I lo…
I didn’t reject you because I doubted
Because I doubted you felt rejected
On my soul, I swear I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember
I just didn’t want to let that define me.
You are skin and bones and nails
And hair
And when you weren’t it was an odd kind of liberty you couldn’t wrap your head around
You loved your body but you didn’t want to let them call you names.
Maybe there’s a sort of freedom in broken language
The ambiguities
That invite conversation instead of assumptions
I redefine myself
By putting identity on the shelf and allowing ‘me’ to be more than an idea
I am woman
But that does not define me
It was never a rejection of you or your perfection
But of words too limited to express it
If ‘her’ means silence and passivity, I defy her
To mean victim, submission, weakness and frailty
I refused to believe that a pair of chromosomes could break me
I need a new word for this double kind of beauty
Black radiance
Dual, sensual, instrumental
ornamental
Sea of life – of breaths and nests and womb
I’m more than enraptured by the glory of you
I just need them to know there’s so much more to this. than that –
Masculine light and feminine black
Blend together to conceive pretty little shades of gray
I was never more
“Her” than when I adorned myself in “manhood”
and revelled

Leyelle (she/her) is a queer African American and Dominican author and artist from Maryland, USA, raised in part in her ancestral home of the Dominican Republic. Author of the Turnill prize-winning short story Rain Dance and the novel Damsel in the Red Dress, her works often dig into the depths of cultural and familial influence on who and what we become. Pretty Little Shades of Gray was written about her struggle between transitioning or accepting herself as a different kind of woman. Website