self-portrait as fish
I stand at a closet of dad’s work ties & ask wire hangers if my gender hides here today. I imagine myself river of silvered fish, licking my chest flat. breasts biting into new gills. their toothed mouth, a keloid constellation healing into scales. no one asks the fish their gender. no one mispronouns him. they see a school swimming in synchrony. my gender, a simple shimmering. hard skull. flapping fin. whiskered -bullhead. I want to be a fish – that smells like my dad’s morning paper. ink lifting from the spell of 5AM coffee. my flesh the color of his silked collar blooming.
Audio: Isa Borgeson reads “self-portrait as fish”
Isa Borgeson (they/she) is a queer, mixed race, filipino american poet and community organizer from Oakland. In 2020, Isa was named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow by the Poetry Foundation. They have also received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Art Foundation, Crescendo Literary’s Poetry Incubator, AIR Serenbe, and Mesa Refuge. Isa’s poetry is influenced by her years organizing in the aftermath of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. They aim to use storytelling to document resistance across their homelands – from Oakland to Tanauan.