From Holy Wild. Published by Book*hug in 2018.
1. I buy a dress for this maybe date at a second-hand shop last Saturday, pink chiffon smells of old perfume embroidered in black flowers for our second date which may not happen or may not be a date, I can never tell who finds my body desirable or curious, I ask a boy if it’s ok for me to wear a dress will he be seen in public with a girl like me it feels polite to let him decide if he is brave enough girls have to be sweet or we’re worthless he tells me to wear whatever feels pretty as if I could feel pretty or if being a woman was being beautiful, like pretty is something I have access to in this body. men shout faggot at me wherever I go, threaten my body, a woman spit at me today, her eyes a disgust I can’t unsee. the dress hangs in my closet, untouched and soft a dream of a life in a body I can’t have. girls like me can’t feel anything like pretty, the same way my grandmothers felt when they were taught being Indian wasn’t a crime as long as you try hard to make your body disappear it’s only ok to be a tranny or an Indian if you try to act like something else. 2. museums for Indians full of our dead junk, masks on walls, cut-up lodge poles, the shells we threw away sleep beside artifacts they stole. they dug up our burials out near Peterborough so deep the graves showed the skeletons of dead kin, white eyes pour over the bones like bleach across the remains of our humanity. I used to think the worst was us as school lessons to be consumed, real only by their imagination alone. after my transition, museums aren’t so bad, the glass cases protect the dead from interrogation but I can be touched an NDN transsexual walk through white people staring. I think how easy it is to be a skeleton, underground in a lodge laid out and frozen, my heart still safe forever from them, if desecration is our destiny, let it come when I’ve gone to a place the living can’t see.