You can take the nature out the boy, but you can’t take the man out of nature
Even when I’m knee-deep in ink and altar smoke, my roots are still hiking trails, crinoid fossils, and the hum of wind through stone.
Poetry is resistance when you write like Poeaxtry
Every line is protest, prayer, and proof that I’m still here trans, loud, witchy, and unerasable.
My gender is wilderness: untamed, honest, and thriving in the dark
I wasn’t made to be trimmed down into a label. I’m a forest fire and a bloom, both.
Spell bags in one hand, survival in the other
I’m a living altar: grief and grit, ritual and rage, healing and hustle.
Former silence, current storm
I used to swallow it all. Now I speak, write, scream, and conjure without shame.
Born from shadow work, built to shine
The ghosts that haunt me taught me how to live.
Soft things with teeth
Gentleness doesn’t mean weakness. I know how to bite back if I have to.
Can write you a love poem, hex your ex, and hike a mountain before lunch
I’m not a contradiction, I’m a constellation.
But honestly, I can’t be wrapped up in just one line. I’m too many things. Too full of lives survived, of magic made, of poems burned and rewritten.
So if I had to choose?
Unapologetic trans man. Poet witch. Rock hunter. Truth-teller. Born to be wild… not just free. And always me!
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I’ve overcome fears that don’t scream loud but echo. Quiet ones. The kind that pull up a chair and settle into your bones.
I feared that becoming me would cost me everyone, and for a while, it did. I feared my voice would never drop far enough for the world to let me be. Feared mirrors, waiting rooms and ID checks. I feared that no matter how hard I tried, I’d still be some ghost caught between versions.
But I transitioned anyway. I started long before most people understood. Seven years before she died, I was already halfway home to myself.
And my mom… she didn’t just accept me. She showed up. She took care of me after surgery. Made sure I had soft blankets and real food. Talked to nurses when I couldn’t. Sat by my side with her steady warmth when the world felt too heavy to hold. She loved me as her son, not after time, not with hesitation, but with her whole heart.
I thought that meant I’d have more time. That she’d be around to see the rest of me grow into the man she already believed in.
But life doesn’t ask for timing. It just takes. Losing her wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was slow, then sudden, and then everything was different. The fear that followed wasn’t about being trans anymore. It was about being here without her. How do you keep going when the person who provided unconditional love is no longer here? How do you continue when those words are no longer spoken?
That’s the fear I never knew how to name, learning to live without her.
But somehow, I kept going. I carried her voice in the wind. In old voicemails. In the way, I still make tea like she did. I kept writing. Kept healing. I didn’t stop transitioning. I just started becoming someone who was able to grieve and grow.
So what fears have I overcome?
Plenty still reside in my ribs. I’ve stared down identity loss, transphobia, surgery scars. Then the bottomless grief of losing the one person who held it all together. I’ve found home in my reflection. I’ve become a man she’d still recognize, and be proud of.
And I learned that love can outlive the body.
That becoming isn’t something you do until someone dies.
It’s something you keep doing, because they loved you enough to help you start.
Everyone I’ve ever met… is afraid they are not enough, but what happens to those who are too much? Time and time again I’m reminded of my extra… baggage.
I’m lost at the intersection, and it always comes to this.. My confessions my obsessions are far to intricate. What once enticed often intrigued you, was the same thing that chased you away.
I never meant to be too much… to loud… to extra. I never meant to have too much baggage… to many relationships failed… To. Much. Trauma. I never meant to be too much. I never meant to be. I never thought I wasn’t enough… It always comes down to the same thing.
One day I will learn to water myself down, Empty vodka bottles at the age of fifteen taught me this: No one will ever know the difference. One day I won’t be too much… you won’t need to chase me with coke… you won’t need to water me down.
I will hold back the tears until I choke. This isn’t a lesson I have never spoke. We are all starving for a connection, except me, Lost at the intersection begging to stop my confessions.
I’m learning to make lemonade where my lemons are. If that is all life is going to hand to me.
I will make something from all the lessons I learned and continue too. No longer allowing myself to continue brooding over what should have, could have, would have been.
No matter what life throws my direction I can only elevate above the shit. I will continue to be the man I was raised to transition to.
Forever serving you my lemonade in different flavors of emotions painting a mural of my life in different fonts.
Hopefully, those who resonate won’t be so alone after they read m vulnerability, every page I print covered in it.
The moment I started writing for survival is not one that would be difficult to pinpoint, especially if you know my story well. I’m not sure if I can even claim that story as my own. It was always more Arielle’s to tell; the kid experienced the hell of living through it. It is simply a memory we share. I no longer carry the trauma it produced.
Let me paint you a picture: I was in 7th grade, around the age of twelve, a straight A student who loved sports, reading, chorus, and writing both short stories and poetry. I had just started hearing the murmurs in the halls, that boy this and this boy that. I had to hold my metaphorical vomit back. When did this happen? We want to ogle all the boys, since when? Not I, and then I realized my best friend and her thighs. This is not normal, and I am already weird so we can just pretend, go along with the boy trend. Fast Foward 7th grade Christmas break. This is the last place for you to turn around before the moment that changed me, and my reasoning for creating art through words.
Okay one of us is at least still here… I had to go to the house of my enemy for most of the break. I remember feeling defeated. My mom could not stop the judge from sending me to what I mistakenly thought was the worst possible layer of hell. A bitch for a father who leaves me on porches for days and days, each weekend, each year (check out my poem still) or just lies to my face either way he’s more than know for abandoning me. Jake the fucking snake. Or the stepmom straight out of R.L. Stein. But they were not even close to the worst, and I would soon learn. I packed my bags and headed to Jakes apartment for what was supposed to be a few weeks visit.
For once I really wish my evil stepmother was there this night and he had just lied about their goodbyes. We went to Uncle Heath’s the evil stepmother’s brother and somehow snake’s best friend. He had a wife, a bug infested house, and a bunch of dirt covered kids. The worst thing in the house was not there because of him. Enter the devil himself at just 17 with teeth sticking horizontally out of the vile thing known as his mouth. He’d touch me under the table with his toes through my pants in the kitchen, while his mom bragged about his large member claiming it put her husbands to shame. I tried and tried to tell, pinch me with his toes until i was quiet from fear. Would hold me down as soon as the adults left out of there. He would touch me all over under my clothes, always stopping before “taking it too far” as if he hadn’t already with a child my age, as an almost man.
I wish I could say that was the end. I begged and begged every time to not have to go to Heath’s but hadn’t told on him. He’d growl at me and threaten to end what life I did have. Jake was usually pretty smart on the pervy way some guy’s minds work…I wonder why. anyway, he’d always tell the devil no when he would ask to stay the night with me. Until that Christmas Eve. The Devil asked and my fucking “dad” said yes knowing it was only us two and now three so my brothers wouldn’t be there to hear anything. My dad got us to his apartment building told devil man to stay in the living room and to leave me be. Jake the snake was always good at one thing sleeping. The devi snuck in and raped me in my brother’s race car bed. I didn’t think it would ever end, he slapped me around, threatened my mother, and left out the door. Although I watched him get up, I never stopped feeling his weight crushing me.
I waited up all night for Jake to awake, and when I told him what happened He slapped me in the face, called me a whore, sent me out the door to the stoop to wait for my mom. This was Christmas day in 7th grade. I sat on the porch while it snowed and couldn’t shed a tear with my Christmas presents in piles unopened laying on the ground. For years I wish I had never said a thing. I told my mom at the age of 19. As sad as it is to say the reaction she had, the emotions, the pain finally told me everything. To my dad I never meant anything. My mom went after him of course. He lied and said I never told him, and pretended he was going to press charges all those years later, and still never did. Still closer to the man who raped his daughter than he ever was to her.
This story gets a happy ending finally. The devil went back to hell where he should have always stayed. And my brother thinks he’s a good man, and wonders why I don’t talk to any of them.
Thank you Mr. Matthew Mitchell. I sure hope you do better to protect your daughters than supporting the likes of a rapist even in death. To circle back around I started writing to escape the vicious rape at the hands of an almost adult, who was introduced to me as my cousin. This need to escape through writing grew as did I. While the size of the things I was writing to hide from began to shrink. I may be passed a lot of feelings this used to stir but I’ll still piss on this man’s grave.
Much Love Forever to everyone but my father, Axton N. O. Mitchell @Poeaxtry_
