Charlie Petch : Three poems

 

 

Good News 

My gender is a party crasher
it’s the television show you’d never admit watching 
it’s the tampon that WANTED A DIFFERENT LIFE

it’s a piece of spinach
stuck in teeth
so big it pulled a tooth out
it’s a mouth full of blood
in polite conversation
it’s why some of you
stopped listening

or maybe we don’t know
good news when we hear it
anymore

aren’t we artists
don’t we make dresses
out of war propaganda films?
tik tocks out of alt-right rants?
don’t we plant tiny explosions
called   revolution
called   think different
called   let’s keep this going
            until we get this right

coming out trans
is a slow avalanche
as I try to celebrate
like I saved a life
like I saved my life
like I stopped my infinite
audition to be a woman
like look at my happy
but all people seem to hear
are boulders dropping out of my mouth
          they/them/he/him
                    transmasculine

is there an app I can use
some sort of translator
that can make this sound like
good news?

because it feels
like I’m telling people
my best friend
is alive again

I don’t let him go this time
as rocks fall from our jaw
as people turn and flee
my male self asks me
          how was the hiding
          what you did
          to be called one of the guys?

I ask him to hold me
to pull me from that mud
tell him how I missed him
and now that he’s really here
we can be a different man
be our own man
thanks to avalanches
like art
like unafraid

I tell him
I’m so sorry
I ever thought
I could leave you
you have always been
my good news

 

 

It’s me, your closet

Hey look
In case you were wondering
(and I see that you’re not)
your closet is doing just
fine without you

yeah I mean who needs
to hear all that crying and
wailing and I really got
sick of hearing “Toxic” on
repeat   I mean Britney does
have other songs

I don’t care that
I’m no longer the only one
who knows your true form
that the specialness of what
we had was clearly just foreplay
that I was merely a launchpad for
the jet plane of your
sexuality and identity

I have your pronouns down though
I’ve been practising them with
you for years   all those speeches
for your parents I have them memorized
how was it telling them?
you never came back to say

ok I know I know I don’t
represent a refuge to you anymore
I guess at some point I have to
accept I was more of a prison cell
type metaphor but really I’m
just four walls
some hangers
and a light switch

are you sure you don’t
need me anymore?
I mean grandma’s coming
next week

I loved our every moment
sometimes I flick the lights
on and off when you walk by
I put the fake fur carpet askew
I just want you to notice me

I’m not doing ok really
I’m all for the revolution
I’m here for your happiness
as much as I held your sadness

I never wanted to stifle you
I just wanted to keep you safe
like any small room should

I’m just saying
maybe you should tear me down
and reconstruct me into the dollhouse
you always wanted
one that is all dressing rooms
and boudoirs and no need to hide

I don’t want to be a closet anymore
I don’t want anyone to find me
crawl inside
and almost
disappear

Photophobia

I left school for lighting
Let my life become theatres stadiums
film crews   ballasts and trucks
1000 watts to 20,000 watts
from practical lights to Xenon bulbs
that if dropped   became actual bombs
they would take the actors off set
when we’d be placing one
into the head of the lamp

after a migraine that became
a monster that ate my brain
I have these little seizures
when lights flicker and flutter
I’m told I have Photophobia
which translates to
Fear Of Light

maybe it is a fear of light because I’m so tired of leaving
my house with brain fog and aphasia and sleep masks on the subway
brimmed hats forever and the way I flinch scream gibberish
when bike lights find that centre of my brain
that no longer can process them

Photophobia : Fear Of Light

how can I reconcile that when
I’ve risked my life for light
climbed the guardrails
while operating a crane at 120 feet
to replace a white hot scrim on a 18K
as a thunderstorm approached the movie set

as the ballast sat too close
magnetising my very cells
and my old crew dies of ALS
and the producers still won’t admit
however we got that disease

as I folded knees that never came back
inside a blizzard with a 10k for
8 hours instead of fighting for
my rights

I’ve climbed on dysregulated
A-frame ladders knowing they
were deemed too dangerous
as I’ve flown through the rafters
of a theatre that’s never heard of
a harness

Photophobia: Fear of Light

but there’s this
I can tell you exactly why you feel that way
in white blue light   why you forget your name
because a disco ball took it
why people only go to your restaurant once
because they remember the headache and not the meal
and why we’d first switch out all the fluorescents
before the camera even got there

I can tell you what’s incandescent and what’s LED
by the way my brain starts to sputter out
by how aphasia takes over mmmmmmmmmmmmy
momomamamaaaamouth and turns
it into reflexed mishmash of animal gibberish
but there’s this

I still know how long I can touch hot metal before it burns
I can tell you how I loved light so much I didn’t
report the harassment I received for being a
femme presenting tech from the
very first day when I was assaulted by my mentor
in my high school theatre till
my last day working with men who
grabbed my breasts before asking my name
and called me mountain dew in the summer
because hey it was the 90’s and all of them
could decide if I got to work or not

Photophobia: Fear Of Light

years after this job I bury my husband and his sister
and I go right back to work
I spend a day with a flickering light
which turns my small migraine humming
into a full scale hemiplegic
into something closer to a stroke into a numb face and arm
a swirl of what words used to be and it’s like a door
was left open that day and now all the light gets in. 

I used to think moths
were enamoured with light
now I know it traps them
interrupts their navigational systems
to the delight of prey
and they call that phototaxis

I didn’t fear the harassment
or death or the level of danger
on every set or lighting booth or truck
all I did was never listen when they said
someone like me couldn’t do the job

maybe I loved light so much
I became the moth
the seizure

what do you call it
when your passion
becomes your disability
please don’t tell me
fear has anything
to do with it

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) [photo credit: Nika Belianina] is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa's Children, premièred 2022.  They have been featured on the CBC's Q, were the Writer In Residence for Berton House (2023), were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. Their solo show "No one's special at the hot dog cart" debuted at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024.

Kim Fahner : Why I Was Late, by Charlie Petch

Why I Was Late, Charlie Petch
Brick Books, 2021

 

 

 

 

As a reader, you’ll know that Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is going to be quirky and fresh as soon as you read the first poem. In “Dear C-3PO,” Petch imagines that C-3PO and R2-D2 were lovers. Later in the collection, there is the very clever poem, “Wookie Love,” a hysterically imagined supposition of what it would be like to be lovers with Chewbacca. Petch writes: “The love cries of my partners have never equalled/the parallel universe of what comes out of your/small-toothed mouth” and “I want to twist and grind you until we become/dreadlocked./dreadlocked//(I'd take them out later though   because I'm white).” Anyone who grew up in the late 1970s or early 1980s, who was around for the first big Star Wars wave of pop culture hysteria—and so who also might have collected those action figures of Han Solo and Princess Leia—will smile nostalgically as they read these pieces.

There are, too, the poems that speak to bigger notions of identity and pop culture influences, and how fame can distort reality. In “The Ballad of Owen Hart,” the poet writes of a famous Canadian wrestling star who “died on live TV” and of Hart’s “fallen beauty” in the ring. They question the cost of fame, the need to fashion a persona that requires “costumes/that make you feel foolish.” Then, a reflection on Mike Tyson’s career is found in “My First Lisping Hero.” Petch writes of the famous American boxer’s troubled life—struggling to try and capture that life’s truly mercurial essence—ending the poem with lines that sit powerfully in the reader’s mind: “Some humans are capable of so much/when we give them a chance/to get up off the mat.” There is always hope, the poet suggests, when we do not box people up and make them colour inside the lines. Petch’s poems about Hart and Tyson ask the reader to think about what other parts of personality that so often are hidden behind the mask of celebrity. There are surfaces and there are depths, and Petch asks us to think about the depths—to go beyond the superficial aspects of what we initially see in pop culture to find deeper truths.

The theme of identity—and of speaking personal truths—is consistently present in Why I Was Late. Petch is a transmasculine “poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host” who has their roots in spoken word poetry. In several poems, Petch speaks to the pain and trauma that occurs when gender is wrongly perceived as being restrictive and not as something that can be fluid and intuitive. In “Schoolyard Theatre,” the speaker recalls a party where “I was a guy at a party/fake smoke and drink in hand/my body relaxed/into boy.” In “Dropping Doves,” the poet speaks of Matthew Shepard’s murder, of “brutal men,” and of the hope of  “better models of masculinity.”

Later in the collection, in “Why Did the Trans Kid Cross the Road?”, Petch writes about the Ontario Conservative government’s decision, in 2019, to debate the existence of trans and non-binary people, and how the government “gave out a hotline number to report teachers talking about gender identity or respecting pronouns.” Petch writes, poignantly and powerfully, of how speaking a truth can result in severe mental anguish for young people who are grappling with their gender identity. The figure of a crossing guard—someone committed to protecting children—might be different under this new regime. That guard might be someone who “grips the pronouns” as “blood spills/between his fingers,” might turn into someone who “doesn’t stop cars.” Petch reminds us that we need to speak up in favour of diversity and acceptance, to speak up for the safety of young people.

Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is so very richly textured. There is a clear voice here that calls the reader to note social injustices, to speak up and speak truth for the good of self and others as well, but there is also a beautifully tender and personal voice here, one that speaks of love and of love lost, of humanity’s inhumanity but also of its big, beautiful heart, and a voice that takes careful note of the sheer beauty of life itself. In “Our Love Is Groundless,” Petch writes: “When you tell me you love me/I orbit the earth.”  In “Muscle Memory,” four short lines that hum with power sing on the page: “Don’t tell me/I’m strong/ask me how/I got there.” There are so many other beautiful things to notice in this debut book of poems, but these are the ones that sang out to me. If you haven’t read Why I Was Late yet, I’d suggest spending time with Petch and their poems.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com