Cast

Rivka Clifton

Rowen, my nesting partner of 10 years and a handful of genders, makes a project of casting my tits. Every few months, I go to their studio, or they bring their life-casting materials to our apartment. I disrobe and wait for them to mix the two-part silicone into a green slime. They slather my breasts, my collarbone, my ribs. I feel it harden.

Once the silicone dries, Rowen layers plaster strips over me. I feel the excess water run down my torso. When this outer shell has hardened, we peel the materials off my body. We look at the hollow depths of my reversed tits, how the shadows pool in the places where my nipples are perfectly captured. 

I am surprised at the size of my breasts—even though I am experiencing second puberty at a breakneck speed, their growth is barely perceptible. Only in photos do I see the difference between how I looked and how I look. It is the same for my face.  

I show a coworker my passport photo. It’s from 2019. A week earlier I had posted a side-by-side comparison of it and a particularly cunty close-up, asking Instagram if TSA would give me trouble. To my disdain, the votes are nearly equally split. Am I really still so masc? I wonder. I post the results and inform the world that if a trans person asks if they look like their pre-transition self, just say no. A few cis-het friends respond to apologize. I make light of the situation—how I love to see people squirm. 

Without hesitation, when my coworker sees my passport photo, she says, “Rivka, you’ve changed so much! It’s hard to track because we see you all the time.” She calls the person in the photo “pre-Riv.” I’m grateful for this kindness. 

At the beginning of their project of life-casting my breasts, early in my development, Rowen makes a large, ceramic sculpture. It is an amalgamation of cow udders and several types of human breasts. They paint it in black and white cow-print. They do this mere nights before they leave for a ceramic conference in Ohio, where they will show the piece. Rowen informs me my tits are on it—they point them out. 

The piece sells. Rowen tells me the collector is well-known and that his collection includes several artists who have influenced Rowen’s practice, including Kiki Smith. I think, Wow, my tits will be next to a Kiki Smith. 

Though Rowen has made several more molds of my breasts over the course of the three years I’ve been on HRT, I don’t know if they’ve cast all of them. I think about my potential doppel-boobs. I think about Alfred Stieglitz’s intimate portraits of Georgia O’Keefe, how he displayed over 300 nudes of the modernist painter when she was still new to the New York art scene. Since 1921 when Stieglitz first showed the nudes, the question of exploitation has hovered over Stieglitz and O’Keefe—where is the line between muse and exploited femme? 

Rowen tells me the molds will chart my progress; the implication is that this project is partially for me. In some ways, the molds are for me, but I don’t feel that way about them. I think of plaster or ceramic copies of my tits hanging in some small, white-walled gallery. Whose are they? I wonder because I know they won’t belong to me.

Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) and Wrong Feast (Baobab Press) as well as the chapbooks Action (Split/Lip Press), MOT, and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines. Reach Rivka on IG @cutratebreakfast and X at @yeaheyesyeah.