Emma Loomis-Amrhein
from up on the bald the trail ahead is a series of fading, chopped-up curves,
like hair on the kitchen floor, cut in rage and frustration and heartache,
and like a good backpacking trip, there is the immediate regret of letting the moments fall away.
i want to tell you it is a funny thing to go bald
just not on the days when i look in the mirror, perplexed,
and remember that to most i am a wrong thing, to other queers, even other trans women.
i want to tell you that balding is a funny thing,
but more often it is sadness, and rarely,
glimpses of beauty.
Hiking among brush and grasses, without a tree around,
my gaze tumbles down the slope, across the creek, and up the other side,
several mountains over, fading into the sky.
Every peak around is stark and treeless, bald and beautiful,
mountains among mountains, with the best views in the entire range.
Emma Loomis-Amrhein is a trans naturalist who is particularly enamored of birds. Her poems reside in Hematopoiesis Press, Recenter Press, and are forthcoming in Barnhouse Journal and Sheepshead Review. Her work explores poetry, phenology, agriculture, and sculpture, and examines historiographies of body and place. She lives with her partner on a small farm in southern Ohio.
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