After an Open Call asking artists and writers for a creative promotional response to the themes of A Fragile Correspondence, Harper Walton was commissioned to write the below poem, which explores the geographically distinct areas of Highland, Island and Lowland as queer spaces through a transgender and non-binary lens.
Abundant Nectar
By Harper Walton
1. Lowland
I am a changeling in the place of a healthy child
swapped at birth by primrose-fearing faeries
I was born under a flower moon, almost full
my parents buried the placenta that nourished me
planting a copper hazel on top
so it could be nourished as well
my parents, the parish councillors
enshrining climate strategy documents
to preserve grassy verges with their blue hearts
my father, the timber framer, the axe salesman
treading lightly on the planet
with small pad foundations
I love him
and his embodied carbon
my mother, the artist, the gardener
I love her
by germinating
my ancestors were Norman colonisers
channel islanders, Celtic fringe anonymities
cockney labourers in tanning factories, soaking hides
in vats of tree bark-derived acid or chromium salts
dehairing, degreasing, irreversibly altering
the protein structures of skin
my forefathers forged munitions
made glass bottles and umbrellas
bound books, kept cows, drove cabs
and me?
my body is also an odoriferous trade
as a child I played
in the beech woods
that occupied an abandoned quarry
whose limestone built the house that raised me
now I’m a peasants’ revolt
a levelling, a threshing machine
with a conscience
my body is an arable croft
a scrumped apple
a criminalised squat
a car park tarmacked onto marshland
I’m the light of the full moon reflected
by reams of hawthorn hedgerow
all blossoming white at once
I’m abundant nectar
and the midnight moth
it lures for pollination
2. Highland
my parents were first married in a pagan ceremony
on a mountainside of gorse and bracken
unofficially officiated by three monks in striped dresses
who split time between a Gospel Oak commune
and a cottage in the Llŷn peninsula
named Y Graig, or The Rock in Cymraeg
these visionaries knit their own shoes
and understood expression and perception elementally
creating new lexicons for gendered energies
that live differently in us all
you can be dard or voy, or a mixture of the two
and I’m not going to tell you which is which
because I long for the right to roam the land
and take stewardship of my body
but my identity is an enclosure
cordoned off by fascistic topiary
and sold back to me for a profit
the animal kingdom is full of hermaphrodites
obligate or sequential
and no one bats an eyelid
many flowers have both
stigmas and stamens
but humans made a thing of me
maybe I’m a hardy annual
a cabbage white, a disgruntled shrew
a dog-violet, not a pansy
3. Island
my body is an archipelago
in a world without boats
a misread neap tide, receding
if no man is an island
what does that make me?
I’m not Vitruvian or Modulor
a range of harmonious measurements
universally applicable[1]
gender is a common treasury
deserving equally divided fruit
people exist who see themselves
more as sea spirits or wood nymphs
than men or women
these are my siblings
and partners in crime
in nature nothing knows I’m trans
for me, no man’s land is another name for utopia
I don’t feel at home in my body
but who says a body has to be a home?
maybe my body is an allotment
never owned, but fruitful
if architecture is an archive of gender[2]
maybe nature is as well
like how I feel the same love towards
the ocean as when I was a child
except now it loves me back
I don’t know what trans architecture looks like
or what that even means
I just want a peaceful place to piss
and a bed to rest my bones
if a trans person falls over in the woods
and nobody’s there to laugh
does that make it a trans space?
maybe this is oversimplistic
but I think spaces become trans
when trans people exist in them
(even if those around us
are actively willing us to leave)
poorly lit underpasses are not
inherently violent or transphobic spaces
until people arrive
people who don’t understand
that my gender is a solar panel
sitting in the shade of a wind turbine
let me ask you this
if Mother Nature was a trans woman
would you still want to protect her?
[1] Le Corbusier, 1948.
[2] Crawford, Lucas Cassidy (2010) “Breaking Ground on a Theory of Transgender Architecture,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 5.