Rewriting Feminisms: Trans Women Poets from the League of Canadian Poets

From WCLJ Managing Editor, Darcie Friesen Hossack:

Trigger Warning for introduction: violence against trans community

In April of this year, during National Poetry Month, I was invited to Rewriting Feminisms: Trans Women Poetry Reading. Generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets, the event showcased the work of Trish Salah and WCLJ poet Jennifer Wenn. Rewriting Feminisms was initiated and designed by Diana Manole, who organized the reading with support from Feminist Caucus members. Diana also curated this collection for WordCity from a panel of open mic readers, whose works were also read aloud that night in April.

In that same hour, that evening in April, as I listened to brave women read lines excavated from their own experiences, in a world committed neither to their freedom nor their existence, I received a news alert. A trans woman, Rasheeda Williams, had been found murdered in Atlanta. A 17-year-old was later arrested.

We present these poems, these poets, in the hope of creating a safer, more loving and accepting world.

Rebecca Gawain
(photo unavailable)

***

I hope when she looks at me 
Glint of recognition in her eyes 
She doesn’t bring it up
We don’t have to talk about the terrors
Our shared dating pools
Who hates us most
I don’t want to know your twitter handle
I don’t want to go to your potluck 
Don’t tell me about scramz or hyper pop
I hate that Swedish shark 


***

Time does not pass 
Between December and December next 
I still see you with the gleam of sun in your Eye 
Boots against the ice, fur trim of your coat
I’m sorry I didn’t make it back from Christmas 
That I weighed my organs this Easter against my sins 
And was found wanting 


***

Set a table for three 
Leave an empty chair for memories 
Yours, not mine 
You absolve yourself with gifts
Time an arrow forward 
Present me like a grotesquerie to your 
Cousins, god parents… 
Your new girlfriend mocks you
She speaks in hushed suggestions
You’re paying the bill 
Anyway

Rebecca Gawain is an emerging poet living in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. She is fond of the work of Notley, Mishima, Bourdieu, and works on a collection of short stories about Taste, drawing on her experiences as butch trans woman. She can be reached at gen_writes@riseup.net.

Madi Lentine Johnstone

A List of Concerns
1:
A lover discovers I chose not to take
hormones and leaves me,
believes me a liar
by omission. Omits me
from their story.

2:
I find someone who loves me
anyway, she says, but my
stubble slices her thigh, and I
disgust her.

3:
I ask a man to bed. I make-believe
he’ll need me, enjoy himself
inside me enough to stay.
He “stealths” me and leaves.
At a clinic, I wait on a bench
hunched over my hands. My fingers prune
with sweat as they crumple a pamphlet.
My thumb sponges up ink
from the letters H.I.V.

Two men on the far side of a windowpane
break stride. They crumple like the pamphlet
laughing: What a dog!

4:
My pregnant wife is filing for divorce
because I’ve been too needy after both
my parents died, within months of each other.
I lose my job at U of T. I lose my three
homes. Tearfully I fulfill
outreach engagements, touring local schools
begging parents Please
love your children.

I give what seems
a hollow talk now, evidencing
my sentiments with names and dates.
Foucault means I don’t know
where I got this idea, just believe it.

Technology of the Self, I say.
I let it hang there.
All selves are technological.
Gender transition is a natural way
of becoming. I prattle on
about robots and God,
pathologized neurologies, disabled bodies…
We are what we make of the parts we are given.
For God’s sake, love your children.

5:
In a sun dress I stand in a tractor-beam of sun
that tries to abduct the dust from my kitchen.
I bathe in my
vapourized self, swing my hips like a censer,
billow my scent through dripping-wet air.
Red daisies I’ve embroidered on my dress
waft pumpkin, guava, soil, tea, and milk.
The scent of the real thing
steeps through a wire mesh screen
overlooking a garden. I peer at the pollinators
my children made in school:
foam and sequin butterflies bejewel
an open kitchen window.

The air drips wet with steam from stewed green lentils.
Red daisy dew condenses on my brow,
trickles
through hairs above my lip and enters
my mouth like earth and blood.

I sing to keep the steam from blinding me.
My breath digs out a trowel-shaped space
for my face. In the universe
my song plants a seed.
I have planted the world
in which I swing and stew and sing and breathe.

The sun shines through my dress, plants
shadow daisies on the floor. I
become more and more.

My children unlock the door and enter the foyer
with an unexpected guest, who cranes his neck to spy
What’s that stench? He’s never tried lentils. Tugging off shoes
he’s never untied, he says Why’s your dad in a dress?
He a fag or something?

Or something, I say. My children redden.
My eldest grabs the offender.
Not today, I say, with my eyes.
I don’t need a hero. I am my own.

That stench is good for you, I say.
You’ll eat it. You’ll like it. And if you don’t,
you can walk away.

Madi Lentine Johnstone (They/She) is a poet, aspiring novelist, and linguistic anthropologist from Toronto. They recently came out as trans, and they’ve been writing furiously to make up for lost time, to rise to the challenges that hid them from themself. Madi’s interests include robots, cooking, and disco dancing.

Misha Pensato
(photo unavailable)

after the family

the stars look down on their reflections
in little blue pools blotched across a sphere
an impossible distance from their business
of swinging round the planets in a fiery waltz

down here, I work on the farm commune
milk yams for the gals’ daily doses

before we didn’t practice astrology for personal insight
more as a reminder that the stars had not yet gone out
now we look up at them every night
read just by pointing

the roofline is leaking and storms
get a bit worse every year

the future blinks

I see something shift behind the clouds
neither a plane nor lightning, but a faint shimmer
        circular movement
that my eyes were not trained to see



the girls in the waiting room go dancing

a girl walks into a clinic to be told she is a girl

a girl sits down at a bar and bursts into song
& then tears. in the bathroom, she strips off
the suit she is wearing, it is her high-school graduation

another girl sits down to join her

naturally, the too-cool indie kids who smoke Belmonts
and play in pop-punk bands depart the stage
as girls

the audience gasps in arousalencouragementhorror

the stage picks itself up and follows

a girl gives up reading other girls who say her body is a prison
or maybe a weapon:used against herself(?) she finds
better books about being a girl

a girl wears leather & rides a bicycle
& keeps a whip at her side
for fun(!)

Misha Pensato is a trans writer and activist from Winnipeg. She is an editor at Midnight Sun Magazine and is currently working on her first poetry manuscript. You can find her poems and essays in CV2, Xtra!, Briarpatch, openDemocracy, and elsewhere. She can be contacted at mishapensato@gmail.com.

Helen Robertson

Siren

We find our wings plucked —
Each feather a quill for another
To write their version of us.

“Look at the damage you’ve done”
They cry as we open our mouths;
Dash their bodies before we speak,

See our plundered smooth skin,
Say we’re of the sea, and craft theory
As to why we look how they made us.



Michelle Pfiffer | Catwoman

Hewn from a child’s understanding
The inspiration of gesture
Is their ability to find
A goddess to inhabit

Every girl told their pain
Is for their own tissue skin
Wishes to feel powerful
Despite the brittle armor they’re given

Which domain will be yours
Reinvention perhaps or rather
Survival — die as many times as you need
To shed propriety and expectation

Find the stitching of your skin
Unable to contain the whole of you
Each mouth a wound repeating
You are more than your hurt

Is it any wonder that you were the first
Goddess and gesture made
By that little girl interred
In the soft earth of boy.

Witch, bitch, and full-time disaster, Helen Robertson is a trans, bisexual, genderqueer woman, moving through the lifelong process of accepting how lucky she’s been; using poetry to excise their ire and sorrow — hopefully turning it into something worthwhile. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various Canadian and American journals including The New Quarterly, Olney, The Fiddlehead, and This Magazine. She was longlisted for the 2019 Vallum Award for Poetry. Their debut chapbook is available online at www.theblasredtree.com. They have had two chapbooks and several poems published as a member of the collaborative poetry collective VII. helen.robertson@helen-robertson.com Twitter: @HelenDestroys

Katrina Stephany

Touching the Stars

As a child I read
about shamans who could slip 
outside their bodies as the world
lay asleep.
        Wandering through the stars
          as their body waited below
            until dawn found them again
and feeling reunited to form.
Always return, they said,
or vivacity unboxed would be lost and alone.

How I longed to travel those same stars,
       to rush in pure ecstasy as I left the embodiment 
                                                far beyond,                                                                                                                          
                  to forget for a time the figure
                   I had learned to despise.
                            Each night I would try 
                                  as I lay in my bed,
                                      to allow my essence to be free
               and forever leave my casing behind
    like a corpse
 fading into forever.

                 Still, each morning I would be 
         once again trapped in the semblance
                 that was never me.
            Weeping rivers of pain 
        for the who I could not know.
      Eventually coming to find
    that the reason to return 
was the need to tell others of what I had learned.

Flying unfettered and free
can only be shared through
touch, sound, and sight.
The melodies I sang needed arrangement for speech,
even if the soma felt strange to the song.
       I had learned in the night, as the world lay asleep,
                      that my shape won’t define who I am,
                             and my soul teaches my body through me.

Katrina Stephany is a trans woman and writer who turned to poetry after she came out, to heal and re-discover herself. When not writing, Katrina is hard at work with her non-profit, Q&T Human Rights Education Consulting, and hard at play performing on stage, painting, and singing with the Rainbow Chorus of Waterloo-Wellington.

https://www.facebook.com/QTHumanRights 

https://www.instagram.com/qtconsult/

https://www.tiktok.com/@qtconsulting?lang=en

Sofie Vlaad

THE HOLE IN THINGS

“I am the hole in things, Bruce. The enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning.” 
                                              —Dr. Hurt, Batman #681

we are all familiar with the scene
an eight-year-old boy
loses his parents
because of some punk with a gun
it begins as it ends
with a bullet wound
the hole in things
the riddle with no answer
the joke with no punchline
the mystery that can never be solved
we know that Batman does not use guns
even when he does
in fact
use guns
a Conundrum
like the rainbow creature
dysphoric ghosts
of Zur-En-Arrh
in need of space medicine
or HRT
after all
isn’t Batwoman
the transsexual reflection
of Bruce Wayne
getting a sex change in Gotham City
is like donning a cape
and fighting crime
the narrative demands it
autobiography is creative writing
and we are all fictional characters
waiting for resolution
Batman is just as real as Elvis Presley
ideas in the mind of God
dreams in the fifth dimension
which is imagination
of course
how could it be a dream
when i hold the Bat-Radia
in my hands
a surreal souvenir from another world
a hole in space
some holes never close
some wounds never heal
two empty graves and a deadname
three tickets to Zorro
we leave the theater underwhelmed
having guessed the twist
it ends as it begins
our heroes always die
an eight-year-old boy
loses his parents
because of some punk with a pen
we are all familiar with the scene

 

STARFISH CONSTELLATIONS

my body is haunted
visions of gender
sexually remaindered spirits
Pollack might say

        i am six years old and         i am thirty-one years old and 
my ceiling is a galaxy          my ceiling is a wound
glow in the dark starfish            a hole that heals
 constitute its constellations      a place to store my memories

like Tiresias i provoke snakes
with intention
like Hermaphroditus i am Not One
but several
This Sex Which Is
beyond and across
a multiplicity unknown
transsexed and interwoven
like a tapestry made of silk
i am sixteen years old and
feverishly femme
my sex is a sickness
diagnosed at birth
i am twenty-four years old and
a mirror covered in dust
a stage for the haunted house
that is my body
a mirror staging fracture
fragmented ray of a starfish
7 years of bad luck
or
7 years a woman
my reflection reforms as
my equilibrium shifts
an estrogen powered operating system
my server is severed and
my code rejects binary
on the other side
i am alone but
from a single ray
a new starfish can grow

Sofie Vlaad is a poet and an academic philosopher based in Kingston, Ontario. Her poetry brings together diverse influences such as hyperpop music, radical feminist theory, trans poetics, and experimental/visual/digital forms of writing to create pieces that are loud, layered, and provocative. She is currently working on “GLITTERPUNK,” a co-authored manuscript that brings together abstract art and surreal ekphrastic poetry. Her twitter handle is @sofiephilosofie. 

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Bucharest-born Diana Manole immigrated in 2000 and is now identifying herself as a proudly hyphenated Romanian Canadian scholar, writer, and literary translator. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and has been teaching at Canadian universities since 2006. In her home country, Diana has published nine creative writing books and earned 14 literary awards. The winner of the 2020 Very Small Verse Contest of the League of Canadian Poets, her recent poetry was published in English and/or in translation in the UK, the US, Belarus, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Albania, China, France, Spain, Romania, and Canada. Her seventh poetry book, Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God, is forthcoming in a dual-language English and Romanian edition from Grey Borders Books.

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