An excerpt from Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read an excerpt from Hannah Green’s collection Xanax Cowboy, shortlisted for the League’s Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
From Xanax Cowboy
By Hannah Green
I will kiss anybody who tells me they like my cowboy boots.
In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje writes
“In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women
and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.”
I am not afraid to die. I want you to be happy for me.
I pace the aisles at Shoppers Drug Mart but there is no card for this occasion.
How like the poet. To rewrite its own tragedy into a comedy.
What is a joke but trauma bleeding from the back, stabbed with an exclamation mark?
At a party, I ask a stranger if he will come outside with me
for a cigarette. I don’t smoke but I’ll keep you company he says. I sigh.
It’s not me that needs the company, it’s the misery.
When I was 10 years old I took three Kokanees and drank them in the back yard.
I did not like the taste but I persevered with my prepubescent lagers in the moonlight.
Cowboys are to liquor as Judith Butler is to gender. I’m talking household names.
Why a cowboy? The stranger asks. Because their drunkenness is close to godliness.
What girl doesn’t want to be admired for the halo of the toilet bowl around her head?
Cowboys don’t need to learn to love themselves. To come home to themselves.
Cowboys spit on self-help books and curse em like the day they were born.
The badassery of masculinity is well-established in the literary Wild West.
Forgive me, but I am too tired to subvert a genre. I am not the cowgirl for the job.
Why a cowboy? He asks again. I am sick of repeating myself.
I’m a fucking cowboy because I said so. There is no Gender Trouble here.
I am not afraid to die but I do not want to be a suicide in Ondaatje’s graveyard.
We believe cowboys. They don’t need to explain themselves
over and over again. A cowboy goes to the doctor with a bullet hole,
not a list of symptoms with no exit wound!
Hannah Green is a writer and poetry editor at CV2. Her debut collection Xanax Cowboy won the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She likes to draw sad cowboys when she isn’t writing about them.
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