Grace Kwan

F*CK YOU JESSE PALMER

I don’t want to fight other girls
but I want to call your attention
to my awareness of how this mycelia
of playwright tropes we call gender dictates
and restricts my range of muscular action the
scope and scale or discretion of which would be
to decrease the sample pool into specificity constructing
scenarios in context removing pretenses to replace them with
heuristics removing histrionics to replace them with hysteria we’re
putting our hearts on the line literally the new treatment envied by the
control group involves holding an eel by its throat and plunging electric fangs
between our own ribs splayed by Finochietto retractors watching green fog dilute
into airwaves and the space between syllables a border we’ve all waged wars over and by the way
I was the one who taught him Tantric breathwork, not that it matters

Grace Kwan (they/them) is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer in Vancouver, BC. Their recent poetry appears in Canthius, Room Magazine, and others. Their first full-length book is forthcoming in 2024. Find them at grckwn.com.