Woody Woodger

Woody Woodger

is a trans, pan, anarcho-commie currently living in Washington, DC. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, from DIAGRAM, Northern New England Review, Drunk Monkeys, RFD, Exposition Review, peculiar, and Rock and Sling, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her first chapbook, postcards from glasshouse drive (Finishing Line Press) has been nominated for the 2018 Massachusetts Book Awards. You can find her bi-week column Pre-Op Thot on COUNTERCLOCK Magazine where she serves as Blog Editor and Poetry Reader. If THAT wasn’t enough (and it was) you can find her on Instagram and Twitter @lovlyno1.

Cunt

“No respectable woman
says that word,” mom says.

She opens a shrimp
like a wet book

when all the ink’s
pooled in the spine.

She hates Cunt
because it sounds icky, Andy (my dead

name), and no one needs
to hear it. I ask

what is it people need
to hear, and she throws the tails

down the drain. In the pot,
shrimp tussle for space

but settle. My Cunt’s
in escrow.

My Cunt will be buff, manila.
Vulva hand picked

from one of our many options.
She’ll divulge herself

to me. mom starts
on more shrimp.

“Mangled the meat
but it’s edible”, she says.

“Doesn’t have to be pretty
to appreciate.”

Season 1 Ep. 10 Sailor Moon

“i bet even a cookoo in a cookoo clock is angry” -Sailor Moon

what if i had a waste like that?
all the time i’d spend
twirling like these quaffed, peace-sign snatches.

but us foolish people. Our tummies fluctuate
every episode. Some tortilla chips, some friend you are.
if you were a real fan
you’d catch all their mistakes.

we smoke on the porch
and talk about the moving we have to do.

i wanna scream into the void
and get the moon to do my make-up      shit.      automated luxury,

fully. and truly, i want the power to bless
my underwire
and sail it glowing
into this week’s leviathan.

Ami and Usagi shop this episode
and all I can think is a girl’s date
would be like magic right now.

Usagi: “i’ll show you if you show me”
(The girls exchange magazines)
Usagi: “AW! THERES NO PICTURES”

Ami: “EW! THERE ARE PICTURES”

Our real life friend sasha says she watched the one where Scooby
cut someone’s heads off
or    no, cut the heads of someones off
or    someone’s’ had their heads cut off

sometimes i see you when your hair boils
and fume lines rake

the white from your eyes.
and your headache appears
as a neat little box. oh     we have to move.

Love, i’ll be your dumb bouncy bimbo bio baby bun head.

Ami: “we can’t waist any more precious time waiting around here.”

what if we did? we’d stair into each other’s impossibly watery eyes
and those glossy bubbles that follow
us like gnats. on the screen we stand stiff
and only our mouths move,
but so predictable—oval, triangle, oval, oval, a brow
twinge, line, and then the fat sweat dollop
impervious to gravity.

In A Station Of the Hetero

loveless for the growing rose between my thighs;
cute pink petals cloistered tight.

With My Face Shaved, the Barista Thinks I’m a Girl Waiting for Her Boyfriend to Pick Me Up

Honestly, the barista knows me better than myself.
Let me be more honest: my Vans

look like they just passed through a skaterboy’s
gastro-intestinal system
and I’m his lacquered little hole.
Let me be too honest: I look like a middle schooler who read

online somewhere that boys will think you’re smart
if you wear tweed while quivering the bottom lip. On the trip

down to earth, god gave me the Schick razor
that almost killed Isaac and said, well, go for it.

Told me if I was to rake my leg a little too rough,

I might learn how to remove all my veins in one pull.
The same way I imagined with dead leaves, but never

quite could. Or maybe that was just my inner
monologue. Who wants god as their Monologue? But isn’t my insanity the cutesie

kind? Let me justify it like this, my Dead Self: when you stick
Your sacred pre-op ballerina-thumb
down my throat, my gut plays the 80’s

drum track we both like. I once saw a fragment
of catechism peer at me through the earring hole

in the mirror. Dead Self, you were beautiful, a little.
Elfish, my friend Liv called you. Ears like knives. I will miss my chance to save
you. It will be the only regret I will remember. But there will be boys for that.

The barista comes up behind me as I watch the window

to ask if I’m ok, honey. Do I have a ride?
But then, more closely now, she clocks the homily seedlings
beginning to pepper my chin, the scratch-post paradise I still can never seem
to salt. Then she glazes
over my brow ridge,
then logs my shoulders, my collar–something
knobby and ceremonial, perhaps sent back from Mars,
I watch her think.

And then she stops. Say, oh! Sorry, no. It was her mistake.
Says, I’m sure I’m fine.

Listen ladies, there’s never been an accident. Not once. Everything
really is astrology and bath bombs. In this café,
there’s also a woman
and I can see she has Alzheimer’s just by the way

she blinks. Clamped to her husband’s shoulder,

she walks out the door like she’s got deer legs
after a pedicure. I hope one day
that I learn how to stumble out

into this tire-woosh apocalypse like that with someone,
Anyone. I’d have after-hour edible eye always and walk like I was unkneeded
at some point, and always! always! suddenly

in some fresh realization, always

needing anyone to point to a car by the curb
and say yes, this one. This is the Accord

we came in, and yes, you have an Accord and YES, I’m sure,
I’m sure I know the way home. It’s you you should worry about.