I want to be the one you run from. / I want you fast enough that I won’t see you. / I want you slow enough that you know I’m coming.

Poetry by Aaron J. Muller

I want to be the one you run from.
I want you fast enough that I won’t see you.
I want you slow enough that you know I’m coming.
It was once your footsteps that shook the house.
My little feet will cause earthquakes in your path.
My little hands will grab at your ancient ankles.
My little life will drown yours out.
 
In the faults I’ve plastered memories.
Strings attach them to my flaws.
Vague words in pen scrawled into the plaster,
They tell the story of my escape.
One of them is “sorry.”
I was begged to tell it to you like a catechism.
One of them is “thank you.”
I was told to recite it like the alphabet.
I know it forwards and back.
It makes up my language.
I speak in your pride’s vernacular.

Aaron J. Muller is a transgender author and poet from Kingston, NY, where he lives with his husband and their two cats. He has been published by Taco Bell Quarterly and Inverted Syntax, and is currently attending Bennington College in pursuit of his MFA in Fiction. He is a graduate of the creative writing BA program at SUNY New Paltz, where he won the 2019 Tomaselli Award for Creative Nonfiction.