Lady @Lady@cat.family

@aescling i just said femme in the poem though because it made a nice æsthetic contrast with tom

@aescling anyway if you want an objective external opinion about how an educated stranger might interpret your gender, i would say devoid of context you read as a somewhat closeted somewhat young trans ♀, so take that how you will

@aescling that's a mood

@aescling would you like to

@aescling

its tiny teeth, so smol, wherewith
yr petting arm to nom;
the cat of flame, with æsc its name:
so femme and yet so tom.

as one example

@aescling add another couplet whose final line rhymes with “nom” and you have a neat little ballad stanza

@aescling this couplet is almost in common metre (a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter). but the first foot isn’t an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). adding a determiner easily fixes this, so you get :—

those TINy TEETH, so SMOL, whereWITH
yr PETting ARM to NOM

which is a little more regular and expected

@aescling probably should have started this with an unstressed syllable, like “those tiny teeth”