Andie’s Place observations of gender dysphoria and beyond

This is your lover’s hand –
fingers in hair teasing out your day
or disentangling dreams.

It is broad as your memories,
strong as the love you ever felt,
gentle as on a sleeping child.

This is your lover’s hand –
light on smooth breasts, loving
them, that announce you woman –

still adoring the swell and curve –
a hand that sees with night vision
and treads so lightly on your skin.

This is your lover’s hand
and, if not quite the hand of a man
or of a woman – how is its touch?

When these lover’s fingers
part you, probe you, decide
which thigh to walk before the other,

travel, and return with gifts
of touch and tenderness to
speak to you only about love –

which part inside of you,
head, heart or belly, reads:
‘this is my lover’s hand’?

Speak to this hand –
tell these fingers at your face that
you have a lover’s hands too.

*

This is your hand – let it love
where once it found coarse hair
and is pressed – on absent breasts,

on your lover’s lace and silk – inviting
an attention you never imagined
when welcoming their hand on yours.

This is your hand – let it inform
your heart, your head, your belly –
not your sex, your gender, parts –

no, not those necessary parts,
those instructions to your eyes
that reassure your nature.

Just let this hand in giving
share with the hand that loves
and simply touch, uniquely.

As lovers do.

From the new collection Realisations.

See also: The truth can sting for thoughts on choice, love and emerging as transgender.
2012 © Andie Davidson