From Holy Wild. Published by Book*hug in 2018.

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

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,

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.

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.