I am fluid in these moments
neither masculine nor feminine
neither hero nor victim
neither camera nor film
and in them I can finally breathe
deeply, fulfillingly
at ease even in the cacophony
of technicolored swirls.

This should not imply disaffection
with the wake-a-day world
my role, my gender, my sex
more that these roots never
took kindly to pots and seek
ranging fields to spread my leaves.

To believe humanisticly
that form follows function
is to believe we can be
cut into the same cloth
or that dough dies
without the cutter.

We are evolving, like a waltz
we step back before forth
too slowly to save every shoot,
not always in perfect time,
so I will hold tender dreams
as ever searching
for mother’s garden.

Tamara Fricke is the 2010 co-winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award of the Academy of American Poets and is previously published by The Lyon Review, Meat for Tea, Attack Bear Press Poetry Vending Machine, Whisper and the Roar, We Will Not Be Silenced, and has been included in a number of compilations.  Her poetry chapbook Our Requiem was released in 2014.  She lives in Springfield, MA, with an ungrateful cat, where she writes grants professionally.