​Cat-Girl Coriolanus Negs Forced-Femme Gwyndolin 

By bonnyCD

Shortlisted for the 2026 "London" Literary Prizes in the Canadian Poetry category

If gender is just down the hall, know this hall’s depth’s unplumbed 
let me dumb it down for you: 
there are no statues of Gwyndolin in all of Anor Londo, not even in the condo lobby
what were gender a ledger? (would it balance? well, would it?!) 
a child next to you at the bonfire  
                sidebars with its keeper “just whose side are you on?” 

to be the edible yellough petal on your tongue  
twilit tweed and reedy weeds cum-film-developer 
then madness fix, madness fix 
foam-clotted lot grown honeycomb  
               order in its lodestone yelloaming 

reckon, if god didn’t want us to taunt at the finish line 
he wouldn’t have given us emotes  

so glossy mineral hard 
this rotted root-beer spackle 
you reckon she’s got that russet pit hair 
there, pat flat next to the prosthesis?  

right there, where mist is thickest, 
purposeless-est 
sebaceous-ish guano-gist 

shh, you’ll upset ty peset  
tho’ know all your cheery Chloe Cherrys  
will one day be whelmed old S. Duvalls :( 

another! another forced-femme int.-caster round 
of plagues sugar-browned in boil of playground  

melee? no, youlee, 
you lay down and die already 

Tin-can tube AM’s thin timbre s o m e t h i n g whelming 
the cigar chimney roused from the Vivian Girls ashtray 
All the blood running down your throat  
The tissue proboscis the end of your nose  
all glogged wid blood, red as a tropical birb 

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​bonnyCD lives and works in rural Alberta (Treaty 7 territory). They are a proud founder of the reading series Feud Court (@feudcourt), alongside Jimmy T. Cahill and MLA Chernoff. Their recent books include The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux (Gordon Hill), GLADDENER (Anstruther), and Banazir Galbasi Doubtfiring with the Farmerettes (solipCYST). They are the most recent winner of the Grain Hybrid Experimental contest, and a previous winner of Geist’s Short Long-Distance Writing contest. They are currently at work on a short pamphlet advocating for wage transparency amongst writers, plus evil, purple short fictions.