my dick is made of flowers:
a trans re-memory

GISSELLE YEPES

Audio: Gisselle Yepes reads.

today I hand flowers to everyone I live with / that has died first / I place
roses in between my legs / how we freshen our home te extraño you
how we learn / to bring flowers / to our dead / you a body part I miss
I’ve never felt / you thorn my thigh / there is something dying t/here
at our altar where t/here / are many offerings today / I kneel
at our grave with flowers t/here are petals / already dying
like a warning / thorned / it is not what I want / and it is / I want flowers
packed / to make a garden / you see maybe / you touch / what is growing
maybe / your fingers return / to us wet / or cut / with thorns crawl
ing / our skin like a ghost t/here we’ve touched / this soil
together / I’ve learned the sound of a ghost / screaming / and we
moved into each other / like she wasn’t / wailing /or tearing / into skin
how a question will go unasked / and fingers thorn / reaching
to open a coffin / how I died / how a body is a home we keep / making
and now there is a grave / or an altar / that drips wet when she /
her ghost screams / please come we hungry / we want / your offering

Gisselle Yepes is a 23-year-old Puerto Rican and Colombian storyteller from the Bronx. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University, where they have received the Bertolt Clever Poetry Prize and the Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing. Gisselle’s “Not an Ode to April 22, 2019” won Missouri Review’s 2021 Poem of the Year. Their work has also appeared in Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets, and voicemail poems. Gisselle holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, where they earned the Winchester Fellowship, the Sophie and Anne Reed Prize, and the award for Connecticut Poetry Laureate. They are an alumnus of the Tin House Writers Workshop and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Originally published May 2022 in poiesis 3.1 by w the trees.