gender in Flotsam

(An ekphrastic imagining)

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On certain days, I am disparate
      fragments, washed up on the shores
of humanity; my limbs and torso,
      unclassifiable as natural in origin,
my heart, hidden in sodden detritus, like a matchbox
      thrown overboard, adrift and finally ejected
from the tongue of the sea on some shoreline, trodden
      flat by feet more sure than mine.
                                                     Where my hips should hinge
                                               to thighs, commanding movement,
                                                     there is only an abraded
                                               rupture, and dashed between them,
                                                     the gouge of a cleft, like
                                               a claw-mark, or the burrowing of
                                                     some unidentified species
                                               of mollusc; bilabial folds of flesh,
                                                     (perhaps with primitive teeth)
                                               armoured by its calcified shell.
This is not a face my mother
        could ever love—I remember as a child
how she terrified me, claiming she could see
        already the devil’s spoon, growing at the end
of my right arm, instead of my hand,
        because of what I wrote in my diary.
                                                     On [un]certain days, I
                                               hurl my right hand, palm like
                                                     a tarnished spoon, far
                                               from my body, disowning the father
                                                     it crudely shapes out
                                               of memories, falling from my head
                                                     like moulted feathers
                                               of migrating birds—unmissed, left
                                                     behind on wintered coastlines.
Because of where he found
        my hand that night, too far
under the bedclothes for
        innocent repose. I was only trying
to decipher my contradictions,
        to fish for other possibilities,
lost in my inland sea.
                                                     On certain days the hereditary
                                               shadows this body casts are alien,
                                                     indecipherable, growing
                                               tangles of tentacles;
                                                     I do not recognize myself.
On [un]certain days, I fear
        at birth, my mother flung me from her,
crying to the world to sever
        our connection, my umbilical cord
like a frayed wire; and she,
        a circuit burnt, because I was both
too much and not enough to bear.
        Still, its doppelganger juts from my belly,
like a phallic phantom limb—and I
        am always trying to electrify the world
out of complacency in dualities.
                                                     How she warned me Hell
                                               was an endless banquet, where
                                                     everyone was eternally
                                               hungry, because Satan gave them
                                                     spoons; the handles longer
                                               than their arms, so they never
                                                     reached their mouth, and
                                               being sinners, they didn’t think
                                                     to feed each other.
On certain days, when the sands
        of uncertainty shift beneath me, and
I am folded in on my salted secrets,
        you collect my flotsam parts together,
cherishing me in your palm,
        like a child who believes everything
found on a beach is treasure.

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Melissa Coffey

Melissa Coffey (they/their) is an Australian writer, editor and spoken word performer. A former theatre director, they’re fascinated by the wilds of nature and the human heart. Melissa’s poetry and fiction are published in Aurora Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Last Girls Club, Crow’s Quill Magazine, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. An appreciator of surreal and avant-garde aesthetics, Melissa contributes regularly to Exist Otherwise. Forthcoming works include fiction in an anthology of feminist reimaginings (Improbable Press), prose poetry in Antithesis and The Ekphrastic Review’s 2024 print anthology. They’re working on several chapbooks and a novella.

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• On the Fluidity of Gender in Flotsam