By Jay Dye
The year is 2013. I don’t yet know I’m trans and so I hate myself and my life. I try to pick a date to end things but there’s still one thing I need to do: I need to see Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion. It doesn’t come out for another 5 or 6 months, so I resolve to stay alive at least that long. November becomes December. The release date comes and goes. I can’t make the premiere and have to wait a week to see it at a different theater. My plans are all messed up. I don’t kill myself after all.
A few months later, I experience a period of intense depersonalization and derealization. I come to believe that I am somehow a physical incarnation of one of the main characters, Sayaka Miki. I believe that my life narratively parallels Sayaka’s character arc—that she is the template for my life; that her fiction rules my reality. Seven years later I transition. Eight years later I read Nora Hikari’s Girl 2.0, which contains two poems about Madoka.
Girl 2.0 is a collection of poems steeped in the memetic online culture of trans women. Niche references to anime video games pile up over its 42 pages—if you’re cis, have a search engine handy; if you’re a trans girl, prepare to grin maniacally when you read “im not a girl im tomoko kuroki an akemi homura / an vriska serket” in a poem whose title refers to kinning an insect. As the collection proceeds, we tread ever deeper into the digital landscape until we are fully immersed. “My polygons are lusting for your realmeat,” moans the speaker in “Choreography for Two NPCs,” approaching humanity as a virtual other. Yet it is that very otherness that gives power: as an “off-model glitch girl,” the speaker can “rewrite sex in assembly” and “dance in ways that would break the engine,” recreating the game for herself in her own image. Trans people decide their own rules.
Then there’s the hilarious “THIS IS MY OC DO NOT STEAL,” an all-caps introduction of the speaker’s OC who likes to “SAY SHIT LIKE ‘I’M THE NIGHTCORE / OF GENDER’” and “BOYS ARE GROSS!!!” On the surface, it’s a funny bit of nostalgia harkening back to the golden era of DeviantArt and RP forums, but underneath it betrays the very transgender need to relive a lost childhood. It is empowering to reclaim the radically uncritical creative freedom of adolescence, a period before the concept of cringe reached consciousness.
In contrast to these lighthearted poems, there are also moments of trans vulnerability. A highlight for me is the tender portrayal of hormone injection found in “Embrace with 25 Gauge Subcutaneous Needle.” The speaker experiences the awkwardness of “[h]olding the needle the wrong way,” the nervousness of “[f]lesh refusing / to give way,” and then the epiphany: “even things that / want to be together / have to be pressed / at the right angle.” This isn’t just about injections; this is the essential conflict of transitioning. The self wants to be together with its gender, but internalized patriarchy, bigotry, and self-doubt push back. Gender, like an injection, can be scary, intimidating, and painful, but also feels phenomenal when all goes well.
Another standout poem for me is “Instruction Manual for Trans-Lesbian Sex,” a poem that renders the emotional aspects of transbian sex in stunning clarity. “For a tribe of invisible women / the worst kind of kink is to see each other,” writes this speaker, meditating on the tension inherent in the vulnerability of sex—having to get naked, to expose yourself, to reveal what you are when you are unable to hide. “It hurts to do this,” writes the speaker, but “that’s the point.” The pain of vulnerability is necessary for pleasure; transbian sex is always “transexually erotic BDSM shit.”
There’s a motif throughout these poems of girlhood being cup-like. Transbian sex is about learning to “hollow out my insides and let / everything pour out, turn myself cupshaped.” Elsewhere, in the appropriately titled “Girl is a Cup,” Hikari’s speaker declares that “Girl is a cup […] // a thing to be filled / with something else.” “Girl is a Cup” is written “after Porpentine Charity Heartscape,” the author of “Hot Allostatic Load,” an essay on the physical and mental effects of existing in a hypercritical community and society. Porpentine urges trans writers to “[b]uild the shittiest thing possible,” giving an example of a trash zine made by crumpling up paper, stuffing it in a plastic baggy, and leaving it under a freeway overpass. Hikari takes the image of trash in her own direction, thinking of girlhood as akin to being a “[p]lastic carcass / decomposing in an empty Starbucks.” The empty Starbucks: trans loneliness in a space filled with people. Instead of the energy of coffee, we are discarded and left to rot on the floor, too forgotten to even be properly thrown away.
But that isn’t where the poem ends. There’s a second part, a sonnet. Here, being a cup is the first step to intimacy, to love. Being a cup means embracing whatever you can contain. “I want to hollow out and carry you,” says the speaker, reaching out to another girl. “I want holding to be every kind of touch.”
The two Madoka Magica poems continue this theme. In “Genesis 1: Between Water and Light,” a found poem using language from Madoka’s Wikipedia page, we discover “the immortal question / of Her first magic: / can I be held?” To Hikari’s speaker, lesbianism was the true secret behind Kaname Madoka’s power. “Two girls love / and the world ends,” begins “Girlhood as Eschaton,” casting the apocalypse of the show’s finale as the direct result of her queer love. In Hikari’s world, magical girl powers are cool, but what’s really magical is love between two women. Changing the world begins with holding one another in queer embrace.
Girl 2.0 is a collection of poems about holding and being held, about what it means to even be able to hold. As affection-starved trans girls, we have spent a lifetime holding only ourselves. Now we ask: what else can we hold? What else can be held? The realization: an empty cup isn’t truly empty—it holds the universe inside it.
Girl 2.0 is available from Seven Kitchens Press.
Jay Dye is a trans poet and artist from California. Her poetry has been published in literary journals including Calliope, Sapere Aude, and Scribendi; her art has been exhibited by the Clyde H. Wells Art Gallery and New Art City. She can be found online at jaydye.org, on Twitter @jayyyyyyydye, and on IG @ghostprincessxyz.