"Screaming Girl" by Matilda Gertrude Paulin,

a poem.

Young pretty bodies, swirling.
She is somehow gliding.
Elegance inside of her
shimmering glaze of vodka.
She reminds me, of course
something is missing.
She is searching for her man.

The first act:
Behind me, her dress
slapping a question.
I am in a suit
I have “the right hair”
Without study, but perfectly on cue. I turn to play him.
Boos and hisses!
I send her screaming.

A school dance is a full cast.
Does the screaming girl get a name?
Sometimes in movie credits she’s just called “Screaming Girl”
All year I’ve been a good butch,
Tonight, I try my hand at trans.
How lucky, this decapitated rose fell right onto my character.
Heavenly tucks and folds, wilting
all the way down.

Oh no! It’s a comedy?
Funny enough, this is a haunted house.
These kids teased a terrible story out of old stones.
The rising curtain let it be shown,
no one swept the dust in Jesus’s new castle.
The cracks in the walls were there when we arrived.
Looks like devoted wrists painted our backstory.
Tonight it worked, I feel blessed.

Judith, if all of gender is a performance, then why couldn’t anyone in any clothes ever send me screaming?
Bad Actors?
If I refuse to turn the book upside down,
Then look, then see: I’m the priest! Not the altar girl.
Cause I’m a whiz with open book tests.
Oh, and also Judy, what gender is the trickster?
In the house of God, he walks among us!
Meanwhile, Carl Jung is very seriously dead.

The last act:
In an ancient American field,
this new one is telling me her story.
I’ve been to church so many times,
I remember the ending.
Mary Magdalen, looking for him
Beautiful eyes damming up old tears
The heaviest of doors is wide open.
She’ll fuck a ghost until she’s dead.
This old hat should have sent me screaming.
Instead, I picked the moon’s flowers and waited
for an angel to suck my cock.