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Tuesday, July 2 was opening night for the Pride Week celebrations organized by Safe Alliance here in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The Coffee House this year was combined with a rock-painting and crafting event, which rounded out the event beautifully, and bumped up our participation numbers. Some of the crafters didn’t know there would be poetry, and they seemed to be delighted by the surprise. Huge thanks to the wonderful Jade Rachwal of the Labrador Friendship Centre for hosting, and to Mason Woodward for making the Pride proclamation (and also doing his own reading, plus taking photos). The event also featured the inimitable Nancy Gear, who led the poetry workshop at the Words of Warmth Literary Festival last month.
Pride and poetry overlap significantly for me. Both practices involve sharing some of the most embarrassingly earnest parts of our interiority; we’ve been taught to be self-conscious about them, but deep down, we really believe they are some of the coolest things that we have to offer the world.
Having recently decided to embark on literary writing for professional markets, I’ve been obliged to reflect on the wisdom of sharing anything online in the meanwhile. The outcome is that I’ve decided to follow the examples of movie trailers and book previews by sharing the beginnings of a few poems here, while reserving the full versions for potential future readings and publications. If you’re reading this post and it makes you want to read more, get in touch!
Here are previews of five poems, all on inter-related themes and written in my on-again-off-again favourite form, the ballad stanza, which I thought would be a fun unifying feature for the selection.
1.
I can take off all my clothes,
but I can’t remove my skin—
the buttons of my vertebrae
are too tightly twisted in.
Clothes, buttons, and exposure are recurring themes in this set.
2.
Shopping is selecting clouds
to drape across a sky—
to chaperone the sun,
obscure, and beautify.
Written after a trip to Thrifty Fashions in HV-GB. Thrift stores were a paradise for me during my social gender transition, because I could buy things cheaply and just re-donate them as my body changed and my tastes (and courage) developed. Also, Thrifty Fashions has strictly gender-neutral racks, which supports unselfconscious browsing, and the place’s whole vibe is super queer positive. This poem reminds me that vestis virum non facit, the clothes do not make the man; we make them, and we can shine in anything.
3.
I am a woman made of felt,
a certain shape and size,
manipulated out of wool
with buttons for the eyes.
I actually wrote the first draft of this poem last year at the 2023 Pride craft event, on a paper plate. The rest of it involves a preference to be made of glass instead of felt, in order to be dangerous when broken.
4.
My memory is beetlekind—
carapace and wing,
a filigree of chitin
and twiggish underthing.
This one I also shared in altered form (third person perspective) at Sara Tilley’s workshop at the Words of Warmth festival, on giving public readings. It’s about other people holding onto our exuviae and pretending they are us (the Amateur Entomologists’ Society defines exuvia as “the cast-off outer skin of an arthropod after a moult”).
5.
Feeling I was near the same
as I had ever been,
I assumed no regnal name
when I became a queen.
Drafted on a plane, returning from an international women’s chess tournament in 2022. I shared it at the 2023 Coffee House, not this one, but I’ve included it here all the same, for its thematic similarity. It deals more directly with transition than any of the other poems, and the stanza here refers to my choice to retain my given name, albeit with a minor adjustment of the spelling.