becoming Missy Matchstick becoming Missy Matchstick

Before The Paint (Alice, Annotated #2)

At the edge of a carefully tended world, a woman watches beauty, breeding, and silence work together to conceal what should have been named. The poem uses Wonderland’s garden to examine class adjacency, Catholic shame, and the cost of growing up as the wrong kind of flower in a family that prized appearances above tenderness.

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becoming Missy Matchstick becoming Missy Matchstick

The Wrong Teacup (Alice, Annotated #1)

At the edge of a crowded tea table, a woman searches for the hidden rules that never seem to apply kindly to her. The poem uses Wonderland to render the ache of masking, overstimulation, and being made to feel out of place in rooms that insist there is no room at all.

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becoming Missy Matchstick becoming Missy Matchstick

First: The Belt

A thoughtful poem about trans becoming, where Orion serves as both symbol and shorthand for masculinity, recognition, and self-authorship.

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becoming Missy Matchstick becoming Missy Matchstick

A Rosary in the Glovebox

Written in the tradition of George Ella Lyon’s “I Am From,” this poem assembles a self from rosaries, winter, food, nursing, and inheritance, tracing the sacred and bruised geography of a life.

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“The palms still stand. Crisp silhouettes against a hazy sky, tall as guilt and just as thin. They line the driveway in symmetrical grief, as if trying to offer shade to something that can’t be cooled. Everything here is sun-bleached and wind-chapped, held together by spider webs and memory. The breeze tastes like eucalyptus and the air smells like dust that used to be skin.”

Noncompliant: A Sunglassed Elegy From Camarillo