Two Poems by Kandace Siobhan Walker

Depression Sonnet

All my friends hate me and my kidneys hurt.

Rain in winter: love has never been further away.

The night is listening to my teenage playlists,

the future is a field of walking banana plants.

Bunches of bedsheets between my teeth like a dancer’s rose.

I wish I was capable of crying, but I am renting.

I listen to my neighbours’ parties—oh, the world, I miss it.

The silver knife crosses my palm like a silver knife.

Wet cheeks, dry lips, voicemail. Red messages on the cave wall

like iron mineral. Five hundred thousand scenarios

where I am the most happy,

I am the most wonderful.

Dreaming through dehydration in the dark, trying to remember

a person, like a rainbow, has no reason to exist.

Boob Jobs

are to Christmas movies what Die Hard is to gender affirmation.

This was never about sex and it always was. Re-articulating nerve endings

all weekend. Surgeons and forums talk about self-confidence

but what about body-mind integration?

Débutante desperado, there is no true self

except what we denounce and what we take

responsibility for. We wonder if our boobs are knife edges

even in a society without inequity. Authenticity is not achievable as a state,

just an emotion, which passes like monopolies and

fashions, which are just monopolies of being. What about spirit?

Beauty ideals are like snowflakes. I wake up high on a gurney:

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker. Yippee-ki-yay.

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a Canadian-born Jamaican-Saltwater Geechee writer and filmmaker from Wales. She is an editor at bath magg. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Magma, MacGuffin, and the Guardian, among others. She has essays in An Open Door and Welsh (Plural). Her debut pamphlet Kaleido will be published by Bad Betty Press in autumn 2022. She lives in London.