ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sara Hovda is a transgender woman from rural Minnesota. She currently attends the MFA program at UC-Riverside while also working as an online entertainer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Passages North, Nimrod, and Shō Poetry Journal, among others.
Also by Sara Hovda:
Crossdressed in Rochester, MN, I Consider My Reflection in a Bar Window
After sex you said
Melancholy
Faggot Regrets Not Coming Out Sooner
The clock hands, two snakes
dead, tied together. Hera cleaned
the ears of Tiresias once
she'd blinded him, after
she'd already changed him
into woman and then back. Even gods
repent what they can't repeal.
Beyond the window, plums
fall, purple throat-lumps, into night's
numb mumbling. Darkness
isn't absence. It lies
so sweet on the tongue.
Here, as with many of my poems nowadays, I'm trying to explore how I exist and how I view myself, gender-wise, in the world. Tiresias has been an important figure to me here, though the gender-switching and the augury often meld together in my head while writing. I do think it's important, while I have the space, to mention here that the idea of transgender people switching from one gender to the other is mostly a harmful one, linked to violence done to transgender people, and that my connection with this concept through Tiresias, as a trans-woman who very recently came out, is personal and is not representative of other's experiences. Suffice it to say that many trans-folks have always been the gender they identify as, and their growing up as their assigned gender was a series of violences and micro-aggression, not an acculturation to that gender.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
