Them! is the must-read new collection from Harry Josephine Giles. A quite unforgettable dive into what it means to be trans, how it is lived and politicised, Giles writes with characteristic ingenuity in a series of poems that will stay with you for days to come.

Them!
By Harry Josephine Giles
Published by Picador

Materials

Each day the world was more girls. Each day greener
and deeper and: brickwork, girls; bin lorry, girls;
three loaves, three girls; vitamin supplements, girls
rattling bones in the morning coop. We were girls.

We grieved. We bit. We waded from girls to women
and were girls anew: sticky, sorrowful, spite
tucked intimate like cool calzone. We
ejected from girls to men and were girls anew,

violent smooth. Girls whooped out those ‘Young-Girl’s
way of being is to be nothing’ guys,
those guys! Those guys ratioed by the specific
labour of their girlhoods, pores and butter.

At any rate: more girls, more peace. No?
Why else does girls the triple goddess grant
to the incandescent pavement, whyever else
the warheads girls, cyclopean, under desert?

Fingers are too much girls to tell any further.
Each good day the words more girls, and louder.

I Love to Hear Her Speak

a cling peach slithering out from its tin

a lip gloss ground into paste by the teeth

a burnt clutch scribbling down from the pass

a cowpat drilled by extravagant heels

a hangnail snatching a lark by the throat

a wire thong under a cage crinoline

a crazed screen slicing a covetous thumb

a quotetweet high on the sodium moona plum duff smelting its thruppenny bit

a lightbulb loose in a bucket of knives

a string cheese stubbornly whole in the pipes

a war pig through the dimensional gate

a salt lick slapping a jellyfish sting

a blessed bass warily bowed at the bridge

Why do we not everywhere see innumerable
transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion?

But Charlie, I vary a body:
deforest my face and force
volcanos from my chest.
May I stroke your liberal beard
in survival? May you and the lads
see me pass saying fit, fit, fittest?

Ach, Charlie! My gametes
rest in their holsters, never
to be unslung, be sprung,
be origin, be stringing
descent. (Selection is choice
and coercion.) The proof of me

is a finch, two finches, eighteen
finches (vegetarian,
vampire, large ground, small ground,
grey) known for their marked
profusion of beak form and function.
A charm, a trembling, a trimming.

Oh Charlie, the flock of me settles
the branches of your damned
ineluctable equation,
twittering . . . Please, Charlie!
Forgive the annotation.
Favour the preservation.

May a transsexual hear a bird?

May a transsexual hear a bird?
When I, a transsexual, hear a bird,
I am a transsexual hearing a bird;
when you hear a bird you are
a person hearing a bird. That is,
I am specific, you are general.
When a bird sounds in a poem
it is a symbol of hearing a bird,
a symbol of a person being
in relation to nature. Only
a person may hear this. Only a person
may hear a bird and write a poem
on hearing a bird and in so doing
praise the gentle dissolution
of personhood or elsewise strive
towards the clear and questionless presence
of an unworded bird, being.
Were I to attempt such a poem again,
I would be a transsexual writing
a poem on hearing a bird – I note
that ‘transsexual’ is the legal
adjective for a person with
the protected characteristic of
‘gender reassignment’ in
the Equality Act (2010),
Section 7, which applies
to any person at any stage
of changing any aspect of sex,
and so to make a claim of employment
discrimination I must have
the capital, social and economic,
to bring such a claim and also be
a transsexual – hence incapable
of dissolving without addressing
my transsexuality to the bird.
Even were I to fail to sound
out my transsexuality,
it would remain in the title, unsilent,
a framing device, regardless, and so
once again you would be hearing
a transsexual hearing a bird.
But now I am too preoccupied
with how to source testosterone –
a Class C Controlled Substance
under the Misuse of Drugs Act
(1971) carrying,
for supply, a maximum tariff
of fourteen years’ imprisonment,
and/or a heavy fine – to give
to my friend, and how to publish a zine
detailing how to negotiate
and circumvent the Gender Identity
Clinic system, given waiting
times for first appointments now
range from three to seven years,
without attracting the critical social
media attention that would shut down
any explicit alternative routes,
and whether the fact I have not heard
from my trans sister in over a month
means she is in a severe mental
health crisis or merely working,
and whether I have the strength and love
to call her, to remember to hear
a bird. If I cannot remember
to hear a bird I cannot write
a poem. How can I lack the strength
and love to call? Because I have not
heard enough birds. Because I am scared
of what it will mean if she answers. Because
I am scared of what it will mean if she doesn’t.
Because I have been working in far
too many political meetings scolding
parliamentarians to call
or hear a bird. I tilt the window
on its catch so I, a transsexual,
may hear the birds singing. If I
may hear the birds singing the sound
may lift me from myself and my
working conditions. Then the self,
the conditions, and the listening day.

Them! by Harry Josephine Giles is published by Picador, priced £10.99.