Dara Goodale

Dara Goodale (they/she) is a Romanian-American non-binary lesbian, poet, and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. They write about mental health, grief, and identity.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

molting

CW: gender crisis/body imagery, bodily injury

the hairstylist looks at me funny

when I tell her how short

I want it I don’t care—

just get it off

it keeps weighing me down

my waterlogged pelt;

gender roadkill

as I walk home I remember a girl

her face like my ghost

in the salon she says: “just a trim,

my boyfriend likes it long”

I doubt that I was ever a girl, word

foreign on my tongue:

something in the mountains

of this body feels all wrong

perverse as a broken arm

when skin bends around bone—

whose hands composed this piece

without my permission?

I want to be malleable nebulous

imprecise in baggy clothes

fluid ill-defined I want to change

with the weather steel muscle

against ample flesh

that yields to touch I want to be

firm uncompromising

deny my name—am I allowed to want?

can I coexist within

this mortal frame?

maybe I have always been more

than natural design greater than

the sum of my parts

I open my jaws wide

and swallow secondary characteristics

I hold my breath; I dive deep—

tomorrow I will wear a suit and tie

and from behind

with my newly shorn fleece

I’ll be nearly perfect

in defense of escapism

CW: child sexual abuse, addiction/drug abuse, self harm, religion as a metaphor, disordered eating

I. my body

untouched suspended in time

if I stop talking I’ll cease to exist

quantum erased someone please

observe me

confirm that I’m real or

pour me a drink before I remember

the child I drowned wolf cub dull teeth

running naked through forest unaware of the body

God how do I grieve me?

easy:

down the neck of a bottle

in some pill some powder

just something to

take the edge off

take a leap off the edge

and wake up in stranger’s beds

II. I can’t stop

going in circles I was never good

with directions I repent pant whine

bare my throat dumb-tongued beast

if anyone’s there :

let this mean something

my scars miss the knife half-sober whole-hungry

now that I know what it’s like

what do I do

with all this flesh it wants

whatever is closest I think there’s a hole

under my rib cage that demands

poison

I look for god in plastic rooms with plastic walls

I need forgiveness but punishment feels the same

when my eyes are closed

the truth: this

desire consumes me

the joke of it all: I know this already

either

starve out the sickness

or swallow the sky you can

go home if you like but then,

all this sensation