For Soldiers and Sailors Alike: Poems on the Familiar Wars of Womanhood

By Murgatroyd Monaghan

Carefully crafted to be both a requiem for and a celebration of the unique gifts and injuries of womanhood, For Soldiers and Sailors Alike is requisite poetry for our modern world. Murgatroyd Monaghan walks hand in hand with readers as they embark on a tour of combat that is at times painful, at times beautiful, and yet always hauntingly familiar. Using both traditional and contemporary forms of poetry, Monaghan opens readers' wounds alongside her own and then sews them back together again, ultimately stitching a literary patchwork that is as diverse and united as women are themselves. Each poem is a voice that refuses to relent, despite battlefields and oceans, as it decorates women for their unique forms of bravery. In the pages of this book, readers of all genders, backgrounds, and ages will be inspired to reclaim and view their own personal story in a more empowering way than they have ever been guided to see it before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228865513

Murgatroyd Monaghan

Murgatroyd Monaghan is a Canadian author and poet. Presently, she makes her home with her partner, three children, and two cats on the traditional territories of the Anishnaabeg in Northern Ontario, where she moved after settling in Toronto as a refugee in the nineties. Murgatroyd, or Troid, as she is affectionately known, has worked extensively to support the rights and comfort of birthing people, dying people, drug users, and those who make their homes in the urban or rural outdoors. She now lives a semi-nomadic lifestyle with her family, homeschooling her children as she endeavors to learn as much as possible through seeing natural wonders and meeting as many of the beautiful people of Earth as she can. She believes that storytelling is the most important way we can both teach and learn. Some of the things that have made her cry are the Aurora, the caribou migration, and when they're all out of maple dip donuts at Tim Horton's. Some of the things that excite her the most are words, the childbearing year, motherhood, listening to travelers' stories on Via Rail trains, quality of life, history, language, travel, music, and theatre. She is pretty sure she has an even better collection of sunglasses than Elton John, but she'd like to know for sure.

Book preview

for

Soldiers

and

Sailors Alike

Poems on the Familiar Wars of Womanhood

Murgatroyd Monaghan

For Soldiers and Sailors Alike

Copyright © 2022 by Murgatroyd Monaghan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6550-6 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6551-3 (eBook)

For Ms. Gage:

You believed in us.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that since I began writing this book, the best statistics, which are underreported, tell me that 6047 trans women globally and 1,084 Indigenous girls and women in Canada alone have been directly slain. Sex workers account for many of these deaths. Sex workers are often professionals, and often victims, who in both cases, deserve respect. This large number does not account for those who died as a result of psychological injuries sustained in the war on transwomanhood and female Indigeneity, such as suicide, or even by disease or other indirect causes of death that trans- and/or Indigenous women are more susceptible to, including the fact that many deaths of transwomen and Indigenous women are not ruled as foul play when they should be. The number also does not account for those wounded in this war. Women will be safe only when we are all safe.

I would like to acknowledge that I wrote this book on the various traditional territories, treaty territories, and unceded lands of Turtle Island’s First Nations and Métis peoples. Canada’s Indigenous peoples have a rich history that began thousands of years prior to settlement and that includes a deeply respectful relationship with the land that I live, work, and play on. I arrived as a refugee here on their land several years ago, and I thank them for being the original and contemporary caretakers of this beautiful, sacred land. To First Nations and Métis communities who have hosted me knowingly or unknowingly: it is my wish to learn about you, to respect you, to respond to you, and to do my part to make your home safer through dismantling and speaking out against the institutions that have caused harm to you, just as you made me safer by welcoming me onto your shore. Thank you for all you do. You set an example for all women with your resilience, not just to survive violence, but to thrive and to bloom despite it. May all women learn from you.

Notes on These Poems

1.I speak as a woman who was assigned female at birth. I have lived as a girl and then a woman my whole life. I have therefore not attempted to speak for all women, including those women who were assigned a gender at birth that did not validate their experience of knowing that they are female, and those who have had the experience of having been assigned female or having grown up as a girl and who were not. Trans women in particular are soldiers and sailors in the war of womanhood who have made valuable contributions to womanhood and to our world, contributions that I benefit from personally. Trans women also experience violence and fall as casualties in this war at an even greater rate than cisgendered women do. This note is therefore to commemorate the many contributions of trans women and all non-cisgendered women and non-binary and two-spirited folks, as well as the many trans men who have experienced violence that is also gender-based violence, and to thank all of these individuals, my fellow soldiers, for their service. It is my hope that all women can find themselves in at least some of my poems, and that they can feel the beauty of their injuries and the strength of our togetherness in a way that makes them both grieve and celebrate their own lives, and also that all people can, in these poems, celebrate and commemorate the lives of all of the wonderful women around them.

2.Indigenous women and girls experience violence that is incredibly disproportionate to the violence that non-Indigenous women and girls experience. Gender-based violence in Indigenous communities is largely a result of colonial attitudes toward Indigenous women, meaning that white women benefit from systems that embody attitudes that harm Indigenous women and girls. I am not an Indigenous woman, and I have benefited from these systems. I therefore have work to do to listen, to learn, and to reconcile my path as a woman with the things that I learn by responding to Calls to Action from the Indigenous community as they lead us all in non-violence.

3.This book could be said to be autobiographical, but highly subjective. It reflects my own feelings at certain points in time, which are often subject to change via such channels as retrospect or maturity. Still, I left them as is, to honour my feelings at those specific times. Additionally, I have read a lot of poetry. I therefore may have recycled a couple of excellent metaphors etc. without meaning to. If I have, please take this as a compliment to the art form and do not hold it against me, I pray. Lastly, if I wrote something that you think is about you, and it isn’t complimentary, perhaps you ought to have behaved better.

Table of Contents

PART I

When the Draft Letter First Came

walk on

PART II

When We Locked Our Hearts Away

Hands (The Universe In Eleven Parts)

Those Who Really Love Fish Don’t Go Fishing

You walk away from me when I am talking

New Love

A Conundrum

Glow

The Way Things Are

Sorry Excuse

Too Real

Black Lace

What’s It Like? I’ll Tell You. It’s Like if…

Condemned

PART III

In the Trenches, We Remember

Dear Mother

Under-Cover Lies

Hell: Admit One

Dead