Arielle Twist is a writer and sex educator from George Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan, currently living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a Cree, Two-Spirit, trans femme supernova writing to reclaim and harness ancestral magic and memories.
Within her first year of pursuing writing she has been able to attend Naked Heart, the largest LGBTQ literary festival in the world and has attended a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. She has work published/forthcoming with Them, Canadian Art, This Magazine, and Prism International. Her debut collection of poetry ‘Disintegrate/Dissociate’ is forthcoming Spring 2019 with Arsenal Pulp Press.
Ahead of her July 11th appearance, Arielle shares three poems with us. They are the highlights of her time in Banff. The first poem C(um) Etiquette was brought to life after a critique that she used the word cum & cock a lot in her poetry and Chords is about the displacement she feels living by the ocean.
C(um) Etiquette
Some days I leave my window open
Some days it’s to air out smells like you
Some days it is to lure you in with the scent of me
I don’t know how to navigate this etiquette
of cumming and going
the ways we invite strange bodies into our lives
expecting something different
than this godless fucking
somedays I wish you would tear me apart
somedays I want to feel nothing
but you, moving inside of me.
some days
I cum and you go
– don’t come back
Chords
I live in a city
where you can hear
whales sing siren songs
reverberating
off lonely chords.
songs I will sing back
in a harbor
familiar with the brown
of the wood
resembling cracks of
my own skin.
I can read them like
bottoms of my rough
NDN feet.
They say take me home.
The mountains sing too.
Arielle Twist visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church Street, Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Vanessa McGowan, Chang Liu, Kiley May, and guest speaker Scott Fraser who will share his thoughts about, “Understanding Acquisitions: What Authors Should Consider When Pitching Their Book.”
Brockton Writers Series 