Welcome to Poetic Licence – a weekly poetry forum, hosted by us, featuring words by local poets. This week? Visiting Verses Festival artist Kai Cheng Thom.
we did not ask for
(from 'a place called No Homeland')
girl, we are both grown now
but i still remember you
young in your white dress
the silver earrings you wore,
sunlight scrutinizing your face and the asphalt
of the schoolyard
the day you told me you’d been raped.
your face so pale i thought you looked dead
the story swirling out of your mouth like smoke
to fill the air between us
eddying between my lips, staining
my throat and tongue.
girl, i cried that day
not just for you
but for me.
felt the alchemy of your words
alter my body at the cellular level
a prophecy
i knew then that the future
would not be kind
and in hindsight, it was true.
girl, we are both grown,
and the years have not been gentle.
today i wear a white dress
and silver earrings
in the rain
in memory, not just of you
but of me
and all the stories - like smoke, like ghosts, like magic -
lost between us
and these rapable bodies
we did not ask for.
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker who divides her time between the unceded indigenous territories of Montreal and Toronto. Her work has appeared in such publications as Matrix Magazine, Buzzfeed, and Asian American Literary Review. Her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (Metonymy Press, 2016) is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her first book of poetry, a place called No Homeland (Arsenal Pulp Press) launched in Vancouver on April 25 at the Cultch as part of the Verses Festival of Words.
To submit your own poetry to Poetic Licence, email [email protected] with Poetry Column in the subject line. Include your poem, full name, contact details and bio. Only those selected for the column will be contacted.
