where there used to be wings

I think you can learn a lot about a person and their collective traumas by how they dance.

Like the Taurus that I am

(Rising)

I dance with grounded ass.

I can move my hips

up and down

side to side

figure eights undulating on the axis of my spine

but I do not move my arms.

My elbows cling like Velcro down by the small of my waist as my bottom half catches the beat.

One time on a fieldtrip charter bus in middle school, Seventeen Magazine diagnosed me as pear shaped and said I should only buy bootcut jeans.

When I was a child, dinosaurs were remembered as the ancestors of reptiles and amphibians.

However, my nephew will probably learn they had more in common with birds.

“My internalized racial superiority is causing my neck to tense up again,” I say to my lover, fishing for a back rub.

In my mind, rhomboids and trapeziuses pop out of my body in red, green, and blue, like the flat shapes drawn on the ninth-grade geometry white board rather than the living, fluid multidimensional sinew that are the very attributes of me.

My scapulae are trying to remind me that our DNA existed long before Patriarchy taught us to clip our own wings.

I am trying to remember how to fly.