- jurors Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader and Sanna Wani via the CBC.

- 2023 Bronwen Wallace jurors.

—Sonnet L’Abbé, 2024 WT Poetry Mentor.

Girls of the Now [Garments] 

Clothes are a better place for girls to keep their histories than stories. 

—Anne Boyer 

My favorite shoe brand is telling me to “take up space.” Subject line, email ad. 

I am in my bikini and my armpits are sweaty. 

My father is talking, in the way he does. 

We are sitting by a desert hot spring near his home in central mexico. 

I archive the ad, vaguely aware of his points: 

Elections, yucatán, his mother’s strength, his father, missing. 

A monologue, a “talking to oneself ” (late Latin) a declaration of his refusal to collaborate.

I psychoanalyze my father and all his secrets—but what do I know? 

I am a silly little girl, which is both true and untrue. 

It’s true in the sense that I am, despite my best efforts, north american. 

Which means I am a girl believing lug sole boots and therapy could solve my emotional heritage.

The chunky military sole, reinforced leather toe, visible seams— 

Today is the day I will heal!!! 

Come on, I know girls are powerful. 

When Kendall Jenner said does anybody even use snapchat anymore, the platform lost millions of users  within twenty-four hours.

And in mexico city, Dua Lipa has made the lines long. 

While the wall at the border is being built again. 

Girls like these can change the shapes of cities with their joy. 

When the ideals of consumerism align with the ideals of feminism. 

I remember being relieved when we all started hating girl bosses. 

Then: where does the high femme nihilism that replaced it take us? 

I am sucking a mango pit; I toss the skin to the side. 

There is no better time to leisurely contemplate gender than the peaceful white noise of a monologue.

I believe in the power of garments. 

The crimson clasp, the bone-pleat detail, the soft cotton gusset. 

See, there does exist a badass shoe, I wear it and my gender changes. 

I won’t tell you the brand; a poem isn’t an ad. 

Poems are ads for quitting your job. 

Take up space, I say to myself in the bathroom mirror. 

The stain of mango juice on my lips, a seam that bears memory: 

As kids, we’d rub the pits all over our bodies like bars of sticky soap and then jump in the pool, washing it  all away, to the distress of the nearby families. 

Nasty little cochina rural canada things we were. 

Before I was born, my mom had a shotgun hanging by the door. 

That was her version of the boots.

She’d grab it to slug down birds for dinner or scare someone off. 

She called it her husband, as in, don’t make me go get my husband.

The ad offers a cheap version of this recklessness. 

My mother’s legacy as a wood worker, a lobster fisherman, hand work in the evenings.

I do hard labor jobs, I become a wildlands firefighter. 

I get two degrees, become highly trained at synthesizing and speaking when called on.

And I buy silks, silvers, jean, sparkle spandex, linen weaves, a west coast dad fleece.

Is it all a kind of performance, even when it’s real? 

A girl can be a first-gen grad, bilingual; a girl can work at it all. 

A savvy promise drifts by on the breeze: 

Illegible bodies can still be bodies of work. 

The gun goes off. The hunter returns. 

Three pheasants, stars retreating, in her hand.