Direct Address

You sit at your desk, starving, trying to transfer $400 from your savings to your checking account
in case the Massachusetts Health Connector refuses to pay for your next 90-day supply of SPI and EST,

even though you checked, more than twice, more times than you can remember or try to
forget, stoned last Friday night, clicking back and back to your Patient Portal to prove to yourself

that the insurance you had to switch to—after your father became head of household, after your mother
died suddenly enough to leave you two with no money and no life insurance to cover the cost of cremation—

fully covers the hormones you’ve been taking for free for the last year and a half, clicking your prescriptions
to read and reread the confirmation page, then closing your Chromebook—and knowing you must have mistyped

the name, brand, or dosage of your prescriptions—you reopened the window, your Patient Portal
glowing in the darkness of your Friday night dorm room, the weekend a field stretched out in front of you—

no phone calls, no 90-minute holds with Planned Parenthood or ConnectorCare, no automated texts from CVS
telling you We can only hold your prescriptions for three more days, and you, too afraid to pick them up—

you sit here, waiting to receive the six-digit verification code you need to change your password
to your PeoplesBank account, because you’ve repeatedly misremembered the slight variation of the same password

you’ve been using since 5th grade that, you think, no-one could possibly guess at this point, since no-one you trust
has known you more than a few years—though you wonder why you’re so convinced your partner is trying to hack

into your PeoplesBank account, because your second self loves you so much she’s promised to pay
for your hormones in case your insurance suddenly refuses to, even though both of you know

there’s no reason why your Patient Portal would lie to you, even if this six-month
disruption since the end of your mother’s life-long death has proven

your thought spirals right and right again, even if they were warning you
about losing your MassHealth coverage to a shift in your household’s poverty ratio

that your father—whose worked construction jobs since the summer he was 17, who dropped out of high school
three weeks before graduation because he didn’t have the courage to show up to three weeks of summer school—

couldn’t fathom himself, so it fell to you to wade through the waves of paperwork that crashed at his desk,
to find new insurance for both of you, to forge his signature with his permission, to call and click

away the mess of your mother’s unsudden death that you were practically unprepared for, though
your stubbornness was strong enough to surprise even you, even in the blankness of your immediate

grief, when you felt nothing as you exploded out of her hospital room in full-body scrubs, a bright blue mask
and a clear plastic shield for a face, screaming I can’t go back in, I can’t, and you didn’t, you drove

back up western Massachusetts to your Friday morning linguistics class, where you aced an exam on conjugation
you can’t remember taking, but you could feel how much it felt like a Friday, the leaves were burning

the way they burn every year, the slow wildfire making its way down New England that, you knew
damn well that afternoon, your mother would never see again, even though she’d seen it enough times to will herself

into a life-long starvation staved off by sips from the bottomless whiskey bottle she hid under her kitchen table,
which you sipped after she went to bed on school nights, sharing shots—mother and daughter, mother and son—

with the same woozy hunger you swear you can feel as you sit at your empty desk, copy-pasting
the six-digit verification code you need to log back into your PeoplesBank account, to change your password

to the slight variation of the password you swore you had, just in case someone hacked into your account, just in case
your new insurance plan refuses to pay for the hormones that keep your body yours, choosing HRT over ERP,

EST and SPI over NOCD, knowing you and your father can’t pay for both,
knowing prescriptions will always be easier to pay for than hour-long exposure sessions on your Chromebook,

twice a week at worst, twice a month at best, your therapist of three years reminding you not to react
to your thoughts with belief—though there you were last Friday, four months without therapy, stoned and opening

your Patient Portal over and over again to prove to yourself that your hormones will be free this summer,
like most women’s are, like anyone’s should be—though you know your beliefs won’t get you anything

but angrier as you set your password to the password you knew you had, as you transfer $400
from your savings to your checking account—almost a fourth of the $2,000 left over from your farm job last summer,

your first summer on hormones, your last summer as your father’s son, your last summer as your mother’s son—
and suddenly you’re starving again, though your stomach is too empty to be full, it’s already full

of a hot blankness echoing the emptiness of the orange cylinders on your bathroom counter
with the name and address blacked out with Sharpie, the ink on the label still shining through, even though you tried

to ration your last 90-day supply of SPI by splitting your 100MG pills in half with a steak knife, not just because
you were afraid you’d have to pay for your next batch out of pocket, but because those horse pills made you

so tired, so hungry, so dehydrated, that a few months on the highest prescribable dose didn’t make
the possibility of your tits hurting again worth it, which they didn’t, of course they didn’t, they haven’t

ached since last summer, since the month you locked yourself in your room with a six-pack and a notebook
and you watched as your paragraphs broke into lines, and your lines revised themselves into sturdy couplets and tercets,

and you knew there would always be something inside you to save you, from that slight tightness in your throat
that did nothing but squeeze a few tears out of your eyes, from your blank surprise as you watched yourself think

I’m actually going to do it, from your secret all-night drives the week your mother faded in the hospital,
the yellow and white lines flashing under the front of your car, counting the half-seconds filling the small room

burrowing through the deep fields of western Massachusetts, which you knew you’d always need
to see again, no matter how tired those doses made you, no matter how tired

the thought of paying for them makes you, no matter how tired you are of the morning you turned 21,
walked up to your father sipping a Heineken on the couch and said, to a space beyond his eyes,

I am your daughter, because you’ve just transferred $400 from your savings to your checking account
two months after he told you he’d never help you pay for the prescriptions that took his only son’s name,

even though you were only anyone’s son when you were skipping two meals a day and saving a cup
of black coffee for the third, sometimes stealing sips of whiskey from your mother’s chair at the head of the table,

knowing she’d fallen asleep too drunk to remember how much she’d left in her bottle, too drunk
to see her son lost in the tides of his own body, grabbing the bottle’s neck to keep himself from drowning

in six inches of dirty water, coating his throat in a slow burn he swore was so soothing
even then he knew it was dangerous—it took him six years to stop burning—

and even now you wake up some mornings with your throat carefully bruised by your other pair of hands,
the same mornings your tits ache the way they did when they used to bloom, your partner’s full breasts

pressed against your tiny ones, aching with a pain as new and old as anything your body recognizes as pleasure,
your hands opening and closing in the half-dark, echoing each other’s touch until your bodies merge

into one long, slow sensation burning through the days between each other’s touch, through the blank
fear of forfeiting $400 to a CVS that could find you enough coupons to pay for your SPI and EST

if you make yourself look hungry enough—fatherless enough, unmothered enough, clocky enough—
if you speak with a tightness in the center of your throat, if you quietly cry above your bright blue mask.

Robin’s poems have appeared in 2River, Passages North, Poetry Online, and Up The Staircase Quarterly, among others. She studied writing and literature at Hampshire College and lives in New York.