“It’s unclear why the train didn’t stop.”

- Reece Oxner, NPR, November 2nd, 2020.

When I was a kid they tried to straighten my teeth with train tracks,

rogue wires and lacerated cheeks, that stretching soreness,

pain and interdental brushes chugging daily through the tunnels

between cemented brackets,

in an attempt to sculpt my smile

into something more acceptable,

something a bit less queer.

At about the same time

Maarten Struijs sculpted two plastic whale tails

for Spijkenisse station, completely unaware

that 20 years later they’d save a train driver’s life,

carriages caught by a fishy appendage,

cradling a disaster 30 feet in the air –

I wore a t-shirt once when I was feeling brave that said

“Some people are trans, get over it” and people kept misreading it,

they said “Some people are trains, get over it”

and at the time I thought they were wrong,

but now I wonder.

Mermaids are often used as a metaphor for trans bodies

and I dream for a minute that these aren't whale tails at all,

but the lower halves of trans people hiding top surgery scars

below concrete, hiding from the orthodontist,

frozen in temporal pockets,

pliers poised to snip train track wires while the votes in America

stay caught between counted

and disputed.

It’s a fact that I have transgender teeth, still crooked,

and I’m lacerated

by fears that puncture my cheeks,

holes that threaten to show me

in the places that aren’t safe to be shown undersea,

like the classroom I’m working in now

on a Thursday morning,

where young men talk every week about the grossness of queers,

and the things they’d like to do to women, and I shrink

to become one of a million indistinguishable plankton

swimming towards the maw of a whale,

until I hear across the water

that in America

Sarah McBride became the first transgender state senator,

and Mauree Turner became the first non-binary state lawmaker,

and that workers are finding a way to lift

a Dutch train

hanging 30ft in the air on a sculpture of a whale tail

just outside Rotterdam

to safety with a sling,

passers-by said they were cheered on

by a merman

with scarred cheeks,

with crooked teeth.