Drinking the Gender Fluid: a Zuihitsu

by Quinn Rennerfeldt

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I explain the dream to my therapist: I found a large, purple chrysalis affixed to a suitcase, abandoned on the sidewalk. She says it is a container for my gender transformation. The chrysalis, not the suitcase. When I hear container, I think tupperware. Less sexy than the sleeve in which a caterpillar melts and resolidifies into a winged thing. But sturdier. A container that women share. Tupperware parties, saving food we made for the next day. I have lost many tupperware containers to my children, who take them to the beach and fill them with sand, salt water, the husks of dead mole crabs, picked clean by the gulls. Days later I surreptitiously scrape the beach into our trash can and soak the containers in hot water and dish soap, but they still smell, a damp, fungal funk, and so I throw them away or save them for the next visit to the ocean. If I think about it long enough, I suppose the ocean is a site of transformation. Hermit crabs moving shell. Whale fall, a giant taken down, its feathery blubber picked clean off its bones for weeks or months. The evolution of flying fish that straddle the water and the sky, or mudskippers, toddler-clumsy on land. The way I changed by moving close to the ocean, the grit of the sand rubbing off the old layers of who I’d once been, my body shedding by flake and scale. I move with ease between different casings. I sink my body into forms that feel like home. Maybe my container is less chrysalis, more intertidal zone. Buffeted by waves. An anemone — sad floppy sock at low tide — coming alive with fingers of pink and gold when submerged.

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Quinn Rennerfeldt is a queer parent, partner, and poetry/prose writer earning their MFA at SFSU. Her work can be found in Cleaver, SAND, elsewhere, Salamander, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog and The Pinch. Their chapbook demigoddess semilustrous is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She is a reader for Split Lip Magazine.