September Spotlight: Bonnie Hancell

About Bonnie

Bonnie Hancell (she/they) is an artist/poet from Northern England. She predominantly uses creativity as a coping strategy for ongoing struggles with mental illness (OCD, MDD, EUPD) and catharsis from trauma / survivorship. Her work often explores illness, queerness, the trans body, net culture and reestablishing notions of divinity or sacredness.

 Bonnie has been published in anthologies by Easter Road Press, Poet’s Hardship Fund and Pilot Press. She has also had work included in The Rialto and The Poetry Review and LUDD GANG amongst other periodicals and zines.

Instagram: @bonniehancell

Twitter: @bonniehancell

About the piece

Doldrum Solidarity is me finding the gobby northern lass in my guts. It's a shot at unpacking the hypocrisy and problematic values inherent to "the Trans bathroom debate". It's about survivorship beyond the necessity of a gender binary, about the illusion of safe spaces. I wrote these words trying to keep hold of my strength. Strength from unity; from relating to experiences of class division and poverty, sexism and phobia. Strength to use our queer capacity for affection or tenderness as radical acts of self-defence or blow kisses to the men who scream "F*ggot" at us in the street. Mostly it's a litany of dysphoric struggles and a eulogy to the f***s I used to give.

Doldrum solidarity bitch a body

is murder to be in

Don't picket me pissing i'll use the boys

if it means we all feel safer (remember

being groped in men's rooms, on

muddy fields/wet verges beside

railway arches/ at low budget studio

space Sci trance raves by girls in black)

- I will never be spankable entirely

will never get my ass back together

enough to make you stay entirely

even if I've got what some might call

an hourglass shape, the sand is all spilled

missing look.

breathing in this body is an act civil

disobedience like

people want me dead, waking in

  this body is a civil war like

shitting blood

I put on pink lipgloss

to go get drug money and

two boys try to fight me in the street

So I kiss the air off their shoulders

to keep breathing, I died

then I finally came

If you enjoyed this poem and want to read more work by Bonnie, then please head here to read In the stupid stupid present where I was living.