In this month’s issue of ​Rolling Stone​, there are pictures of you wearing a blue pillbox hat with a peacock veil draping over your face. Ankle-deep in English waters, encased by stone embankments, the powder blue schoolboy shorts barely covering your thigh tattoos perfectly pleat in what little crease comes down your leg. Harry, I was born during a spring where all of the apricots cracked open & there were no guts inside. Sometimes, I joke to myself that the heatwave of 1998 lapped so hard against my body that it beat the Y-chromosome out of me. Sometimes, I envy how you dress so fluidly & wear salmon- tinted overalls with nothing underneath, & wrap a yellow ascot around your neck, & pass for whatever you want without fearing your body will be the end of you. I am slowly being eradicated. My gender is a tattooed naked body with a meadow of syringe welts or graves or dahlias across the stomach. I know that no ink can possibly make whatever I am manly. My skin hasn’t even been properly slept in. A stranger on Instagram with a Y-chromosome mansplained my condition to me, based off of what a Wikipedia article told him. Someone at the post office called me “ma’am.” A man swished the word “faggot” around in his mouth & spit it out at me in the breath of a catcall disguised as an apocalypse on the street. Surely my people are going extinct because of this. Once, when my parents got the news that my DNA didn’t say I was a boy, my father watched a pink glint of sun break through the Cleveland Clinic window & veil my face, & said ​what can we do to prevent this from getting worse.

Los Angeles was once so dark it wore stars on its chest, the sky like passionfruit sizzling under an indigo heaven when the Rolling Stones built sounds out of oceans for their Let It Bleed album at Elektra Studios on Sunset Boulevard. Inside those sounds lived the matriarch of rock ‘n’ roll, Merry Clayton, & constellations poured from her mouth like shards of glass & turned into violets & blossoming hemlocks & binary stars.

In the middle of a November night, you could hear Merry’s frozen breath hanging in the cold air, curlers in her hair, months deep into her pregnancy, every croon turning brittle like a yellowed bathtub. Her voice, like all of our mothers’, wailing, it’s just a shot away, in the same way our stomachs lose a layer with every scream. I always thought, when the apocalypse came, Merry’s voice crack, the one we all know, would be what unquiets the dying world, but somewhere in-between the shard of noise sculpted into glass & the black & blue sunrise the next morning, Merry buried a child she never met, each ash a scale of crystal earth clinging to a hungry & grieving body, her throat sewing back the hurt like a zipper stretched into four long minutes.

What ignorance we all have to listen to a song & not know the story behind it. I never met my grandfather, but the family says I’ve got his same voice, same face, same spine curve like a reclined barber chair. I lick decade-old dust off the bottoms of Revco Drug pill bottles to eat his rheumatoid arthritis off my mother’s bones.

They put his body beneath a headstone with coordinates I can’t memorize, but I know the topography of the way my grandmother would run her leathered fingers across my face when the cataracts in her eyes shimmered my body into his shape. My mother drives me hundreds of miles across Appalachia to hear family tell stories of him just so I can create my own version of his voice because she can’t remember. She bends the sun to catch the color under my eyes like the light once did in his. Merry Clayton carved a whole life out of a song she never listened to. This is what it’s like to inhabit the space of someone else’s grief. To hear your own voice echo off the walls.

Matt Mitchell is an intersex writer from Northeast Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Boiler, NPR, the minnesota review, The Shallow Ends, and Passages North, among others. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021).