folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Apartment Hunting
For
Allison
A friend once asked if I'd ever seen
How small the vast empty appears
The way a room pregnant with possibility
Shrinks — scared of occupying its space
How the careful curation of living
Allows it to bloom
I wonder how when you spread my ribs
Wrist deep in my lungs, fingers clutching my
spine
You saw me — small and terrified
Or vast
And ready to open
Daphne
You can see her still/dancing
In the wind — having chosen
One kind of freedom.
A story writ and writ
On transformation and denial.
The crowning laurel an abject lesson:
How an artist makes unwilling muse
Of a woman
Who says
No.
The project I had most recently been putting a lot of time into was a collection of leather dyke love poetry. I am currently on the tweaking and submitting part of the process on that one and I do truly hope it finds a home. I have a manuscript of religious/devotional poetry I had left to the side (which I am slowly carving out of a prior failed project) and a long term translation and expansion of Catullus's Lesbia poems which are going to be my next big foci. However for now I am trying to let creativity step back into me by taking it easy and just getting some unfocused unthemed writing done.
Witch, bitch, and full-time disaster Helen Robertson is a transexual, bisexual, genderqueer dyke using poetry to express those emotions too large to hold within herself.