This selection is included in NonBinary Review #7, available here.

You would shape worlds with your indignities.
Yet I am not what you would make of me,
A useless care unwillingly consigned.
For in the harsh constraints of your designs
I braved to be the “her” in hero’s first;
I am the rhythm, she my open verse,
This child I guard as though she were my own
With honor at last sanctified in stone.

O grave, thou hast thy victory;
Such triumph have I shared with thee.

The child’s good fate impelled an end to mine
Yet my light lives wherein two lovers shine;
She has grown up to see your motions fail,
While he has named the hero of his tale.
This ghostly soldier fought throughout her woes
Past fear, past pain; toward sacrifice I rose
And thus fulfilled the dream that I loved best:
To join my loved one, hidden and at rest.

Your hand was not the death of me.
I left you when and how I pleased.

Idynne MacInnes is a Minneapolis-based writer, cartoonist, and illustrator. She has been published most recently in Literary Mama (“Meat,” February 2015), Quantum Fairy Tales (“Fungus,” summer 2015), We’Moon 2016, and Roger Morris’s “Brain Waves.” You can find more of her work at idynne.com.