Gwen Aube, missed connections with tall girls

 

at digby house, before steve sold
the place to hop trains in mexico 

at digby house you were playing the drums
while screaming. 

you didn’t really have boobs,
but your boobs were out. 

you were hitting the drums very fast.
anarchopunk thrash metal fast.
you called stephen harper a fag. 

i crushed a beer can on my head,
thought “holy fucking shit” a lot of times,
got kicked in the face, and went home. 

six years later at a party i saw you,
wearing a dinosaur onesie
and holding a beer with both hands,
like a nervous dinosaur. 

like a meteor shower,
four trans girls swooped on you at once.
you ran away because we scared you. 

three years later your boyfriend is visiting—
we watch you play drums in your basement. 

        he says:
she is going so fast. 

        i say:
i think she has been doing this forever.

From Montreal-based poet Gwen Aube [performing later this month in Ottawa at VERSeFest], following her chapbook debut, pulp necrosis (above/ground press, 2025), comes the full-length missed connections with tall girls (Brooklyn NY/Athens OH: LittlePuss Press, 2026), a sly, savage and saucy assemblage of intimate first-person lyric gestures filled with youthful vigor and gestural language, elements of poverty and deep grief. “you really were the enby dyke folk hero / of the Grand River housing projects. // your desktop tower full of Japanese autopsy / photosets, werewolf omoroshi, Linkin Park AMVs,” begins the poem “raised by wolves,” “neopets begging for their lives as guts hung / from their pixels like ball gowns.” Across a landscape of poverty and precarious living, working class life and transgender experience, and ridiculous and wayward adventures with friends and situations that occasionally move well beyond control, Aube’s delightful and exuberant poems articulate a meditative flamboyance, joyful optimism and playful language and use of the line. “waiting for a boy to take my bag outside dufferin station,” begins the poem “dao owes me a burger,” “the big blue duffel thing paint-stained & exploding socks / shirts skirts pants panties & broken // laptop, i lock eyes with a girl / in a lemon yellow crop top / posted up on the sidewalk, / hey sis, she slinks from somewhere behind / that sweet-sly smile, a jutting eve’s apple, / appraising my spills— [.]”

I do agree with the back cover blurb, appraising that Aube’s “hilarious and uncompromising poems chronicle a precarious, debaucherous carnival of trailer-trash divas and Discord autistics, living and delightful in survival at the edges of technocapital,” and comparing her work to “a transsexual Kevin Killian” [see my review of Killian's posthumous collected here], although some of the language-layerings and gestural flourish of her work just as much provide echoes of the work of Toronto poet MLA Chernoff [see my review of their latest here]. As well, the work of all three share a joyousness that is just as much a strategy for survival as it is a celebration, gesticulating a lyric-as-protection, writing out document and elegy, mournful ballads and memorials, playful gesture and theatrical waves. Either way, Aube’s poems remain grounded in narrative experience, which of course allows elements of the language to flourish, almost flail, suggesting an untethering or even an unravelling, but very much walking that line between order and chaos, both through lyric structure and narrative intent. Or, as the ninth poem in the ten-poem sequence-section “Wearing a Fur Coat to the Welfare Office” ends, writing:

i know this is no way to end things
but i hate it here, in ottawa.
& i’ll need to come back soon
to finish a poem— 

not this one.
this one is done.