A Place Called No Homeland

by Kai Cheng Thom

  ready to blaze

  about to explode

  i want to embrace you and lose all my names in the blast,

  could it be that we have always known what we are?

  infinite and changing, courageous by necessity,

  our beauty is dangerous,

  has always been,

  because it refuses to be contained by definition,

  our beauty is a face whose scars are outlined in glitter,

  our beauty is a mouth painted red for war,

  our beauty is a secret that stands up to scream,

  our beauty is becoming and becoming and becoming

  O rising moon

  I call to you

  Tell me the truth

  O rising moon

  Open your arms

  I have always been here

  they tried to teach to be afraid of ourselves

  because they were afraid of us

  but there is no fear left in me

  the fire doesn’t fire its own heat,

  the night sky does not regret its stars,

  you

  are the azure core at the centre of the flame

  you

  are the salt tang of blood on the tongue,

  if we had no jewels

  we would wear memory and rage

  if we had no gowns

  we would wear the storm

  strange sister weird sibling brother gay & grim

  you teach me to be dangerous being beautiful

  you teach me to be brave being beautiful

  i want to go dancing with you

  and set fire to Eden

  the gods will never sleep again

  doctor’s daughter

  swallowing elixirs

  beneath the moon/i am

  a slow-burning alchemy

  in midnight’s tube/shape-shifter/

  skin-changer/doctor’s daughter/i

  am demon mother

  with barren womb. sweet nectar

  puddling in my pores. ometimes/to survive,

  we must become more than alive

  the other night i dreamed

  that there were two flowers

  budding inside my chest.

  like cereus, my body blossoms/

  swells/

  beneath cool

  blue

  fingers

  hunger p(h)antoum

  hormone therapy makes me hungry

  i am wracked with violent and mysterious cravings.

  my body demands furious consumption

  to fuel its furious growth.

  i am wracked with violent and mysterious cravings.

  an infestation of phantoms roams my body, ravening

  to fuel their furious growth.

  the memory of famine is devouring me.

  an infestation of phantoms roams my body, ravenous

  for cheeseburgers, pork buns, the sweet red flesh

  of memory. famine’s devouring me

  i keep starving, though my mouth’s always full

  of cheeseburgers, pork buns, the sweet red flesh

  of poetry. my ancestors died hungry, and so i shall

  keep on starving with my mouth still full

  like the insatiable Goddess of Vengeance

  of my ancestors’ poetry. she died hungry, as we all shall

  stamping her feet and licking her bloodstained lips.

  i’ve always liked the Goddess of Vengeance:

  she was a woman who tasted the world.

  so i stamp my feet and lick my lips

  hormone therapy makes me hungry!

  i am a (trans)woman out to taste the world,

  and my body demands furious consumption.

  autopsky

  someday they’ll cut this body open

  and discover that my flesh is made of sky:

  azure, sapphire, cerulean, turquoise, ultramarine

  indigo

  violet

  black

  cirrus and cumulus clouds stirring behind my eyes

  cumulonimubus, alight with lightning,

  crackling through the capillaries of the heart.

  i am oh so full of rain

  you could fall through me into forever.

  please,

  dear scientist, mortuary explorer, search me thoroughly

  tenderly catalogue all my wayward parts.

  find somewhere in me

  the forgotten moon, the faded stars.

  re-member, reassemble, this tattered heaven, this

  shattered

  celestial thing.

  some things i have done

  i put a jar of water, honey, and flower petals out under the moon

  i sprinkled salt upon your doorstep,

  i wrapped your photograph in twine and hung it from the ceiling

  i cooked you sweet potatoes and garlic, green beans, miso soup and salmon,

  i slipped amethyst and rose quartz into your pillowcase

  i left my toothbrush in your bathroom,

  i slept with you and woke with you and held you in the morning as you wept

  and wouldn’t tell me why, and i licked away your tears

  i made you cum,

  i sat by the window and named the raindrops,

  i clipped the ends of my hair and burnt them to ash, whispering your name

  seven times,

  seven times,

  seven times,

  seven times,

  seven times,

  seven times,

  seven times,

  i watched you break the dishware, the windowpane, the table, your knuckles,

  i put my lips against your bruises, like a promise,

  i let you lie to me,

  i caught a bird and killed it, stripped the feathers and the flesh, bleached the bones

  and buried them in a pot of earth,

  i put witch hazel in your bathwater,

  i put the mandrake root beneath your bed,

  i watched you leaving me in your dreams,

  i will not ask you to stay.

  shelter: a glosa

  for Amber Dawn

  you can’t make homes out of human beings

  someone should have already told you that

  and if he wants to leave,

  let him leave

  —Warsan Shire, “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”

  i took shelter from the war against my body

  in the crevices formed by the angles of your bones

  this was my first, my chronic, mistake.

  but can you blame a burning woman

  for the error of seeing salvation

  in the darkness of a fever dream?

  just so, i clambered into your rib cage

  reclined in the shadow of your spine

  all the while knowing

  you can’t make homes out of human beings

  still, i sure as hell tried.

  after all, hadn’t i survived

  the minefields of date rape, a fusillade

  of past lovers’ fists, the onslaught of doctors

  prescribing my body, my brain, into oblivion

  all in order to get to you? what couldn’t

  or wouldn’t i do to hold onto the miracle

  that you (said you) loved me? the notion of

  romance was always intended for biological warfare

  someone should have already told you that

  so i made a wet fortress from the framework of your skeleton and skin

  put my tongue between your teeth like turning a key in a lock

  built a fire between your legs to keep us warm.

  i guess i hoped that your naked flesh would be armour enough

  to keep out the rain, the past, the unwanted advances of men

  on the street, the reality of the job market for transwomen today

  race wars reigniting in north america

  the possibility of dying violently, or (worse?) alone.

  slid myself into the
spaces between your hips, thighs, your nipples, lips

  hiding from the thought, and if he wants to leave?

  was it me or you (or does it take two)

  that turned the circle of our arms

  into this private battleground? are you

  keeping me safe or just keeping me here?

  am i holding your heart or just holding you down?

  i want to find the place where my fear ends and your body begins.

  there is some kind of ghost trapped inside

  the shelter we made of our bodies pressed together

  and it’s time that we

  let it leave

  book fetish

  for the past three weeks, i’ve carried

  a copy of amber dawn’s memoir, How Poetry

  Saved My Life, in my purse. it’s a slender volume,

  fits nicely tucked alongside the eyeliner,

  compact mirror, switchblade, cell phone, lipstick. my femme

  talismans. my femme tools.

  i take it with me everywhere: on the metro,

  to pore over while ignoring the catcallers.

  to pay-what-you-can queer dance parties,

  to glance at while hiding in the bathroom from bad exes.

  to school, where the nice

  white ladies who are my classmates

  in the social work department

  are curious to know what i’m reading,

  and then say “oh,” politely when i tell them

  it’s a lesbian sex worker’s autobiography. “how interesting!

  is it for research?”

  yes, of a sort. i am researching queer herstory.

  femme future. i am researching my own survival. my thesis

  is my life. amber says, lying is the work

  of those who have been taught that their truths have no value.

  reading that one line

  makes me want to slide myself between the book’s covers,

  cry myself to sleep.

  i’ve always needed books,

  the way some of my punk queer friends need cigarettes,

  or weed, or clear packets of molly the size of a thumbnail.

  without them, i get fidgety, anxious,

  start to sweat. can’t have a good time,

  can’t get down, can’t

  see the point of paying rent or

  going to work or having sex. i hoard my books,

  hide them in unconventional places, like a rat lining its nest:

  inside my pillowcases, under the mattress, in the underwear drawer,

  the crisper of the fridge. a leftover reflex

  from childhood, when my parents would take them

  away to punish me, or my sister would rip them up

  just to see me cry. that worked better than hitting me, they said,

  because i cared more about my books than i cared about my body.

  i learned from this

  that the best way to control somebody you love

  to make them behave,

  to keep them in line,

  is to threaten the things they hold dearest.

  to take away the things that make them free.

  when i was sixteen years old, i discovered queer poetry:

  poems about boys becoming girls, about boys desiring boys,

  girls fucking girls, and everything in between. i knew immediately

  that i needed these poems

  to change my life, to make my escape, to become somebody different.

  i needed these poems,

  but they came printed in books i couldn’t afford, since

  i was never allowed to have a job or keep any money.

  this was how i learned to steal books. paperbacks are easiest,

  especially thin ones, you can roll them right up and put them

  in your sleeve, or your wasteband, but hell,

  no one suspects a cute little asian girl like me

  of shoplifting anyway, do they? if i was black or brown,

  this would be a different story.

  i stole the books i wanted so bad, like a rat stealing the blue eggs

  from a robin’s nest: i stole gloria anzaldua, and audre lorde,

  and june jordan, and michael ondaatje, and allen ginsberg, and

  maya angelou. i stole them because i loved them,

  or at least, that’s what i said. i could have borrowed them

  from the library, too, but that wasn’t enough for me.

  i needed to own

  the things i loved.

  someday, i’m going to put every single book

  i own into a big wooden chest. from slim paperback volumes

  to hardcover bricks. i’m going to drag them all out

  to the roof of highest skyscraper i can break into.

  they’ll be taken aback, at first, by all that expanse

  of open blue. they’ll have grown accustomed

  to the dark insides of my jealous custodianship, to being tucked

  inside purses, and slipped inside pillowcases, slid between mattresses

  and crammed into refrigerator crispers. but slowly, little by little,

  they’ll start to flutter their pages. they’ll catch the wind beneath their covers.

  they’ll soar off into the sky. i’ll wave goodbye, and whisper, i’m sorry.

  and because they are wise, i think they’ll forgive me.

  your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you from the end of the world

  even if he loves you

  even if he knows how to love you well

  your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you:

  for all the strength

  you imagine into the curves of his arms

  no matter how tightly you have taught him to hold you

  the circle of his embrace is not a fortress

  cannot keep out the cold, the rain, the memory of your father

  striking you across the face

  could not hold back a horde of ravenous flesh-seeking zombies

  from coming to devour you – high-heeled boots, glitter lip gloss

  and all

  even if he has read every single internet article in existence

  about the top 11 ways to be respectful to a trans girl

  even if he has educated the shit out of his privileged white self

  he will not, can not know

  the hidden road through the invisible minefield

  that trauma and rape

  have made of your body

  he will never be fluent in the secret language of your scars

  when all the city lights go out in the wake of the apocalypse

  it is you who will have to lead him to safety at night

  by following the diamond map of the milky way

  you could spend your whole life trying

  to find a way into his skin

  to wrap yourself in the blanket of his safety

  his normalcy, the ease with which

  he moves through the world

  but sooner or later,

  you will fall through his fingers like water, like smoke

  like diamond dust

  every time

  every time

  girl, you were born to live through the end of the world

  and the end after that, and the end after that

  and the end after that.

  you are the one who will sing the apocalypse songs

  you are the one who will string the bow

  you are the one who will light the fires

  we are the ones who will paint our faces with ash, for courage

  and remembrance

  your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you from the end of the world

  even if he loves you, even if he loves you well

  he is, after all

  just a boy

  3 love stories

  1. white hipster queer

  when i step through the door of the hipster café where all the white quee
rs with asymmetrical haircuts and tattoos of odd things like cats and vegetables like to hang out and talk about judith butler and pretend that they aren’t gentrifying this formerly working-class / Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood, your head will turn. you will think to yourself that i am the one who does not belong, with my thick black ethnic hair and darkly made-up asian eyes and mouth plump and luscious from the stub of mac gold lipstick that i inherited from a femme poet sex worker auntie. (white queers are always thinking that other people don’t belong in the places that they have decided belong to them. after finding out we were neighbours, a campus butch once told me indignantly that they didn’t think that i “was the kind of person who lived in st henri,” as though white trans masculine bois from oakville were indigenous to the montreal’s old factory district.)

  for reasons you do not understand, your heart will begin to race, and your palms will sweat, and you will swallow hard with a throat suddenly run dry of radical queer politics and the latest most fashionable gender neutral pronoun. your eyes will linger. over the the sweet curve of my adam’s apple. slight bulge of my rosebud breasts. languorous swell of hips and thighs leading down to the sharp clack of two-inch heels. you will look again. notice the tell-tale scars on my arms, the mark on my face where the shadow of my father’s palm still burns, nine years later. i don’t wear foundation, don’t try to soften my “masculine” jaw or disguise the lines at the corners of my eyes. honey, i am twenty-five years of age, that’s an old hard femme in trans woman years. i don’t soften anything. as i walk past your table, you will keep on looking. you will stare and stare without knowing why. you’ve never even touched a body like mine before, but i guarantee, you will dream about it. white hipster queer, i am the most beautiful girl that you have ever seen.

  2. airplane military sex dream man

  we meet sitting next to each other on the airplane to halifax, and your body starts the conversation for you, all blond hair and blue eyes, legs a mile long and biceps as big and round as grapefruits. you can have anyone, anything you want, your body says. what you want is you want to talk to me, and i am surprised at first, before i remember that i am now petite asian lady with good bone structure rather than a gawky skinny effeminate chinese boy. remarkable, the effect that repackaging has on the market value of a product. you’re a military man, you tell me, combat veteran, and currently a search-and-rescue specialist, and then you ask me what i do. i think about telling you the truth, that i’m being flown to dalhousie university to perform my trans femme survivor poems to an auditorium full of sensitive college queers. instead, i say that my name is anastasia, i’m a clinical psychologist specializing in early childhood mental disorders, and i’m giving a guest lecture for a research conference. you can take the hustler out of the boy, turn him into a girl and put her in grad school, but you can’t make her stop hustling. all’s fair in love and mile-high flirtation.