Robin Gow
Robin Gow
Robin Gow is a Lambda award-winning trans poet and witch from rural Pennsylvania. It is the author of several poetry books, an essay collection, YA, and Middle-Grade novels in verse, including Dear Mothman and A Million Quiet Revolutions. Gow's poetry has recently been published in POETRY, Southampton Review, and New Delta Review. Fae lives in Allentown Pennsylvania with their queer family.
Tank Tea Party
“That is the difference between
little girls and little boys,” my mom said
every time she used to tell the story
of me gathering my plastic toy tanks
for a tea party.
I imagined their barrels
as mouths, long and hungry.
Hungry just like mine.
This was not an act of gender
but rather against it.
Of how in my smallness I first imagined
a tank as a creature
and not a tool of destruction.
Having never felt the earth shake
beneath me or smelled
a burning life. Instead, I grew up
between farms and
crooked leaky rooves.
Instead, inside me opened
an animal dream of communion.
Face to face. Nose to nose.
A gathering on the speckled carpet.
This is what
we could be.
Playing Pretend
When I say “revolution” I do not mean a new fresh terrible war. I mean you are the hat salesperson and I am looking for something to wear to a field of sunflowers. I mean we are on a planet of ice cream and wool. I mean you are the mom and so am I. I mean we are dogs and our house is made of dragonflies. We follow it wherever the sun will shine off our exoskeletons. I have a hard time finding anyone to play pretend with anymore. One summer I worked at a daycare. I craved moments when a child would say to me, “We are going to catch a dinosaur and feed it cake.” The other teachers would say, “I don’t know how you put up with them.” I would lie and say, “It makes the time go faster.” Really, I adored those moments. We were no longer in the backyard of a house by the highway but instead in a jungle of nectar and moss. When our time ended I hated the return. How to go back to being a girl living out of her car when, just hours ago, I was capable of being another species and capable of flight and capable of real abundance. When I say “revolution” I mean I want you to play pretend with me.
Naked Barbie Wilderness
When I undressed dolls I was always
looking for something.
Hoping that beneath
the polyester clothes
there was a fragment
that might teach me
what a girl was supposed
to be.
Bodies smoothed
of all complications.
I adored them
the way all true queers
love a facsimile.
I never had Barbies of my own
so I always did this
at friends’ houses.
What did they think of me,
always with the naked Barbie?
I imagined my girlhood
running naked
like the dolls.
In a sexless way.
A deep wild wood
where no one had a body at all,
just blood
and fingers.
Once, a friend made her doll talk.
She asked, “Where are
your clothes?”
I did not want
to make mine answer.
The rules of play though
are that you are safe
as long as
you are both
in the same game.
I did not want to admit to her
that we were not
so I said,
“I lost them.”
An Ode to Babyless Girls
Dear little prophet, I am in love with your fingers.
Sometimes I do not believe your fingers are my own.
I remember how you crouched beneath
the pine tree. Plucked globs of sap front its neck.
How you dug wild onion bulbs from the spring earth
and ate them raw. We never had baby dolls but god
did we have children. The alien flowers
and the dead birds. Stuffed monkies who we cradled
and fed. I want to be a disciple of my younger self.
She knew so much about gentleness and often
I wonder where all of that went in me. Mothering
has so little to do with gender so much more
to do with softness. She had endless softness.
The patience of an early moon saying, “I’ll stay
until you are done.” It is wrong to say I was never a girl.
My god I was a little girl. She walked in the creek.
She raised tadpoles like little Lazaruses. Once,
in a bible school production, she played Jesus
for the miracle where he walks on water.
I told the other children pretending to be prophets,
“Do not be afraid.” When I spoke, they believed me.
The carpet becoming water. Nets full of fish.