National Poetry Month : Tara Borin,

 

 

MUSTACHE

 

My nana’s upper lip was sometimes
soft with hair she routinely dissolved under
a thin spread of depilatory cream. She made my aunts
promise to keep up with the practice even after she became bedridden
and unable to do it herself. I wonder what Nana would say now that my own
top lip bristles with stiff dark hairs made darker by a weekly shot of viscous testosterone
cypionate pooling in a pinch of fat near my belly button. Shadows reshape my face in ways
I never imagined could be mine. I come by it honestly, I’d tell her, my mustache kissing her absence.

 

 

 

 

Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.