Self Love

by Annette Covrigaru

---

You feed yourself blue and call it sustenance, shelve decades of drunk Coke bottles and call it
collection, scribble stars on your thighs and call the blood decorative. In the kitchen on Long
Island, the wicker chair’s frayed strands stabbing the back of your knees, your mother looms
over the lacerations like a shaky ceiling fan, bellows a breeze from her dour lungs. You were
made, she says, out of love, and you, of course, believe her, not like god, because that is just
another name for absence, but like every trans child or your grandmother’s laughter. Yes, you
must always believe it, this origin with teeth and a hunger for sunlight.

---

Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender american-israeli writer and photographer. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated Lambda Literary Fellow and Holocaust Studies M.A., their poetry and prose have appeared in Peach Mag, Voicemail Poems and Lunch Ticket, among others, and are collected at annettecovrigaru.com. Annette is the author of the chapbook Reality In Bloom (Ursus Americanus Press, 2020). They live and roller skate in Brooklyn.