"A Brass Band Heralds the Institute's Destruction" by Ava N. Winter

A Brass Band Heralds the Institute’s Destruction

   What Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science might have contained when     
   ransacked by Storm Troopers and the Hitler Youth on May 6, 1933.


The maid’s uniforms worn 
	             by Dorchen 
	and four other trans women
		            who made this place a home.

	                             Twenty thousand volumes too dangerous
  	                                                        to touch without intention.


		             The last dance card from a drag ball 
			                          held in 1894, 
				                                       jammed as a bookmark 
			                                     into the Psychopathia Sexualis—

	                                                                               a shock of recognition 
	                                                                                          scrawled in the margin.             

	             The notes to seven satirical dance routines 
		                             choreographed to the tune of the Horst Wessel Song.


	                                              A kabbalistic numerology 
	                      	                                                            for divining the names 
		                                                   of forty-three million genders.


		                A transvestite license bearing the name 
		      of an ancestor 
		                                               with whom I share no blood.



Originally appeared Transgenesis (Milkweed Editions, 2024)

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Photo Credit: Jess Poli

Ava N. Winter is the author of Transgenesis, a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared in The Baffler, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Ava’s work has been recognized with a Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. She holds an M.F.A. from the Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

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