Photo by Dave Grubb

My family asks me to try to deepen my voice,
sitting at the dinner table, my sexuality a tapestry
they are coming close to unthreading. I look
down at my plate, moving fishbones with my fork,
and beneath the mess of food, a print of hunters
in red coats chasing the foxes. In the forest
outside, animals are starting to yield to geometries
of winter, the grids of their antlers and torsos
hardening, tenderness steeled in the blood.
I am thinking tonight I would like to go out
to the forest and try to join them. I am thinking
most of my life I have wanted to give up to the snow.