day/break

Gwen Benaway

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781771665735
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665742
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

day/break, poet Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.

1

 

I am not a girl

but a creature made of smoke

and exhaustion.

 

I want a poem scrubbed of

dignity,

a body

not brave

but present.

once

after fucking me hard

in a bedroom filled with dust,

 

you said I was more or less

like a biological woman.

 

I carry your words inside my body

like the night carries the moon—

 

each time I wake,

less of me is left.

 

still, the low sounds

of the city rise up

to wash my hands clean

of longing

 

my morning cigarette

is a prayer

to mourn

the end of sleep.

 

look to your own horizon

tell me what you see.

 

 

is it my breasts,

wet with your saliva,

returning to press

against memory

 

or does nothing of me remain?

 

I asked for this, didn’t I?

 

to be in love

and not broken,

 

luminous,

suspended in air.

 

brief light

of this new day,

 

bless us

in our forgetting.

2

a tranny is a girl

who sold her dignity

for a chance

to be human.

I am the lesser woman,

transformed by scalpel

and the indifference of men.

their careful pity

marks my body,

the border

between want

and shame.

call me hunger

and place your flesh

on my lips.

I want a gender

that does m...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• break
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• break
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• About the Author
• Colophon