I Never Felt Comfortable in My Own Skin So I Made a New One

I was on a walk when I was struck by the precarity of the gender that wore me,
which moved my matter, wrote books, and fell in love. as a child, I scoured 

the forest for brittle cicada skins abandoned on trees. husks present differently now
a pair of nylons caught in the thicket, a beak surviving its decomposing bird, 

a mural of George Floyd with a purple cock spray-painted on his beryl cheek.
among these discreet mutilations, I pull a line of thought through flesh 

where a misled margin slept. I was uninhabitable before I snared a man
for his hide. I was not unlike the skin of a drum thriving under a stamina 

that made music of me before I split. you wouldn’t recognize me now
if you saw me in the trees, played out, scattered to the undergrowth. I took a life 

and returned it to scale and membrane. I foraged a life coated in plastic
and mud from the highway overpass. it reeked of wheatpiss and it was mine.

Copyright © 2022 by Xan Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I was listening to the Watchmen soundtrack when a line struck me like it never had before: ‘I never felt comfortable in my own skin so I made a new one.’ During the first few months of my medical transition, I was in constant wonder at my own skin thickening, insulating me more from the cold, and drawing me out onto long walks across the city. On these solitary walks, I had no one to commune with but the detritus and foreboding infrastructures I encountered.”
—Xan Phillips