Masculinity is the coffee we got at the coach stop on the way to Leeds,

because my ex was at uni, and your cat had died.

You said you didn't trust the sandwiches and regaled me with the tale of Margate,

summer 2025. Your step-mum thought she was dying,

and you shielded your younger siblings,

clumsy-limbed and wiry, the kind of teenage that takes root like a sapling with too-few branches.

You took them to an arcade and returned to the paramedics stood heavy-booted

crowding up the apartment. You worried, then,

Thought of too many late-nights and near misses where I had texted you,

and I texted you then, or someone did. You found the time to wire me taxi money and

took shelter with your father in the master bedroom.

Only afterwards did you discover it was food poisoning all along

Masculinity is an airport panini:

it was my last euro --

I gave it to you so you could buy your girlfriend a souvenir:

The last act of kindness I could give you,

before our lives were separated by The Channel and

a phone screen.

I ate an airport panini instead.

Chicken was cheaper than pesto, so I broke a six month stretch of vegetarianism.

We both promised to not tell my girlfriend.

I promised not to tell yours what you had told me,

and we could ache for freedom in the solitude of our own borders:

lines drawn on a map. Countries to control and liberate like gods,

Two seventeen-year-olds sat in a Charles-de-Gaulle Starbucks,

With the weight of a world to change on their shoulders.

Masculinity is a gas-station burrito.

The one I opened from the wrong end and spilled rice on my skirt.

I stuffed guacamole back into the tortilla,

using a snapped plastic fork. It tore more holes in it, and my lipstick

Stained the insides black. I thought it might be mould, and so I stared into ground chicken,

puzzled, listening to your dad talk about the queers and the BBC. ULEZ,

the feminists, immigrants and Gaza. I wondered for a second,

as he sat with his back to the muted wall-mounted TV high above the food-court like God,

or a surveillance camera,

(Sky News: another round of bombings on kids too young to speak)

if money had scrubbed the brown from my skin,

and adolescence had grown my hair out in front of his eyes,

dissolved my breasts into the flesh of privilege and Aston Martin sheen.

I have never been a man without woman.

To gas-station burrito, it was his girlfriend:

less ex, and more symbol, like purple hair and cherry cola, Subway,

bubble tea and exaggeration. It was pretending without acting,

a corny couples costume: sexy Daphne and Velma with the wig torn off,

a first-time-drunk first-time-heartbreak,

guts spilling like the pierced paper skin of a sandwich wrapper.

To airport panini, it was the imprisonment of it all:

a mental cage, pacing like the shitty tiger tattoo my roommate gave her brother.

As if the masculine doubled turned on itself and became the feminine, effeminate,

and femininity doubled still could not escape the former.

A cage of both, as if to be feminine was the worst debt to pay off.

As if partnership with its associates could be revered and reviled all at once, no matter how forceful:

a dying promise against harm that lies futile in the face of temptation, in the exchange of money

for a corpse.

To coach-station coffee, it was the cyclical pull of tide to shore:

a double-suffered life, a double-worn wardrobe,

a double-spoken script and played game.

Something gentle and violent, like the inheritance of things spoken about in private:

a suffering misunderstood to the men, taking shape in the cancerous additions to

breast, womb, heart and brain.

And the teenage pretending by philosophizing that it can be warded off by the masculine cancers,

palmed cigarettes and porn.

Manual labour and black coffee.