Emily Austin | Issue 35

Poetry | Strange women, / darkness remains dark until there is light— / so, smoke a cigarette

Mar 16, 2024

Strange women, darkness remains dark until there is light— so, smoke a cigarette and listen to the beast roar. Shall we resurrect, strange women? Rise like steam, like birds from a subway station? Defy the convention of the proverbs? Write with our fingers? I am. Resurrect the spirit, fly into the ember, caw a song in the air like a crow. I am who I am, she is who she is, you are who you are. Can you hear me? Are you listening? I am sweltering. Rainbows arched in the sky, ink in our skin. I am. Naked under gold and pearls a volcano erupts. Take the pew, she is at the pulpit. She is.

Take the white clouds into white rooms. She is at the front now, fire in Her belly, fruit on Her chin. There are words in Her mouth, in Her gut with the apple. We listen to the crack of fire, burning bushes crack listen. There are virgins in the white clouds waiting for dead men crack if heaven is hell for girls crack then heaven is hell. Keep your soul insurance in the fountain crack there is a shadow poisoning the well. Wet your hair with drops of the night crack, crack praise the monsters, meet me where the fire never goes out. CRACK, CRACK

Lot’s unnamed daughters had an unnamed mother. She was turned to salt for looking backwards. At nighttime, before the girls slept, they must have talked about her. “Should we keep her salty body?” “How will we remember her without pictures?” “Cameras don’t exist yet.” Maybe they hummed songs she sang, or made recipes she taught them. Maybe they saw her in their dreams, or wrote poems about her face and wonders. Could girls write back then? How did they remember her? How do we remember them? Spit on the ground, put the mud in your eyes. JOHN 9:1–12

Ruth said to Naomi, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following after you; for wherever you go, I will u-Haul; your people shall be my chosen family, your clothes, my clothes, your God, my God; where you die, I will die, there will I be buried, and theologians will write that we were friends, travelling companions, but I will have loved you with the purest desires of my heart.” ROMANS 1:26–27 & RUTH 1:16

Emily Austin is the author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.

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Gay Girl Prayers: Poems
by Emily Austin
Brick Books, 2024

Publisher’s Description

A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of “strange women.”

Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.

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Emily Austin | Issue 35

Poetry | Strange women, / darkness remains dark until there is light— / so, smoke a cigarette

Excerpt from Gay Girl Prayers

© 2024 Excerpt from Gay Girl Prayers: Poems by Emily Austin published with permission of Brick Books.

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