Should’ve asked to be the corpse / instead

Poetry | Brandi Bird | Issue 53

Notes on Roman Roy

For Dina Del Bucchia

Roman asks Tabitha to play dead when they fuck,
still can’t get it up. Should’ve asked to be the corpse

instead. He only cums from behind a screen or door. Begs
to be held by the older woman who watched him grow up, groomed

the way a foal is: beaten, ridden. He flirts
with a fascist in a bathroom & violence is a language

spoken in rooms I binge through. No need just want,
glass sharpening as it falls & falls

to the ground. Kieran Culkin says in an interview that Roman
performs masculinity, orders steak, can only stomach

green grapes at table, worried
about his weight. I watch Roman masturbate

He’s on top of the world but consumed by the preparation
& clean up afterward. Closed blinds

in his office & Kleenex on the windowsill. His darting
eyes turn into my shame. Slap from Roman’s father

culled from my molars. Roman can’t get it up without tonguing
a bloody gap. A hole he can penetrate without thought. I objectify

him. Imagine him comforted by this, pleasure
in debasement. It’s the only luxury

I can afford.

Excerpted with permission from Pitiful by Brandi Bird. ©2026 Bird-Brandi Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com

Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Musqueam peoples (Surrey, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s awards. Brandi Bird is currently completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia.

Pitiful: Poems
by Brandi Bird
House of Anansi Press, 2026

Publisher’s Description

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as “sovereignty” itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.

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