Prologue
When men die, they are reborn as women: it is their penance. To suffer as they made others suffer.
June’s past life was a brute: he left her a firm jaw and large hands and seven small bruises-turned-birthmarks across her arms and legs: little freckles of male residue.
Beautiful people fill June with rage: June is not beautiful: June is brutish: she has this unspoken fear that she looks like her father.
I wake in pieces of children
The child I won’t have, the child I won’t see again
Today I am both less and more myself than ever before
And tomorrow I will be neither the same nor any different
But I pray that someday, someday I might be you once more.
In the morning light, she is a young boy again: tapping inside the cavern of her left ventricle: he beats out his pulse: steady soldier: he is full of rage, stirring June’s blood into plummeting apologies that pool in her bed sheets: a young boy: a clot of blood: a body inside: apologies for his pain: his sex: for being a man and for being a child: a boy in the night time: born and dead by dawn.