Homestead

Alessandra Naccarato

We borrowed a farm house and grew a glory of armpit hair.Yard high with yarrow, thigh high with silk, uninvited to the weddingdown the road. What they’d call peculiar, at the punch bowl,gas station. Queer as unbelonging. Queer as the oak leansand moss invites itself in. We left the city without a driver’s license.The roof full of crows. A hive, a coop, a barrel of rain.Slow dancing between appetizers with my hand on your silk.They ask us politely to leave. Queer as in trespass. As in allof god’s creatures. Outside, you can hear a goat opening a universe.My sister’s hands on Pluto, turning. There is a black hole thrummingin a high school, in a drugstore nearby. Nobody gets outof themselves alive. We look to Venus, count names we can touch.Poplar, bulrush, homestead. Crescent, willow, dyke. You don’t getto take it with you, the sign reads: you might as well dance now.

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Alessandra Naccarato is a writer living on the traditional territory of the Saanich, Cowichan, and Chemainus First Nations (Salt Spring Island, B.C.). She received the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2015 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, and her poetry has been published in Room, CV2, Arc, The New Quarterly, EVENT, and elsewhere.

Room

41.3

Vancouver
Canada

Room is Canada’s oldest feminist literary journal, and has published fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, interviews, and book reviews for forty years. Published quarterly by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society, also known as the Growing Room Collective, Room showcases writing and art by women (cisgender and transgender), transgender men, Two-Spirit and nonbinary people. We believe in publishing emerging writers alongside established authors, and because of this, approximately 90% of the work we publish comes from unsolicited submissions or contest entries.

Works that originally appeared in Room have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, and Best Canadian Essays, and have been nominated for National Magazine Awards.

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