My desire to change

my body so that I might locate

it is a minor one comparable to

What a body is

a burnished

shell a fertilized egg

a small piece of

wall you’ve come to love

Dysphoria is a feeling with

a fee attached to it

a feeling trained not to

look down the front of its

body with no shirt on

Rocket Caleshu is a Los Angeles-based writer. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts, where he was the inaugural Truman Capote Literary Fellow, and a BA in Africana Studies from Brown University. He received the 2016 Black Warrior Review Prize in Nonfiction. He is working on a book of essays titled Whatever, and a book about love co-written with a clown.