Sideshow Concessions

By Lucas Crawford

Sideshow Concessions is the first book from queer performer and scholar Lucas Crawford. A collection populated by the circus-like bodies and experiences of a narrator navigating rural pasts and urban presents, Sideshow Concessions is the unofficial story of someone who is both a bearded lady and the fattest man in the world.

"Sideshow Confessions is an accessible glimpse at the absurd — a clever look at a trans narrative which explores its challenges without drowning in them... Crawford’s sense of humour is a breath of fresh air."—Broken Pencil

“Sideshow Concessions is fresh, honest, heartbreaking, and funny, with turns of phrase equally intelligent and moving.”—Karen Solie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781926743639

Lucas Crawford

Lucas Crawford is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowment Lecturer at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. His poetry has appeared in Room, Rampike, PRISM International, The Antigonish Review, SubTerrain, Other Voices, and The Nashwaak Review, as well as the anthology Between: New Gay Poetry. Crawford's poems won the the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia's Atlantic Writing Competition and are currently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He's based in Vancouver.

Book preview

I.

Fattest Man in the World

YOUR FAT DAUGHTER REMEMBERS WHAT YOU SAID

My dad was in the hospital cafeteria  eating lasagna when I was born.

I was making lasagna at home when he flat-lined.

Symmetry.

My mom has low blood pressure. My dad’s was high. And I

am a gymnastics school dropout

with an inherited need to redefine balance.

(I sat immovable on the seesaw,

a whole pubescent pack

trying to dethrone me.)

I’m fifteen, telling my parents I’m gay. Dad says:

I know you think you are

’cause you’re a bigger girl

and boys don’t like you.

I start a list of his remarks like this.

When his heart stopped for the first time,

I was making lasagna with my first girlfriend.

She was closeted and was supposed to be elsewhere,

maybe on an elephant eating cardamom marshmallows and

counting every lucky constellation that she and her father

can’t find in the light-drowned night sky of Mumbai.

There you were when you were skinny as a rail!

Dad says this when we all watch an old video.

I am four in the video.

Lighten up, he’s just trying to encourage you!

Encourage me to what?

Choose a photograph from your hard drive.  Invert the colours.

Stare at it for thirty seconds. Close your eyes,

then open them in front of a flat white wall.

Now, each time you blink, you will see the photograph

as if it’s been branded on your insides.

I’m sure that somewhere a nun is doing this

with a digitized painting of white hippie Jesus.

She’s shrieking with vengeful glee,  "That is the power of the holy spirit!"

The image is everywhere and nowhere, but it’s no spirit.

It is a matter of light and the physics of memory.

It is the way in which bad memories might reappear

each night and blink.

Even if trauma is so last season.

You are going to trim your chin hairs

for your grandmother’s funeral.

Oh yes, you can see them.

I was noticing them in the light the other day

and it would mean a lot to us.

Get your sister to help you do it.

Girls don’t have chin hair.

My dad had coarse curls, salt-and-pepper ’stache, and a neck beard.

My mother’s family has coifs that go Brillo Pad in Atlantic air.

I have it all, from chin to chubby toes.

How was I to know

that I ought to be ashamed

to be the heir apparent

to my parents’ hair?

You thought holy communion was a snack?

You would think that.

Months before he died,

my dad carried a small portable cabin

through the woods with a buddy and said,

If that doesn’t kill me, nothing will.

Irony is the new black, Dad,

and you know it’s slimming.

You’ll be 200 pounds

by the time you’re in Grade Eight.

(CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.)

I was eating smoked meat yesterday on the boulevard

and noticed that the goods are measured on a silver scale

emblazoned with the slogan: We Weigh the World.

The same company produces a tool called a strain gauge,

which indicates how much pressure  is being put upon an object.

I saw a picture of a strain gauge

glued across a crack in a brick house.

Am I the house or the gauge  or am I the picketer with a placard that says

"The possibility of collapse

cannot be determined by formula—"

I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on