Meet our October Poetry Contest Winner: Stephanie Holden!
Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes poems about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. She has two cats, a bearded dragon, and deep love for frogs. Find her writing at The Journal of the Wooden O, The Kennesaw Tower, The B’K (forthcoming), Hearth & Coffin (forthcoming), and Bullshit Lit (forthcoming), her art at BEST SERVED COLD (forthcoming), or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.
From the Writer:
“The piece is inspired by Fakir Musafar, a performance artist known as the father of modern primitivism. The poem is based on perhaps the most famous photo of Fakir, in which he is heavily corseted. Fakir's art attempted to reach spiritual actualization through body play, and this poem explores the ways that the self demonstrates ownership over the body.”
The perfect gentleman
-- after Fakir Musafar
Hand against hook, hook against skin, how poetic that cadaver must do its own destruction / Grind boning into bone until savage body becomes owned / Fire is fire no
matter where it burns / Body is bastard and gets what it
earns / Flesh and fiber, fragile, fragment,
fall to nothing /
When
sword pierces
skin, turn injury to inkwell and press
fingertip to shaking lip / Iron fingerprint now lipstick on
point-filed fang / Burn of blood now poison on split tongue / After all,
there is nothing better than a battle scar for proof of ownership / You animal, you primitive, you -
the perfect gentleman.
“We adored their experimentation with form and the visceral beauty of her words. It really stood among the rest.”
— The Editors
We appreciate everyone who took the time to submit to our first contest! We look forward to holding more contests in the future, but for now, let’s give it up for Stephanie!